Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars , returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . . except that wasn't really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart ...
Mar 27, 2024•35 min
Greg Cerio, editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, died Saturday. In this special episode, Ben pays tribute to the man who gave Curious Objects the green light, and who foresaw a rich future for objects from the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 20, 2024•6 min
This week Glenn Adamson returns to the pod to discuss an exhibition he co-curated at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu focuses on the work of the Okinawan-American ceramicist, which bridges the gulf between art and craft. In this inaugural installment of Curious Objects Bites—bingeable conversations about fascinating things for the busy listener—Adamson details a “closed form”: a Takaezu pot that confines a bead that rattles around inside. Learn mo...
Mar 13, 2024•13 min
Taylor Thistlethwaite, proprietor of Thistlethwaite Americana in Middleburg, Virginia, returns to the pod to defend the merits of “brown furniture.” Whether it’s earthy, richly figured black walnut or the sometimes-overlooked black cherry, it’s important not to “think of wood as just something brown,” Taylor says. “There’s so much life in it. And it matures like fine wine.” Case in point: Taylor’s three-hundred-year-old chest-of-drawers with chunky hardware and unusual feet that is as beautiful ...
Mar 06, 2024•41 min
If you ever start to feel like history is abstract, spend a little time with an object or two that were actually there. For instance, a silver bowl and a pair of candlesticks that once belonged to New York grandees Pieter and Elizabeth Delancey, which suddenly reappeared recently after being lost for three hundred years. In this special rerun of one of Curious Objects ’ most popular episodes, host Benjamin Miller revisits the obscure journey made by these three storied objects, with the help of ...
Feb 28, 2024•28 min
Last month Benjamin Miller made a guest appearance on Art Slice, hosted by the podcasting power couple—and artists and art historians—Stephanie Dueñas and Russell Shoemaker, and now available here. The trio’s conversation focuses on a dazzling group of mixed-metal wares made by Tiffany and Company in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including such standouts as an 1879 chocolate pot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a coffee pot shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Of spe...
Feb 21, 2024•43 min
How much should you spend? What kind of stone should you get? Is antique better than modern? These are just a few of the many questions that any courter must consider when ring-hunting. Here to share his ring lore on this special Valentine’s Day episode is a true jewelry expert, Matthew Imberman of Kentshire Galleries. First things first: don’t worry about cursed jewelry. In Imberman’s experience, it’s usually not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 14, 2024•47 min
In 1909, Daisy Makeig-Jones was hired by the Wedgwood firm in Staffordshire, England, to decorate pottery. She would go on to develop the “Fairyland” luster pattern, which combined dazzling iridescent glazes with motifs from fairy tales and would serve to revitalize the Wedgwood brand. Bailey Tichenor, one half of the duo behind Artistoric gallery, comes on the pod to discuss a mid-1920s example of Makeig-Jones’s work called Poplar Trees, which boasts depictions of cypresses and other trees, a J...
Feb 07, 2024•37 min
In what has become an annual tradition, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller capped off January with a panel discussion at the Winter Show. This year’s edition was named “Catching the Bug: Enriching Your Life Through Collecting,” and featured three distinguished collectors and the objects they live by and through. The Hawkes bowl belonging to conservator Lloyd Zuckerberg, interior designer Marcy Masterson’s Italian side chair, and the Etruscan hand mirror of artist and educator Thomas Lollar pro...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 13 min
In the summer of 1966 the Beatles were in Japan, whirling through the first leg of what would be their final world tour. Hoping to forestall the dangerous excesses of Beatlemania, Japanese authorities confined the Fab Four to their hotel suite at Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel for almost the duration of their one-hundred-hour stay. Casting about for things to do, the Beatles fell to painting: each took upon himself to design one quadrant of an acrylic-and-watercolor artwork known as Images of a Woman , cu...
Jan 24, 2024•33 min
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published a seven-part book that would become the foundational text of modern anatomy: On the Fabric of the Human Body . With it, the Flemish anatomist overturned more than a millennium’s worth of medical dogma, many of his breakthroughs coming while dissecting human corpses—a method of study unavailable to physicians of classical antiquity. Part education and part art, Vesalius’s illustrated anatomy is as respected today for its woodcut specimen drawings—flayed “muscle ...
Jan 17, 2024•51 min
In this week’s episode, interior designer Tara McCauley gives listeners an inside look at her practice, which she likens, curiously, to a travel agency. She says: “I like to think of myself like I’ve gone into the market and I’ve done the research and I’ve talked to the experts and the locals and I’m bringing you the best kind of experience you’re looking for.” She's also brought along a small splatter-painted box by artist Thomas Engelhart, a veteran of the houses of Mugler and Hermès. For his ...
Jan 10, 2024•50 min
Over the past couple weeks we’ve been fielding and compiling questions that listeners have put to host Benjamin Miller. A taste: “Has any object ever truly baffled you?” “What’s the best town for antiquing?” and “Will Curious Objects ever do an adults-only episode?” This week’s episode represents a taste of his own medicine for Ben, usually the interviewer, and offered a chance for us at The Magazine ANTIQUES to learn a little more about what the Curious Objects community puzzles over. Learn mor...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr 12 min
A top-tier orchestra might well have tens of millions of dollars–worth of instruments on stage. Many of them are antiques. And there are few people who know these instruments more intimately than Paul Becker. He’s the fifth-generation owner and director of Carl Becker and Son, a 150-year-old luthier business in Chicago. He and his family have restored the most famous instruments in the world, and they’ve put violins, violas, and cellos in the hands of many of the world’s finest musicians. In a w...
Dec 27, 2023•47 min
“Conservative” by the standards of its day, the three-piece suit worn by American statesman and bon vivant Lewis Littlepage (1762–1802) at the court of Catherine the Great is sewn of silk and embroidered with sprays of blue, white, and grey flowers. Neal Hurst, curator of textiles and historic dress at Colonial Williamsburg, comes on our Curious Objects podcast to discuss this colorful garment in connection with Littlepage’s similarly colorful life—from contretemps with American Founding Father ...
Dec 20, 2023•39 min
This week Benjamin Miller is joined by filmmaker Rachel Gould, better known on YouTube as the Art Tourist, to discuss Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire cycle of about 1834–1836. A watershed in the genre of landscape painting, Cole’s canvases use an allegory of empire—germination, prosperity, decline—to preach a cautionary tale about environmental and spiritual overreach. It was message delivered with earnest intent to the citizens of the young and ravenous American republic, and is hardly less rele...
Dec 13, 2023•37 min
This week we travel back to the seventeenth century, to the glorious court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in France, and his astonishing commission for a suite of ninety-three carpets to cover the 1440-foot-long Grande Galerie at the Louvre, then a royal palace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now the proud owner of three of these carpets—the creative work of court painter Charles le Brun and court architect Louis Le Vau, and handiwork of the Savonnerie Manufactory—and British decorative arts cur...
Dec 06, 2023•55 min
This week Ben speaks with three bigwigs of Gem X, an international club for jewelry aficionados. Founder Lin Jamison, Simon Teakle gallery director Christine Cheng, and returning Curious Objects guest Levi Higgs of David Webb discuss men in brooches, women in cuff links, and the fail-proof “smell test” for detecting real gold. These glitterati also have with them enchanting bijoux from their personal collections: a Van Cleef and Arpels Virgo pendant, Portuguese citrine and pearl brooch, and a pa...
Nov 29, 2023•50 min
In this special throwback episode of Curious Objects , Ben Miller takes listeners on a virtual tour of the suite of beaux-arts abodes built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White. These houses—referred to as “cottages” by their nouveau riche owners—have been lovingly maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County. The organization’s CEO and executive director Trudy Coxe, curator of exhibitions Ashley Householder, and c...
Nov 22, 2023•33 min
Friend of presidents and billionaires, nemesis of Hitlerism, and helicopter skiing enthusiast, Kenneth Rendell is an antiquer who needs no introduction. But listeners hankering for more had best apply to Safeguarding History: Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History , Rendell’s recently published memoir and the occasion for his conversation with Curious Objects ’ host Benjamin Miller. On the docket in this episode is the role Rendell played in cracking the case...
Nov 15, 2023•46 min
This week host Benjamin Miller checks in with the intriguingly named Salt Lizard, a two-woman antiquarium at the center of hipsterdom: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Lizzie Trinder and Rita Nehmé bring all their vocal-fried charm to bear on the shortcomings of fast furniture, what it was like doing business with reticent Millennials and Zoomers during the pandemic, and a trio of fascinating finds: Gustav Gurschner’s theatrical art nouveau floor lamp, a transferware lavabo, and the niftiest games table/...
Nov 08, 2023•40 min
This week host Benjamin Miller engages Lillian Stoner, a scholar of classical antiquity, in a wide-ranging discussion about the quirks and inequities of provenance, tomb robbery, and repatriation as it concerns objects of the ancient world. Of particular concern is the infamous “hot pot” that was once on display in New York City: the Euphronios or Sarpedon Krater, a monumental bowl for mixing wine with water, decorated with red-figure paintings by the Attic virtuoso Euphronios. Acquired by the M...
Nov 01, 2023•49 min
Amber gameboards became very popular in northern Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the subject of this week’s episode represents the very best of type. A symphony of richly figured amber, silver, and silver gilt, the Danzig-made board was used to play chess and the ancient Roman strategy game known today as Three Men’s Morris. It’s one of many amber objets d’art from the Baltic region on display at the redoubtable Galerie Kugel in Paris for the exhibition Amber: Treasures f...
Oct 25, 2023•49 min
Like host Benjamin Miller, Oliver Newton specializes in silver—specifically, that from England, and especially silver from the nineteenth century and before. He has in hand a 1713 Anthony Nelme shaving bowl, one of those otherwise workaday objects made exceptional by fine craftsmanship, distinguished provenance, and, of course, the luster and value of its material. From the bowl’s history to the ins and outs of slinging hollowware, Oliver and Ben cover the antiquing gamut in the collegial manner...
Oct 18, 2023•45 min
Nick Dawes knows as much about antiques as probably anyone alive. With more than one hundred appearances on “Antiques Roadshow” since its US edition debuted in 1996, Dawes has sifted through thousands, perhaps millions, of family heirlooms in the thirty to sixty seconds allotted for each supplicant by the busy TV production schedule. Talking antiques, Dawes reminisces about “the ones that got away,” and the time he discovered a ceramic vase painted by Picasso that sold for $400,000. Word to the ...
Oct 18, 2023•38 min
Benjamin Miller is joined by Nathan Raab, principal at the Raab Collection, a purveyor of historic documents, manuscripts, and autographs that range from medieval codices to notes, signatures, and letters by the likes of Napoleon and Amelia Earhart. The firm’s inventory includes several items of especially national significance, such as the never-before-seen missive by George Washington—written just before the Continental Army’s encampment at Valley Forge for the winter of 1777–1778—that is the ...
Oct 18, 2023•37 min
Clarissa von Spee, curator and Chair of Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, comes on the pod to discuss a pair of ornately carved Qing Dynasty jade vessels, made by masters in Suzhou, China. Probably luxury objects and perhaps gifts, they’re just a couple of the more than two hundred objects on view as part of the exhibition "China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta," the first exhibition in the West that focuses on the artistic production and cultural impact of a r...
Sep 20, 2023•28 min
This week host Benjamin Miller welcomes back an old friend: Glenn Adamson, ANTIQUES contributor and now editor of Material Intelligence, an online quarterly published by the Chipstone Foundation. The upcoming issue of the journal concerns leather, one of the oldest as well as the commonest human-worked materials. From its sartorial to industrial applications (machine belts—sorry American bison), and its prevalence in sadomasochistic paraphernalia, Ben and Glenn cover the gamut. Learn more about ...
Sep 12, 2023•35 min
Benjamin Miller continues his odyssey through the PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, which embraces a sizeable portion of the museum’s nearly 2 million objects sourced from around the globe. Christian Louboutins and a $2.1 million copy of the Declaration of Independence are on the menu, as Ben speaks with Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library. Learn more about your ad ch...
Sep 05, 2023•36 min
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the United States’ oldest continuously operating museum. Today it embraces nearly 1 million objects from around the globe. However, as with most museums, space and programming constraints mean that only a fraction of these can be on view at any one time. Enter PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, a massive new facility that gives curators, visiting scholars—and Ben Miller, host of Curious Objects—access to Jingdazhen punch bow...
Aug 27, 2023•39 min
