At the front of the line at Antiques Roadshow
I've been a fan of Antiques Roadshow since I was young, and it even inspired me to write my tenth grade term paper on English furniture. So I was ecstatic when I heard they were coming to film in the museum's Luce Foundation Center and Lunder Conservation Center. I literally jumped up and down when I got tickets to go to the main event.
I love the show because of the stories it tells. While at Lunder, Nancy Druckman from Sotheby's concentrated on four portrait miniatures from the museum's collection. There was the tragic story of the Bordley brothers, depicted in Charles Willson Peale's miniature. The elder brother Thomas died shortly after the portrait was painted. Then there was the student-teacher relationship behind Sarah Goodridge's portrait of renowned painter Gilbert Stuart, which Stuart said was the only “true likeness” of him; he even went as far as to give the portrait miniature to his mother! Druckman explained how miniatures became more economically available (not only for what she called the "American aristocracy") when artists began to paint on paper rather than on ivory. Druckman pointed out why Captain Noah Rich was painted with his warship—it was because he wanted to be remembered as a valiant captain (which made me think about what I would want in my portrait). And those fanciful clouds around James Sanford Ellsworth's sitters' heads were meant to make his miniatures stand out against the very popular daguerreotypes of the time.
At the main event Saturday, August 21, the lines were endless, but the camaraderie between everyone waiting was interesting to watch—each person’s object had a story and strangers commiserated with each other after finding out their treasure wasn’t as valuable as hoped. I finally found myself standing in front of the appraiser. What would he or she say about my treasures?
The set of ivory boxes, which I had so often looked at on my grandparents’ bookshelf while growing up, were from around 1820. They came to my family via my great-grandmother’s antique shop, where she had marketed them as boxes from the time of Louis XIV, about a century before (it still had the sales tag she had typed). Everyone in the family was a bit upset to learn the truth about the boxes because they had always been so romanticized! My mom’s brooch was from around 1915 and had been part of a larger, Edwardian-style necklace. Too bad it was broken up along the way!
I did catch a glimpse of some of the pieces that will be featured when the episode airs in 2011, but I’m not going to spoil the surprise!
