Metro Station

The Golden Touch

I have always sympathized with the Pirates in so many childhood tales, because I too seem to be drawn to all things shiny.  As a child I watched my mother, a self-taught furniture doctor, take sadly destroyed giltwood frames and bring them back to their golden glory.  I took this knowledge gathered through observation for granted over the years, but after pursuing an MFA in painting, I found myself managing a decorative painting and restoration studio in Washington DC, and suddenly all of the knowledge passed to me as a child of a furniture doctor and painter was very useful.  In the last decade I have spent time gilding and restoring everything imaginable, from the ceiling of the Plaza Hotel in New York to the frames at French Metro. 

The first step to recognizing gold leaf is simple.  Items which have been gilt will have visible lines where the gold has been laid across the plastered surface. Normally a red iron oxide underbody has been applied and is visible through these lines.  Gold leaf is essentially a foil, so you can imagine that if you wrapped foil around a curved surface it would create little lines, but with gold leaf this is a much finer network of creases.  

If something has been gilt in 22karat gold, the individual leaves will have been laid all in a row, with the size of each leaf left clearly visible with the faint red tone of the underbody coming through each divide.  Recognizing real gold leaf is fairly simple.  Usually it has not been antiqued, and the shine and hue of the gold is much lighter as a result.  This is because real gold is immune to the oxidation and rusting that will attack lesser metals.  When something is finished in imitation leaf it must be varnished or sealed to keep the air from eventually turning it black.  The size of the leaf is also a good indication.  Real gold leaf is much smaller, usually coming in 2.5” squares, whereas imitation leaves come in 3” to 5” squares.

Real gold leaf is what adorns the exterior decorative elements of most of our nation’s monuments.  This is again due to its resistance to the elements.  Most of the frames that have made their way to French Metro have a long a storied history, and because of Renee’s wonderful eye for quality I can truly say they are all finished in gold leaf, not all 22 karat, no, but  they are all the real shiny stuff instead of paint, so this pirate has found her treasure. 

Art History Comes Home

Art history classes in college often consisted of the drudgery of route memorization. Movements and styles were observed and filed away with some small mental notes on preference.  It was not until I began to travel and see paintings in museums and houses around the world that the history of so many remembered works came alive.

A Copper Curiosity

After sixteen years of searching all over France for the rare and unique, I still run across something I've never seen before.  A beautifully hand crafted copper piece engraved with the year 1743...the date alone was enough to catch my attention!

Growing up with French Metro Antiques

It has been nearly a year since I was in Fayetteville doing odd jobs for my parents at their shop, yet I never feel disconnected from the hubbub at French Metro Antiques.  Only two months ago, my parents came to visit me here in France where I’ve spent the past year studying at the Université du Maine in Le Mans.

Soon after their arrival, I found myself tagging along once again on one of their buying trips.  I was greeted by the familiar experience of having to share what little space there was in the rental car with various treasures of copper, bronze, and a variety of woods.  Despite the frequent car loads we dropped off at the shippers, within a matter of hours there always seemed to be a new hoard of goods to share the seats with.  One might think it must have been annoying, but for me, I enjoyed their company, the stories they told, and the lives they’ve lived.

Each piece of art, for that is what they were—gave me new insight into my favorite subject of study:  French history.  The change in motifs from the time of the French kings to the dawn of the Enlightenment and the formation of the French Republic showed a change in attitude among the French people.  The adopted patriotism following the Revolution was evidenced in the revolutionary hat on a brass drum cover from 1793 or in the rooster head pommel on a Napoleonic sapper’s saber that we found in Lyon.

Every day spent with my parents, I inspected the items we found either at some small brocante (flea market) in a village nobody has heard of, or at a grand déballage (fair) where we’d spend hours, eyes peeled, on the lookout for rare objets d’art, such as a skillfully made marquetry chest.

As a Hunt, I am cursed with a keen appreciation for craftsmanship and forgotten beauty.  Try as I might to be restrained (after all, I am just a poor college student), I find myself yearning to expand the collections that I myself have assembled.  This trip in particular, I added to my collection a spadroon with the imperial eagle of Napoleon Bonaparte and dated August 1812, just two months into the emperor’s invasion of Russia.  Though it is impossible to know for sure, I couldn’t’ help but imagine that it had been used during the Battle of Borodino on September 7^th.

French Metro Antiques has allowed me to expand upon my knowledge of French history and feed my passion for the past.  I’ll be back in Fayetteville soon, just in time to help receive the fall shipment.  I will once again be greeted by the objects we found on our trip through France, and with each new item unpacked, a memory of our errant search for art will rush back to me along with the nostalgia of travelling in France with my parents.

Born with a Silver Napkin Ring in His Hand

I was born into a family that did not hold dining traditions dear.  We were six kids, an overwhelmed mother, and a father who travelled during the week and was only home for dinner on the weekends.  The love was there, and dinner was important, but dinner finery, not so much. But kids grow up and discover new ways of doing things, and so did I.  When I started my own family, I discovered a lovely French tradition that I embraced as my own.  When a baby is born in France, one of the traditional baby gifts is a silver napkin ring.  The initials or name of the child is engraved on the silver treasure, and the napkin ring is customarily used at mealtimes throughout his or her family life.  A cloth napkin rolled into a napkin ring is as much a part of the table setting as is a knife, fork, or spoon.  When the meal is over, one’s napkin is folded back into the napkin ring for the following day.  After a few meals, the cloth napkins are exchanged for fresh ones.  When my first child Alexander was born, a dear friend with whom I had studied French all throughout high school, college, and abroad in Dijon sent my baby Alexander a silver napkin ring from France with his very long first name engraved on it.  I was delighted with such a gift.  Three years later, Elliot was born, and a second napkin ring arrived from France.  By then, I realized my husband and I needed our own to complete the table so on our first trip to France together, we chose two Christofle silver napkin rings and had them engraved.  On went the tradition and the children.  Two more babies, Harrison and Camille, and two more napkin rings.  There was never a thought that it wasn’t normal to have children setting the table every night with silver napkin rings and cloth napkins next to their plates.  It was so taken for granted that one of the children saw his first paper napkin at age five at a neighbor’s dinner table, and asked me what he was supposed to do with it at the end of the meal.  He’d never heard of throwing away a napkin!

Some may think the tradition is a bit formal, but we continue to add to our collection.  We brought back one for our Brazilian exchange student when it became apparent she would always be part of our family.  And our daughter-in-law Cynthia observed the tradition early on before she married our son.  She decided she wanted to form napkin rings out of vintage silver forks and spoons for each of their wedding dinner guests, and Elliot stamped each guest’s initials on them.  Here was a girl after my own heart! 

Of course, I soon sought out a very special antique silver napkin ring in France for my new daughter!  And soon after I found a second one for Chef Elliot to use at family meal, one with cooks in the kitchen all around it.  It even had an E on it!

Traditions in a family are connecting points, and this tradition is a cherished one of ours, one that started with a French custom and took root in our own family history.  We are fortunate that six of the seven of us live in the same neighborhood.  We gather for family meal every Sunday, one that chef Elliot now prepares for us, and we are still setting the table with our silver napkin rings.

Pop The Cork!

• The traditional...

Fit for a King

The Palace of Versailles

Our first major stop this trip is Versailles where we usually find some incredible artwork (photos below). This flowery, bourgeois suburb of Paris is the site of the grandest palace in France. It served as the seat of the royal court for more than a century until 1789 when the Revolutionary mobs massacred the palace guard, and dragged Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to Paris...

Another day in Normandy

Antiques de Provence

Running like a bull...after one-of-a-kind antiques!