The Winter Antiques Show announces that a six-part lecture series will be presented in conjunction with the 2013 loan exhibition Newport: The Glamour of Ornament, celebrating The Preservation Society of Newport County. Topics will explore different aspects of Newport, from the lives of Newport’s great women to a current restoration project at The Elms.  For the 17th year, the loan exhibition is sponsored by Chubb Personal Insurance.  All lectures take place in the Tiffany Room at the Park Avenue Armory, 67th Street and Park Avenue, New York City. Seating is on a first-come basis and is complimentary with admission to the Show.

Trudy Coxe will present Great Women of Newport on Friday, January 25 at 2:30 p.m.

Women have been great cultural, social, and preservation forces in Newport, Rhode Island, a city rich in three centuries of American history and architecture. This lecture will explore the lives of some these fascinating women, including Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whose restoration of the White House is legendary, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a great builder and prominent suffragist, and Katherine Warren, a leading art collector and pioneering preservationist whose vision for Newport transformed the city and saved its nationally significant heritage.

Trudy Coxe has been CEO and Executive Director of The Preservation Society of Newport County since December 1998. Coxe has directed the growth of the organization’s operating budget to $17 million annually, and admissions to more than 800,000 annually. Under her leadership, fundraising, retail sales at the Society’s six museum stores and membership have grown dramatically. During her tenure, the Preservation Society received accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, becoming one of only 750 museums nationwide to be accredited. In addition, ten of the Preservation Society’s properties were designated as Official Projects of Save America’s Treasures, a public-private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

On Saturday, January 26 at 2:30 p.m., Charles J. Burns will present Hidden Treasures: Fine and Decorative Arts in Newport.  Associate Curator Charles J. Burns is currently researching the highlights from the Preservation Society’s collections. This lecture will survey a remarkable group of items from this wide ranging and eclectic collection of over 50,000 objects. Meet some of Newport’s Gilded Age hostesses as seen through portraits by some of the most important artists of the day, discover how Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt acquired an Egyptian 26th Dynasty bronze Horus Falcon, and hear about The Elms where the most complete cycle of early 18th century Venetian history painting outside of Italy came to rest.

Charles J. Burns is the Associate Curator for Research at The Preservation Society of Newport County and has been affiliated with the Society since 1987. A graduate of Wesleyan University (M.A.) in Middletown, Connecticut, Mr. Burns’ thesis was devoted to eighteenth century American decorative arts in the collection of Miss Doris Duke. Mr. Burns studied fine and decorative arts at Christie’s London, receiving a diploma from the Royal Society of the Arts in 1998. He also holds a degree from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art (M.Phil.), where he did a thesis on the Vanderbilt collections of European fine and decorative arts.

John R. Tschirch will present The Architect’s Dream: Great Houses of Newport, Rhode Island on Sunday, January 27 at 2:30 p.m.  Newport, Rhode Island is an architectural treasury with landmark buildings by some of the nation’s leading architects, who left a significant artistic heritage in a collection of great houses. As a fashionable summer resort during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the city became a veritable laboratory for experimentation with the most innovative designs in domestic architecture. This illustrated lecture will examine the diversity of Newport architecture including the work of legendary designers such as Richard Upjohn, Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead & White. 

John R. Tschirch is the Director of Museum Affairs and Architectural Historian at The Preservation Society of Newport County. Mr. Tschirch has lectured and written widely on houses and gardens from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Providence College, and a Master's degree in Architectural History and Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia. He also attended the Attingham Program for the Study of the British Country House in Great Britain, and the Royal Collections Studies Program at Windsor Castle. He is currently an instructor in Design History at the Rhode Island School of Design.

On Thursday, January 31 at 2:30 p.m. Caitlin M. Emery will present Masterpiece: L.C. Tiffany and Stanford White Create a Newport Room. At the time of its completion in 1881, the Kingscote dining room was unlike anything previously built in Newport, Rhode Island. Departing from earlier stylistic traditions, the space epitomizes the eclectic aesthetic that defined the early work of its designer, Stanford White, and identified the clients, Mr. and Mrs. David King Jr. as discernable patrons of the arts. Incorporating glass designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Kingscote dining room helped establish White as a designer and tastemaker, and illustrates the idea of “cultural fusion,” drawing inspiration from Elizabethan, Japanese, Moorish, Aesthetic and American Colonial sources.

Caitlin Emery is the Research and Interpretation Coordinator at The Preservation Society of Newport County. She received her B.A. in Cultural and Historic Preservation from Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island and her M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She has lectured on American interior design and the early work of McKim, Mead & White for the Decorative Arts Trust, The Newport Symposium, the Salve Regina University Conference on Cultural and Historic Preservation, and Winterthur.

Paul Miller will present Designing for the Vanderbilts: French Interiors for Newport

on Friday, February 1 at 2:30 p.m.  The confluence in nineteenth-century Newport of urbane patrons and ambitious architects fostered an evolution of high style residential design with a distinctively French flavor. The evolution of this stylistic preference can be clearly witnessed through surviving interiors in the community, interiors which in their day had a national and international impact. Mr. Miller will retrace the steps that led the American “Queen of Resorts” to adopt Parisian Belle Epoque taste.

Paul Miller has been affiliated with The Preservation Society of Newport County since 1977, serving as Associate Curator prior to his appointment as Curator in 1995. He received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Miller is a noted authority on late nineteenth century architectural interiors and has acted as a consultant on related questions for institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Corcoran Gallery, Hillwood, and the Ringling Museum of Art. He has lectured widely on the subject in the United States and abroad. He was selected as a Getty Scholar in 2005 and continues his extensive research on the Paris decorating firm of Jules Allard and Sons, active in America between 1880 and 1907.

On Saturday, February 2 at 2:30 p.m. Charles J. Moore will present Gilded Splendor: Preserving a Great Newport Room. Collectors have prized Asian lacquer since the mid-sixteenth century. The Chinese export lacquer panels in the Breakfast Room at The Elms (1901) are reminiscent of those on view in their original locations at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna and other great European sites. The Preservation Society’s Chief Conservator Charles J. Moore presents the work required to stabilize and preserve these important and rare objects. 

Charles J. Moore was trained and employed as a cabinetmaker and worked as Chief Carpenter of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Mr. Moore is currently Chief Conservator at The Preservation Society of Newport County, where he began as the Furniture Conservator in 1985. He graduated from Roger Williams University with a B.S. in Historic Preservation and completed his studies for an M.A. in conservation from Antioch University.  Mr. Moore was awarded a J. P. Getty Foundation grant in 2008 to study Asian lacquers at Schonnbrunn Palace in Vienna. This study forms part of Mr. Moore’s conservation of The Breakfast Room at The Elms (1901) in Newport, RI.

About the Winter Antiques Show

The Winter Antiques Show celebrates its 59th year as America’s most prestigious antiques show, featuring 73 renowned experts in American, English, European, and Asian fine and decorative arts in a fully vetted Show. The Show was established in 1955 by East Side House Settlement, a social services institution located in the South Bronx. All net proceeds from the Show benefit East Side House Settlement. The Winter Antiques Show will run from January 25-February 3, 2013, at the Park Avenue Armory, 67th Street and Park Avenue, New York City. The Winter Antiques Show hours are 12 p.m.-8 p.m. daily except Sundays and Thursday, 12 p.m.-6 p.m. Daily admission to the Show is $20, which includes the Show’s award-winning catalogue. To purchase tickets for the Opening Night Party on January 24, 2013, or Young Collectors Night on January 31, 2013, call (718) 292-7392 or visit this link on the Show’s website.

About East Side House Settlement

East Side House Settlement was founded in 1891 to help immigrants and lower income families on the East Side of Manhattan. In 1962, it moved to the South Bronx where it serves 8,000 residents annually within one of America’s poorest congressional districts, the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. Among the initiatives that focus on educational attainment as the gateway out of poverty is the innovative and highly acclaimed Mott Haven Village Preparatory School. For more information, please visit www.eastsidehouse.org.