Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them

Join us on a journey to ancient Egypt as we explore the quirky material history and dead-serious religious significance of a very curious object: a 2,500-year-old Imsety-headed canopic jar—i.e., a vessel made to hold a mummy’s liver. Charis Tyndall of UK antiquities dealer Charles Ede guest stars.

Special guests James Boening (James Robinson, Inc.), Ria Murray (Lillian Nassau), and Taylor Thistlethwaite (Thistlethwaite Americana), join hosts Ben and Michael at the Park Avenue Armory during the Winter Show for a lively discussion about a Tiffany favrile glass pig, a silver molinet, a pair of Scottish Highlands pistols, a c. 1770 New York card table, and a fetching portrait miniature from the German school.

Ever wondered how the otherwise-unremarkable locales of Meissen, Staffordshire, and Sèvres became Europe's porcelain-producing polestars? Or what outsider artists like Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, discovered by the art establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s, made of their newfound fame? The experts at Christie's have the answers!

Michael Diaz-Griffith treks to Colonial Williamsburg to talk with chief curator Ron Hurst about a new exhibition, "British Masterworks," in which objects like gilded chandeliers, a colossal Chippendale bookcase, and an armchair upholstered with a parrot and a basket of fruit—collected by curators in the early twentieth century to flesh out their conception of 1700s Williamsburg—tell very different stories today from the ones they were bought to support.

The first American flag Peter Keim collected was a hand-sewn thirteen-star specimen that he found poking out of a paper bag at a farm sale. Happily for Keim, the flag turned out to be a hand-sewn beaut from 1862, worth $10,000. Keim now owns approximately four hundred American flags.

Only a small number of people have the resources and wherewithal to collect Hepplewhite furniture or Paul Revere silver, but plenty collect baseball cards, including our guest this month: Randall, the voice behind the viral video The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger.

There’s a tried and true method for curating art exhibitions: paint walls, hang pictures, write labels, and Bob's your uncle. But what happens when a neuroscientist gets involved? This month, CO examines how researchers at the Peabody Essex Museum are analyzing the ways people look at art.

A suite of furniture made for the storied Beekman family of New York has one extremely over-the-top feature: the pieces are upholstered with export-quality French tapestries, i.e., material that wasn’t good enough for the French to hold on to. One man's trash . . .

Philip Hewat-Jaboor is chairman of Masterpiece London and owner of a fine alabaster and rosso antico marble vase. The vase has a fascinating transnational backstory, but, maybe more importantly, it's beautiful, a factor Philip says is “coming back into the equation” with regard to works of art.

If you find an Old Master artwork in your attic, how can you be sure it isn’t fake? This month Ben and Michael consider the case of "Judith and Holofernes," a painting attributed to Caravaggio and estimated at $100–$150 million that sold to a private buyer on June 25.

Scholar and curator Glenn Adamson reminds us how important it is to pay attention to the objects in our immediate proximity in this episode keyed to Art Carpenter’s Wishbone chair

This month we focus on a quartet of curious objects at Freeman’s auction house: a marble-top pier table long believed to have belonged to General Washington’s aide-de-camp Tench Tilghman, a quirky painting of Noah’s Ark by foppish Lancaster polymath John Landis, and two stoneware wine bottles in the shape of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

In collector Noah Wunsch's private life one rule guides his hand: “no matter what you're buying make sure you like it.“ In this episode, Ben takes the measure of Noah’s treasure, which ranges from a 60 BC Visigothic belt buckle to the zany artwork of Genieve Figgis.

Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize in economics and his personal dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations have come up for auction at Sotheby’s. Ben Miller calls on the expertise of Duke University professor Bruce Caldwell and Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton to put these and other items in historical context.

For the Winter Show’s 2019 diamond jubilee, Curious Objects hosted a panel discussion between four young lights of the antiques world, who'd gathered to announce the birth of a new club: the New Antiquarians.

Ben Miller talks to John Stuart Gordon about glass formed by the Trinity nuclear test and a stained-glass window smashed by a dining hall worker in 2016.

Rare book dealers Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney drop some knowledge about Henry Highland Garnet’s "Memorial Discourse,” the first address delivered to Congress by an African-American.

Happy birthday, Curious Objects! In this special anniversary episode, we take a look back at the work we’ve done these last twelve months.

A virtual tour of the suite of Gilded Age mansions built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds in Newport, Rhode Island, by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White.

This time it's your turn. For the last two months, we’ve been asking listeners to post their curious objects on Instagram, tagging #mycuriousobject and @antiquesmag.