Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them

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 curator Wolf Burchard is on hand to discuss their convoluted history and the way in which they illustrate the baroque principle of variatas: that all things artistic be constructed along similar lines, while individually being unique and exciting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 pair of Flemish heart pendants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 curator of historic landscapes and horticulture Jim Donahue give Ben the lowdown on the almost three hundred years of architectural history preserved here . . . and, of course, the strife and scandal that stalked the lives of the houses’ owners (spoiler: murder and rosarian shenanigans abound). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 of the forged Hitler Diaries, how he amassed twenty-five thousand rare books and manuscripts in just eleven months for Bill Gates’s personal library, and tips for determining the value and authenticity of precious objects, for collectors new and old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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/console you’re likely to find this side of the Levant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Metropolitan Museum of Art for over $1 million in 1972, it was repatriated to Italy in 2008 after decades of investigations into its questionable origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 from the Baltic. Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller gets an inside look at how such curios were crafted, and the lore that surrounds the gameboard’s decorative themes and provenance, courtesy of Laura Kugel, sixth generation dealer at the family-owned and -operated gallery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 what befits two young swells of the trade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 wise: if you ever hear the phrase “this is a very interesting object . . .” brace yourself—your curio is probably worthless. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 subject of this episode.

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 region located in the coastal area south of the Yangzi River. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

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.

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 bowls, documents from the Salem Witch Trials, showy Persian shoes, and much, much more. Feat. Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.

In 1963, archaeologists from the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York began excavations in an ancient Levantine town called Jalame, in today’s Israel. For eight years they uncovered objects—many of which were brought back to the Corning—related to the production of glass in the Late Roman Empire. Most of the pieces produced in the Jalame workshop were workaday, monochrome items, but a few were more luxurious, such as a conical beaker decorated with blue dots (from copper). Untreated glass is naturally green or blue, from the iron found in sand, so the glass for this beaker would have to have been de-colorized with manganese. “The Jalame excavation was transformative because it was really the first scientific investigation of a glass workshop from antiquity,” says Katherine Larson, the guest for this episode of Curious Objects and curator of the exhibition "Dig Deeper: Discovering an Ancient Glass Workshop in Corning."

Host Benjamin Miller welcomes back his erstwhile co-host, Michael Diaz-Griffith, to discuss the latter's new book, "The New Antiquarians." A survey of the up-and-coming generation of antiques collectors, who are taking up the mantle of the wealthy, socially competitive collectors who preceded them, the book takes readers into the homes of “people who are independent of mind, who want to create an interior that’s expressive of who they are"—from fashion designer Emily Bode to artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins, and many in between.

The cope, a long, loose-fitting ceremonial cloak worn by a priests or bishops, is a curious object. “Imagine a circle cut in half—a cope is the shape of that half,” explains Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Henry VII commissioned thirty of these richly embroidered vestments for the English clergy, helping to lay the foundation for that special blend of religion, power, and material prestige that would mark the reign of his son, the notorious Henry VIII. One of these copes is our focus piece this week. But twenty-nine of its brothers and sisters shared the fate of so many Renaissance textiles: oblivion.

Curious Objects guest Kay Collier, who is the owner of Kathryn Hastings and Company, purveyor of fine antique and modern wax seals, has always been a letter writer. You can thank her grandmother for encouraging the habit. Every week when she was a child Collier would receive a card with a piece of bubblegum and a dollar bill, and would send mail back. When she was nineteen Collier took a trip to Europe with her sister. Visiting the Amatruda papery on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, one of the oldest paper manufactories in Europe, her heart lit upon a wax seal. “You just have an intuitive feel for an object, it calls to you and you think ‘I don’t know what this is but I have to know more, I have to touch this thing,’” she says. One thing led to another and today she is the owner of some five hundred seals: wheel seals, case seals, rotating seals, fobs made to be worn with pocket watches by Victorian gents. Each boasts a beautiful matrice (the part of the seal that’s actually pressed into hot wax, to render a desig

A couple of months ago, Ben Miller turned up at the Salmagundi Club in New York’s West Village to assume an unfamiliar role: that of interviewee rather than interviewer, sharing his expertise on nineteenth century American silver with the audience of the Gilded Gentleman. It’s a conversation that we are proud to present to you now. Silvery was in a state of flux during the nineteenth century. Discoveries of huge lodes such as the Nevadan mother given its name by Henry Comstock, new production methods like silver plating, and most importantly, the maturation of the domestic industry, were shifting American styles from the Englishisms of Paul Revere to the Yankee grandeur that was Gorham, and the glory that was Tiffany. That’s the metanarrative. But Ben and GG host Carl Raymond don’t shy away from pesky niceties such as the difference between the silver of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his father, Charles, the importance (or unimportance) of hallmarks, and the most consequential question for listeners hoarding fa

For nearly two hundred years, from his death in 1823, New York potter Thomas Commeraw was out of sight. In 2010 it finally became possible to positively identify him: as a prosperous free Black craftsman with a manufactory in Corlears Hook employing seven people, an enterprise that provided stiff competition to the legacy affairs of Pot Baker’s Hill in lower Manhattan.