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Miss de Wolfe liked to change out her busts. Here’s the new
one after she redecorated the dining room and here it is in another shot. She also liked to use the same bust in different apartments. Here is one in the original location in her drawing room. And, here it is later after she traded it on to Miss Marbury’s new friend Anne Morgan, placed in Miss Morgan’s boudoir.In Elsie de Wolfe, Sparke shares with us one of my favorite areas of the house. There are no images so we only have descriptions:
(de Wolfe) …decided to eliminate the cozy corner and add a small
conservatory in the bay window. By placing a piece of white marble in the bay
behind a raised area that concealed a drainpipe, she was able to transform a
17Th-century marble baptismal font into a fountain and have six ornamental
goldfish swimming in its water.
Beautiful ashtrays are the vestige remains of a lost religion. Ashtrays have a bare utility, left only to be fetishized by a few and eshewed by many. It is practically unheard of to have a beautiful ashtray. As if having a beautiful ashtray would be lining you up with the trappings of the tobacco industry placing you far right or left a direct supporter of that gasping yet prosperous institution.
One can see evidence of a backlash to anti-smoking bans all over. Last month when in L.A., I had dinner in a restaurant that offered cigarettes on the bar and how could one not indulge in that?
My favorite smoking memory was at the UES apartment of a friend’s mother. It had been my second visit. At the first visit she offered me a cigarette, she having recently switched to Camel filters and I had politely said no thank you, I’ve quit. But I had regretted it that whole year. How could I not smoke with a matriarch who was also a wonderful portraitist and now in her late 90’s! When she offered me a cigarette this last time, I accepted and lit hers as well.
Still, beautiful ashtrays: we don’t have the material objects of the real smoking generation, we seem to have bottle lids, plastic lighters, and the last swallows from a Starbucks Cup to flick our ash in and to smother our fire.
At least one ashtray has been designed in the not too distant past. Ron Gilad developed his ashtray for the Cooper Hewitt. In taking one of Vitra’s miniatures; George Nelson’s coconut chair, and adding a layer of sterling silver, Gilad adds not only to the narrative of tobacco but furthers a conversation of design and the iconic imagery of modernism.
There is a slight ironic humor here. Is Gilad taking a jab at Nelson or at the state of contemporary design? Is he saying that the past is only worth the butt of my cigarette–who knows but Gilad. He might be saying that we can not nor should not be formed by precedent: that we have to develop beyond the past to be new or at least see things in a new way.
All I know, is that it is doubtful that any child of mine will be making me an ashtray in art class and bringing it home to me for father’s day which is really a shame.
Italian ashtray, AREA iD.
From the iris the fleur-de-lis motif is said to have developed. In A Dictionary of Symbols J. E. Cirlot says the fleur-de-lis:
The garage flea market in Chelsea.
This jar circa 1890 was most likely from a set. Cut glass with a glass stopper and sterling silver lid. The hexagon motif with a hatch cross on the reverese that traverses the surface between a curved convex ribbon. Burke Antiques on Lex. about 450.
My friend Bramlett of Dallas started me on collected snow globes. For a brief period, I was only collecting snow globes from places that I had never been. It’s more difficult that it sounds. I bought my first of Paris at a boot sale in Cambridge: the water was charmingly evaporating. Later Bramlett sent me globe from the Loch Ness, and later still she sent a lovely book on the subject after we had both returned to the states. This is not a snow globe and probably only a distant neighbor of Nessie: the sticker on the bottom reads: 
A former client of mine in London and I used discuss our mutual fixation on Campaign furniture –easily folded up and moved. This didn’t stop her from having a storage unit, and it doesn’t stop me from having way to objects scattered and tucked in around and about my rooms and in other peoples storage units across the country. Her storage was in the most glamorous of locations– an apartment building adjacent to the Michelin building in an old maid’s apartment. I had wished I lived there and could imagine myself happy to be out of the cold like Miss Trotter on The Duchess of Duke Street.
