Tag Archives: america’s medicis

Farewell to David Rockefeller

Posted on April 13, 2017 by

One of the pleasures of being a biographer is that one becomes intimate with one’s subjects without really knowing them in the flesh. So it is, after spending five years writing America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and their Astonishing Cultural Legacy, with the … Continue reading →

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The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Posted on June 1, 2016 by

  Two very different women, the socially striving Arabella Worsham and the retiring Laura Spelman Rockefeller, occupied the lavish Gilded Age dressing room that joined the period rooms in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning in … Continue reading →

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Sotheby’s 2015 Impressionist and Modern Art Auction: The Joy of a Making-Believe Billionaire

Posted on May 15, 2015 by

Art from the collections of Jerome H. Stone, a Chicago entrepreneur, Lola Sarnoff, the Samuel Goldwyn family, and Anthony Goldschmidt led off Sotheby’s spring auction. The latter included a Monet looted from Jacob Goldschmidt by the Nazis in 1941. It … Continue reading →

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Christmas 2014: Other People’s Holidays

Posted on December 24, 2014 by

My mother was a Christmas junkie. I can still smell the pine aroma of the eight-foot tree that stood in our parlor in Hanover, Germany. Beeswax candles suffused the room with flickering light and a profusion of home-baked cookies weighed … Continue reading →

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The Eye of Nelson A. Rockefeller

In 1970 or so my husband and I went to B. Altman, the venerable Fifth Avenue department store, to view remarkably inexpensive sculptures assembled from old farm implements designed by William Heise, a sculptor from Vermont. It was rather early on … Continue reading →

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The Rockefeller Women

Posted on September 16, 2012 by

Since 1908, the year Nelson Rockefeller was born here on Mount Desert Island, part of the family has summered here ever since. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was one of the three fathers of Acadia National Park. The Rockefeller women have … Continue reading →

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The 58th Annual Winter Antiques Show

Posted on January 30, 2012 by

In my innocence I believed that armories, whose function is to keep soldiers in shape between wars, were frill-less, like gyms. This is not so in the case of the Park Avenue Armory, built for the prestigious Seventh Regiment of … Continue reading →

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