If your house burned down tomorrow, what would you do? On December 16, 2003, Thomas N. Armstrong III and his wife, Bunty, got the phone call that every absentee homeowner dreads. Fire had destroyed their summer place on Fishers Island, N.Y. Year-round residents of the exclusive resort community adrift in Long Island Sound, a ferry ride from New London, Conn., retrieved the house⁳ most valuable contents. ⁇et the Audubons out,†the matron marshalling the volunteer brigade commanded. But the house †a rambling, 1926 Colonial Revival that the Armstrongs had meticulously renovated and furnished for themselves and their children †was irrevocably damaged. Faced with the same situation, some would bank the insurance settlement and retreat. Others would attempt to recreate what had been lost. A career museum director who over three decades headed the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Andy Warhol Museum before becoming president of the Garden Conservancy, Armstrong saw the opportunity to start anew. You could call it accidental creative destruction of the artistic variety.

Salem, antiques show cat and beloved companion to antiques dealer Bill Kelly, lost his courageous fight with diabetes and kidney disease on April 23. He was 12½ years old.

Marburger Farm Antique Show opened April 3 to its largest first-day audience, according to show manager Ashley Ferguson. Running April 3‷ with nearly 350 exhibiting dealers, the show was greeted by several thousand visiting shoppers looking for the latest décor and antiques to add to their collections.

Five Twentieth Century scroll paintings by Chinese artist Qi Baishi sold for an impressive $2,424,000 at Kaminski Auctions†March 30″1 sale. Each was sealed and signed and dedicated in running script to Wen Tsan Yu from whose collection they came.

A Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens exhibition illuminates the remarkable changes wrought in the United States by the planning, construction and completion of the transcontinental railroad. ⁖isions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad Across America, 1840‱880,†is on view through July 23.

(AP) †When is a penny worth $1.15 million? When it is a rare experimental penny minted in 1792.

⁉mpressionism in a New Light: From Monet to Stieglitz,†on view at Carnegie Museum of Art May 12⁁ugust 26, will present a robust picture of what Impressionism means in art, displaying paintings, drawings, prints and pastels by major artists alongside works by many of the most famous Pictorialist photographers of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

The annual Bedford Spring Antiques Show, April 14 and 15 at the Rippowam-Cisqua School, changed its stripes for 2012. No, there were the usual tastefully assembled displays by about 30 antiques dealers, some new and some veterans of the show.

Most likely stolen on Easter Sunday, a French barbotine majolica bowl, with hand-applied birds and flowers, was reported taken from a home here. The bowl is approximately 14 inches tall with a diameter of about 20 inches.

Joseph William Belperio died on February 24 at the age of 58. As the owner of Shimazu Antiques, a firm established 34 years ago, Belperio was a respected antiques dealer of Japan⁳ Meiji art.