'The Admirable Art Of The Needle' On View At Chelsea

NEW YORK CITY

:Chelsea Edition's showrooms in Manhattan's Fine Arts Building on East 59th Street proved a congenial setting for "The Admirable Art of The Needle," an exhibition of English and American samplers and embroideries worked between 1650 and 1850.

Organized by American dealers M. Finkel & Daughter and Cora Ginsburg LLC in association with their English colleagues Maureen Morris and Alistair Sampson Antiques, the selling exhibition, which continued through October 26, was timed to coincide with the recent International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show. Ginsburg and Sampson have collaborated in three other such ventures in Manhattan over the past three years.

Pooling their inventories, the specialists achieved impressive range in the 125 works on view. From petitpoint sampler motifs, $350 and up, to a Seventeenth Century mirror, $275,000, that was the talk of the town when it came to auction in London in 1932, there were antiques to tempt many tastes.

Founded by Mona Perlhagen, Chelsea Editions opened in New York in 1996 at the encouragement of the late Jed Johnson, a designer with whom Perlhagen had often worked. Chelsea Editions supplies designers with hand embroidered fabrics inspired by antique English, French and American originals. The textiles are custom-made in India to the highest standards.

Endowed with 12-foot ceilings and abundant sunlight, the galleries of Chelsea's reconfigured carriage house are the perfect scale for looking at embroidery. While the front gallery contained English pieces, the back gallery was largely American, an arrangement that suited Amy Finkel of M. Finkel & Daughter.

"Many collectors of early needlework came through," said Amy Finkel. The Philadelphia dealer sold her best piece, a 1795 Chester County sampler illustrated in The Flowering of American Folk Art. She also parted with several Westtown School Quaker samplers; a linsey-woolsey sampler from Marlborough, Mass.; a family record from Lynn, Mass.; and a rare Colonial Dutch sampler from Curacao, among others. To an institution she sold a rare Cohasset, Mass., schoolgirl shadowbox constructed of molded and cut paper.

"I've had follow-up from the show that may be exceptional," said Cora Ginsburg owner and director Titi Halle, just back from exhibiting at Ars Nobilis Kunstmesse in Berlin, where she headed immediately after the close of "The Admirable Art of The Needle."

Halle's next effort is "Fascinating Modernity: The Spirit of Art Deco in French Textiles and Fashion, 1910-1940." The joint presentation by Leonard Fox, Ltd, a rare books dealer, and Cora Ginsburg, LLC, runs from December 9 to 22 at Fox's gallery at 790 Madison Avenue. Woven and printed textiles will be shown alongside the graphic designs that inspired them.