Antiques

Donny? Get my VEST!WIBC Bowling Prizes (enough to SPARE!) Books and Ebooks by Jim Linderman available HERE

The best thing in Oblomov, Part 1, Chapter 9, “Oblomov’s Dream.” It is a long episode, 8% of the book, 29% of Part 1. My understanding is that it is the germ of the novel, the first part of the novel Goncharov wrote years before it was published. The conceit is that Oblomov is sleeping in his St. Petersburg apartment, dreaming about his childhood and the estate where he grew up. The dream is not especially dream-like, but it does explain Oblomovism.Oblomov’s dream begins strangely, with the narrator setting the scene by insisting that it contains “no sea, no high mountains, cliffs or precipices, no dense forests, nothing at all imposing, wild or menacing” (82). In other words, nothing sublime. Goncharov is adopting Burkean language. Mountains are “menacing and fearsome like the unsheathed claws and bared fangs of some wild beast going for the throat,” while the sea is “wailing and groaning like some monster doomed to eternal torment.”There will be nothing like that in Oblomov’s dream where even “the sky seemed to crouch closer to the earth… so as to enfold it more snugly” and each season “proceeds in the orderly sequence ordained by nature” (82-3). The landscape is purely picturesque, “ a series of charming, attractive, picture-postcard landscapes.” The estate is nowhere near a railroad, a town, or even an ordinary road. The arrival of a letter is not merely a rare event, but a source of confusion.So the entire household, the entire estate, is suffused with the spirit of Oblomovism. It appears to be a family trait. But that is not enough. Oblomov, in the first part of the dream, is seven years old. This is one source of Oblomovism:Oblomov, seeing in his dream his long dead mother, started quivering with joy and his heart contracted with a fierce spasm of love for her as two warm tears slowly slid from beneath his eyelids and hung motionlessly on his lashes. His mother smothered him with passionate kisses and devoured him hungrily and anxiously with her eyes. (88)The other source is the imagination, centered on his nanny telling him fairy tales:The adult Ilya Ilyich, of course, eventually came to realize that there were no such things as rivers of milk and honey or good fairies, and cheerfully dismissed his nanny’s tales with a smile, but the smile was not entirely genuine and was always accompanied by a wistful sigh. For him, real life and fairy tales were hopelessly intertwined and, in spite of himself, the thought that life was not a fairy tale and fairy tales were not life, depressed him at times. (97)Three great accounts of childhood on a Russian estate were published during the 1850s, Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood (1852) and its sequels, Sergey Aksakov’s A Russian Gentleman (1856) and its sequels, especially Years of Childhood (1858), and “Oblomov’s Dream.” It is a curious conjunction. My guess is that the pace of progress had become so fast that writers were looking backwards, whether twenty years for the young Tolstoy or seventy for Aksakov, to tally up the changes.Oblomov’s inactivity is some kind of retreat to childhood. It is a protest against the passage of time, a protest against existence. Thus to his friend Stoltz, a person of the world, Oblomov seems to be rejecting life. In a sense he is.

I'm excited to be selling at the City Wide Garage Sale this weekend in Austin Texas. You can get in for early shopping at 8:30 on Saturday. Now don't let the name fool you, it's not actually a city wide garage sale, it's just called that. It's in an air conditioned building so you don't have to worry about the heat and there are about 75 vendors, if not more, that are selling vintage items. You usually can find what you are looking for here. If you've never been to this sale or even heard about, I've blogged about it several times. Check out my other blog post here.Here's another fabulous picture from Judy Hill's Open House last Thursday:I hope to post more of her place, so stay tuned.I'm taking mainly white French Farmhouse items this weekend to Austin. Hope you make plans to come out and see.

Paint Obsession, Re-Imagining Old Furniture Into Stylish One Of A Kind Works Of Useable Art   Suzy Collins Logue is a decorative painter obsessed with changing the look of vintage and antique furniture. From the wee hours of the morning until the sun goes down, you will find Suzy hard at work in her Farmington Valley Arts Center studio in Avon, CT. Suzy's business name "Paint Obsession" reflects

Vintage Jewelry Looks Great Displayed On The Strings Of An Old Wooden Tennis Racket Vintage jewelry is not the easiest item to sell in an Antique booth when you have lots of other collectibles, textiles and antiques competing for attention. The small little things such  as costume jewelry generally get lost in the avalanche of STUFF. But one clever dealer I met at the Harwinton Antiques

When Enrico Cernuschi (1821–1896) was forced to flee his home in Milan after the revolution of 1848, he settled in Paris. An astute businessman, he went on to make a fortune in banking but his first love was art. Between 1871–1873, he traveled around the world and became obsessed with the art of Asia. In China and Japan Cernuschi acquired nearly 5,000 rare antique pieces and on his return to Paris, he built a mansion near the Parc Morceau in the heart of the city to display his collection. In 1898 shortly after his death, the Musee Cernuschi opened, focusing principally on the art and archaeology of China. Later curators added pieces from Korea and Vietnam and today, the museum houses one of the largest collections of Asian art in Europe. Visitors to Paris interested in Asian art generally head for the better known Musee Guimet in the 16th arrondissement, a repository of some 60,000 items, but those in the know include the Musee Cernuschi, one of the city’s hidden gems. From the Chinese Neolithic to Japanese graphics to the exquisite pottery of the Ly and Tran Dynasties of Vietnam, the museum offers a crash course for visitors in the beauties and subtleties of classic Asian art. Visiting the Galleries Galleries on the ground floor are generally dedicated to temporary exhibitions and on the day I was there, the exhibit featured the paintings of Qing Dynasty artist Ren Xun (1835–1893). One of his more interesting works on display was a portrait of the art collector Wu Dacheng sitting in a room of his house surrounded by tiny painted reproductions of each of his most valuable pieces. The work seemed to mirror the home of Cernuschi, himself. The painting was an innovative and amusing way to present a picture of the collector in the midst of his own art inventory. In an adjacent example, Ren Xun had taken a leaf from the ancient art of the Shang Dynasty and used inked printing blocks to further memorialize Wu’s collection. Each image was a stamped picture and a description of the piece. This exhibition flowed naturally into the rooms upstairs where the museum’s permanent collection is on display. From iconic Shang bronzes to carved wooden grave servants reminiscent of Egyptian ushabtis, visitors can walk from room to room and from dynasty to dynasty. A giant statue of the Buddha oversees the beginning of an exhibit of artifacts from the Han Dynasty. Meticulous models of terracotta houses mix with carefully sculpted clay acrobats frozen in time doing hand stands on the lip of a painted container. One of the liveliest exhibitions is of figures from the Tang Dynasty with their individualized faces and realistic poses. An orchestra of eight young girls, each mounted on horseback and playing a separate musical instrument, seems to move in procession down one side of the room. On the other side, traditional glazed earthenware horses and Bactrian camels remind visitors of China’s historic ties to the Silk Road. Nearby, a terracotta figure of an Indian dancer with curly hair and ochre-painted sari is an example of the people and goods that traveled down the Silk Road to the Tang court at Chang’an. In another room, a 14th-century wooden bodhisattva from the Ming Dynasty sat in meditation near an exquisite 11th-century marble Amitaba Buddha from the Liao, probably carved in northwest Hebei. Two exquisite gold face masks typical of the grave goods of the Khitan Dynasty of Liao (907–1125) seem to sleep in their glass case, the woman still wearing one of her delicate gold earrings, shaped like a cat. From its classic 19th-century exterior, the Musee Cernuschi looks like the home of an affluent French businessman. But its classical European lines and Doric-columned portico are deceptive. Inside is another world, a treasure house that reflects one man’s passion for Asian art. Susan James is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. She has lived in India, the U.K., and Hawaii; and writes about travel,

My goal is to publish new posts twice a week — Mondays and Thursdays. However, if you don’t see a new post on Thursday, it’s because I was too busy, so please look for a new one the following Monday. Sotheby’s was the first of the major auction houses to hold their 20th Century sale in June (20th Century month). Their Important 20th Century Design auction was held on June 12, 2013, with total sales of $4,738,940 — a strong result for a relatively small 165-lot sale. The top two lots of the sale were beyond my comprehension — a Paul Lobel silver-plated coffee service (lot #89, $449,000) and a François-Xavier Lalanne realistic sheep, Mouton, (lot #148, $341,000). Rare Tiffany Studios Dragonfly and Waterflowers table lamp, Sotheby’s lot #27 Top lot of the Tiffany section of the sale (and third overall) went to #27, a rare Dragonfly variation called Dragonfly and Waterflowers, on a rare and desirable mosaic glass Arrowhead base. It sold at the high estimate of $200,000, for a total of $257,000, including the buyer’s premium. Tiffany Studios 20″ Dragonfly table lamp, Sotheby’s lot #22 My personal favorite Tiffany Studios lamp of the sale was lot #22, a 20″ diameter Dragonfly on a killer Bird Skeleton base, with a fabulous patina. The lamp sold for $161,000, near its high estimate of $150,000. It would have sold for more if the shade had been more exciting. This was one of those rare times when the base was worth more than the shade. Rare Argy-Rousseau Monkey vase, Sotheby’s lot #76 There was a small, but excellent quality, selection of French glass in the sale, led by lot #76, a very rare Argy-Rousseau pate-de-verre Monkey vase. It more than doubled its high estimate of $35,000, to sell for $87,500. For the complete results of the sale, click here. No shows until July 19-21, when we’ll be in Denver. A fellow dealer convinced me to try the show again. She said the show has new promoters, who filled the hall with buyers the last time. So we’ll give it one more shot. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to call or write if you would like to buy, sell or trade. Just got this incredible 8½” Daum blackbird vase (dirty in this photo, but soon to be cleaned) Click here to view French cameo glass for sale. We always strive to offer the finest objects for sale on our website and at every show. Wonderful A. Walter pate-de-verre vase with lizard, just in Look around my website. There are many items for sale, sold items with prices and free lessons about glass and lamps.

When you're deciding whether or not utilizing an online appraisal service is right for you, there are a number of things to consider. The most important factor is probably whether or not you're willing to provide the person evaluating your antique or collectible what they need to do the job in a stellar fashion. Do you want to make the most of your online appraisal experience? Read more...

The Rookwood Pottery mark is easy to recognize once you're familiar with it, but many of the company's earlier wares also had an artist's cipher on the bottom and these are a bit harder to identify at first glance. It's important to research these marks since knowing the artist can add value to a piece, and in some instances that can be considerable. I'm in the process of adding ten more artist specific marks to my gallery illustrating this topic to help dealers and collectors with this task. Read more ...

I promised on Twitter that this piece would be more coherent than yesterday’s. Likely an error. But I will number my points for clarity. The book at hand is Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 Oblomov.1. Oblomov was once a student, a civil servant, a man who attended the theater and kept up with fashionable books, the usual stuff of his class, the landowner who leaves the estate for St. Petersburg. But he gradually withdrew from all of that until he ended up where we find him at the beginning and throughout the first 30% of Oblomov, on his couch, in his dressing-gown, living off the dwindling proceeds of the mismanaged estate he inherited.Based on the behavior of the friends who appear throughout the opening part of the novel, Oblomov’s complete removal from society is fairly recent. They assume he is still mobile, eccentric but not a recluse.We know the truth soon enough, though, that Oblomov has settled into a “deep and all-pervasive inertia” as Stefanie at So Many Books calls it, a Russian Bartlebyism where Oblomov prefers not to, whether the act is painful or pleasurable, necessary or frivolous. He does not always act, by which I mean do nothing, as he prefers. But the tendency is clear enough, the desire for an existence that suspiciously resembles non-existence (thus the temptation to invoke Buddhism).This is Oblomovism or oblomovshchina (Pearl explores but does not translate the word). Torpor as ideology.2. The novel operates by a contrast of characters.a. The servant Zakhar is genuinely lazy. He prefers ease. After describing Oblomov on the first page of the novel, Goncharov turns to the filthy apartment – the “back of one couch had collapsed and the wood veneer had come unstuck in places,” “mirrors had ceased to reflect anything,” and the pages of the “two or three” open books “had yellowed, were covered in dust, and had clearly been discarded long ago” (2-3). This is the result of Zakhar’s laziness, not Oblomov’s, who “would actually have liked to see everything clean, only he wanted it to somehow happen by itself, spontaneously and in a flash” (8).This makes for good comedy.b. Oblomov’s friend Stoltz and his eventual fiancée Olga are active people. They are convinced that they can overcome Oblomov’s inertia, and they are to some degree correct – the key is to apply constant goading, which is exhausting and likely not worth the effort. But they both try. Stoltz is half-German and is allowed some comedy of a satiric variety; Olga is taken all too seriously.The progress of the love affair between Olga and Oblomov occupies the middle 47% of the novel.c. Then there is Agafya Matveyevna, Oblomov’s landlady in the latter half of the book, who is an embodiment of domestic activity. She unquestioningly supplies Oblomov with food, cleaning, care, and even sex – Oblomov does have a sex drive, but just barely. Bartleby eventually rejects the basic elements of life, while Oblomov takes them for granted. Someone always provides.3. Perhaps Oblomovism is a disease of the rich. Goncharov performs a demonstration. At one point, Oblomov loses all but a subsistence income. His clothes fall apart, his luxuries disappear, but he barely seems to notice (Oblomovism is monstrously egotistical). He eats his barley soup with the same gusto with which he used to eat oysters (see pp. 384-5). He prefers luxury, but as with a clean room it is not worth sacrificing a single nap. Oblomov is not above money, which is a common source of anxiety for him. He is beyond money.Goncharov is clear enough about why Oblomov is an Oblomovist, but I will save that for tomorrow. It is the best thing in the novel.