French Antique Details, stories of another time.

 

French antique details

French antique details: Transfer-ware ribbon design on a soup tureen. A bundle of lavender ribbon in its original packaging. A hand painted china plate… the  small details of someone's artist labor that remains true hundreds of years later. Small details that last, that speak, that tell a story of time gone by yet remains alive.

French-antique-detail

A pair of carved flowers in wood, followed by a row of brass tacks, then a trace of blue silk, the details of the top of a French chair that I sit on while I type.

It is hasn't changed since the day it was made.

Memories-of-Paris

A paper back book dated 1853, or is that 1856?

The story is the same, only the date has changed.

We live in the past, present and hope for the future, yet sometimes I forget about the present moment and think I am living tomorrow.

The story continues, it flows the same, word after word, page after page, day after day.

French antique detail

An angel cast in an iron chimney plaque sings delicately. Her wings seem light, feathery even after years of reflecting the heat from the fire back into the home.

Roll-of-lace

Hand made lace, hours of handiwork, what was the person creating it for? Why was it never used. Flawless abandoned art. Paintings hang in museums while this lace was stashed in dusty box. Impeccable and left aside. Art for the sake of art, creation simply to past the time. I wonder if the person who made it thought that someone might one day create something with it?

French-antique-detail-flame

An eighteen century carved wooden flame, worn off golden gild, Light! Though it has never burned.

Antique-wine-glass

Wood, paper, iron, lace and glass. Time, history, art, handiwork…culture carried over to this moment in time.

Last night I accidently broke this very old antique glass… it had a word etched on it:

SOUVENIR.

 



Comments

20 responses to “French Antique Details, stories of another time.”

  1. Gina Baynham

    You always find the small details of beauty where others might be so busy taking in the larger object they would overlook what you show us…!

  2. yvonnerosenfield

    beautiful post. Thank you
    yvonne

  3. becky up a hill

    oh…sigh on the glass breaking..beautiful pictures Corey. Thanks for sharing such beauty.

  4. I love you my darling one
    Time to shimmy our shamrocks
    Weekend Weekend
    Cha Cha Cha♥

  5. I mourn the glass with you but celebrate all the beautiful details! Have a wonderful weekend…hope you have fun and get to treasure hunt!
    🙂

  6. Jeanette M.

    Yes, your attention to detail is a gift – and we all reap the rewards. I use to buy old photographs because I felt so bad they had been discarded. I am torn between wanting someone to buy that beautiful hand made lace and finally make something with it and wanting to have it be kept as it was first made. I love how you see the stories behind these pieces of art.

  7. laura trevey

    Lovely…. it’s all in the details!

  8. Nancy from Mass

    I would take that lace and sew it to the bottom of a sheer curtain for my kitchen. Back in 1983 when my Mom went to Belgium and France to visit friends there, she bought enough lace to make curtains for her parlor windows (9 in all). She asked me the other day if I wanted the remaining lace. My back door window will look so beautiful!

  9. You obey its call, Corey, ‘to remember’ and in doing so, remind us all to take the time, to see the little details of the past and allow them to draw us into themselves – thanks

  10. The love of antiques is surely a passion of us reading your blog. I dust my antique pieces and wonder who dusted them before me? I stare at victorian photos and wonder who they are, what they were thinking at the time of the photo. It all makes me happy, as it makes you happy, so I see. Isn’t it wonderful?

  11. Kathie B.

    Corey, when I looked at that beautiful tatted lace I immediately thought of the elaborate needlework, including embroidery, of our shared ancestral Azores, which was still practiced by poor women even into the 1950s and ’60s in order to earn an additional pittance to help support their unspeakably impoverished families. In the novel “I No Longer Like Chocolates,” the typical hard early life of a (fictitious, but based on reality) young woman from the island of Terceira named Maria Lurdes (nicknamed Milu), who eventually immigrates to the prosperity of California, is thus described:
    “…they all recalled Milu’s parents’ tiny house with its small door containing only a peephole, its three windows of differing sizes, thinly covered with mud and painted with whitewash that the rain would rinse off. There was a kitchen, a middle room and a small bedroom (her parents’), while she and her sister slept on a small platform in the middle room and her brothers on a mattress wedged into an improvised loft above the kitchen. The rest of the place had a small back yard which, besides vegetables, contained an outhouse between the little pigsty and a traditional chicken-run. It had been in this minuscule wealth that Milu grew up. Her demands revealed the other face of a young woman who had definite ambitions and would only abdicate from them temporarily and for strategic reasons. America had made her wake up. She no longer needed to strain her eyes, sitting on the platform in the middle room of her parents’ house, embroidering linens for the city’s embroidery factory, which paid poorly and irregularly. She would arise at dawn and, seated cross-legged, set to work: the mechanical motions of her arms and hands, the needle between her fingers, in a rhythm that dazzled the eye and was only broken when a sharp and unstoppable pain shot up her back until it impeded her breathing. On the island this was women’s work. From their hands came forth embroidered poems, but at no great profit. It was necessary to embroider for many days just in order to earn enough to buy a meter of printed cotton percale to make an apron. In America Milu would not know the weight and arduousness of hard labor.”
    Oliveira, Álamo. “I No Longer Like Chocolates” (tr. Diniz Borges & Katharine F. Baker). San Jose: Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, 2006, pp. 98-9.

  12. AmyKortuem

    This is EXACTLY why I have to limit my antique shopping – I get so sentimental about all the things in the store, I want to take them all home!

  13. It is always sad when we break an antique piece. You have the beautiful picture of it still and will remember the “Souvenir”
    I think the maker of the lace was just expressing her creativity and making her own heart sing to make it. She may not have had a purpose for it, but to create a thing of beauty.

  14. Johanna, 365 Days of Drawing, All Things French

    you observe the small STUFF so well.

  15. jend’isère

    Generations of wine refills surely merited its engraving of “souvenirs”. Cheers for the memories… literally.

  16. Kathie B.

    I fear the lacemaker was an impoverished peasant girl/woman or domestic servant (or nun/sister?) who was probably paid very poorly for all her eye-straining, finger-numbing tatting.

  17. Shelley at decoragain.blogspot.com

    The devil is in the details….and not one escapes you!

  18. You really do have an eye for finding treasures, Corey. All of these pieces are beautiful – as are your photographs of them.

  19. I too love to imagine the story behind a well loved piece.

  20. Oh, that lace…

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