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Elizabeth Appraisals Elizabeth Appraisals: Discovering value in Art and Antiques, consulting on downsizing, securing repl

This tapestry serves as a mirror of contemporary 17th-century Renaissance diplomacy, and the often tragic misuse of powe...
10/13/2026

This tapestry serves as a mirror of contemporary 17th-century Renaissance diplomacy, and the often tragic misuse of power.

This tapestry serves as a mirror of contemporary 17th-century Renaissance diplomacy, and the often tragic misuse of power. 21st-century people find it difficult to understand a world, in the deep ...

This photo is a performance, not a statement of two young men and their rugged occupation, the genesis of the cultural p...
10/06/2026

This photo is a performance, not a statement of two young men and their rugged occupation, the genesis of the cultural portrayal of the “created” self-image. In social media, as in life, we inherited the invention of self-hood. In this old photo, the myth of masculinity takes center stage.

KK sent me a fantastic 1880s silver gelatin photograph of two young men. They’re friends or brothers, we do not know. They’re dressed in oversized fur flap-eared caps and long ...

Germans in Europe loved rye, considered a cereal crop. But it created many things like rye wh***ey. They prized it for f...
09/29/2026

Germans in Europe loved rye, considered a cereal crop. But it created many things like rye wh***ey. They prized it for filling mattresses, insulation under carpets and walls, and stuffed horse collars. They used rye as drinking straws, and, of course, basket making.

My grandmother lived in a small house under the shadow of the BEVO Mill, a reproduction windmill housing a famous brewery on Gravois in Saint Louis. I grew up there ...

The way we saw the world changed in the mid-18th century. People fell in love with optics, the concept of sight, and opt...
09/22/2026

The way we saw the world changed in the mid-18th century. People fell in love with optics, the concept of sight, and optical marvels. The zograscope became a way to experience sights you never saw before, and to see in 3D.

The concept of interactive media is familiar. We interact with our phones visually. The concept of a picture in three dimensions is ordinary, mundane, part of our visual vocabulary. However, ...

Look at the carving on the lower panel of this Chinese chest. You see ten figures carved in deep relief. These are the E...
09/15/2026

Look at the carving on the lower panel of this Chinese chest. You see ten figures carved in deep relief. These are the Eight Immortals, with two attendants.

KG owns an early 20th century forty-one-inch long Chinese Qing Dynasty carved camphor chest of little value—$350-400. These are relatively common, but it bears priceless symbolism. Should KG keep this ...

How we dressed in the 1970s, in many ways, became a restatement of the Art Nouveau fashions of the early 1900s. The rein...
09/08/2026

How we dressed in the 1970s, in many ways, became a restatement of the Art Nouveau fashions of the early 1900s. The reinvigoration of 1900 Art Nouveau became a predominant style after the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.

Along the Art Nouveau lines of the 1970s, DD sent me a floor lamp with a 1979 Tiffany-style blown-glass shade in the Quezal tradition. The attached shade hangs on a ...

A doll in a dream blends tenderness, family heirloom thoughts, and strangeness all at once. In the case of the doll coll...
09/01/2026

A doll in a dream blends tenderness, family heirloom thoughts, and strangeness all at once. In the case of the doll collected by EE from South Africa, I see a difference between a doll as a toy and a doll as a sacred object.

In the last three weeks I’ve received two calls for two major doll collections of hundreds of dolls each. Readers know I’m frightened of dolls. When I attend an appraisal ...

My mother longed to collect Boehm porcelain during the 1960s. My father admired the sculptures but thought them extravag...
08/25/2026

My mother longed to collect Boehm porcelain during the 1960s. My father admired the sculptures but thought them extravagant purchases. He often substituted less expensive copies produced by the Japanese firm Lefton China for special birthdays and anniversaries.

EG sent me a photo of a magnificent seventeen and a half inch porcelain Blue Jay perched on raspberry branches. Its brilliant plumage modeled in hard-paste porcelain and hand-painted with ...

Advertising posters, which entered the design world in the mid-nineteenth century, are a means of mass communication usi...
08/18/2026

Advertising posters, which entered the design world in the mid-nineteenth century, are a means of mass communication using art, history, and design. They’re aimed toward popular culture and consumption, promotion of a product or event, propaganda.

This week FF sent me a French advertising poster with the narrative theme of enjoyment at the circus. Well-dressed 1930s crowds enjoy a carnival, (buy your tickets!) signed Émile Finot. ...

These images ask a larger question: What’s the relationship between our five senses, shared with all primates, and the c...
08/11/2026

These images ask a larger question: What’s the relationship between our five senses, shared with all primates, and the cultural forces that shape how we see, hear, think, taste, touch, and smell?

Singerie, you say? Yes. DD owns a delightful group of color lithographs ‘after’ Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin‘s celebrated Le Singe peintre and Le Singe antiquaire. One monkey is an artist, the other ...

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