Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story [Hardcover]

Maryalice Huggins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009

“Everything I needed to know about Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first I saw it”

 

What antiques restorer Maryalice Huggins knew when she stumbled across the mirror at a country auction in Rhode Island was this: She was besotted. Rococo and huge (more than eight feet tall), the mirror was one of the most unusual objects she had ever seen. Huggins had to have it.

 

The frame’s elaborate carvings were almost identical to a famous eighteenth-century design. Could this be eighteenth-century American? That would make it rare indeed. But in the rarefied world of American antiques, an object is not significant unless you can prove where it’s from. Huggins set out to trace the origins of her magnificent mirror.

 

Fueled with the delightfully obsessive spirit of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Aesop’s Mirror follows Huggins on her quest as she goes up against the leading lights of the very male world of high-end antiques and dives into the historical archives. And oh, what she finds there! The mirror was likely passed down through generations of the illustrious Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island.

 

Throughout history, mirrors have been seen as having mystical powers, enabling those who peer into them to connect the past and the future. In Aesop’s Mirror, Maryalice Huggins does just that, creating a marvelous, one-of-kind book about a marvelous, one of-a-kind American treasure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Antiques restorer Huggins delivers a knowledgeable, however overstuffed and ultimately frustrating, frolic through the high-end world of the buying and selling of early American decorative arts. Well experienced in spotting potential masterpieces from her longtime work as a furniture and mirror restorer for antiques dealer Israel Sack Inc. and the big New York auction houses, Huggins by chance found a large, exquisite rococo mirror at an auction in Clayville, R.I., and for the next 10 years allowed it to follow her around like a beloved pet elephant. Obsessed by tracking down its provenance, she knew only that the fanciful carving of the gilded frame, modeled on the Aesop's fable she calls Fox and Grapes, must have been from a Thomas Johnson design, while the wood was North American white pine and the primitive craftsmanship probably American. As an early Block Islander, Huggins was familiar with the old families of Rhode Island, and delves into the probable original owners, the Browns of Providence, specifically, Anne Brown Francis Woods and her daughter, whose first (rejected) suitor was the future Irish statesman Charles Parnell. The Irish question takes Huggins into a valid, unfashionable consideration of the mirror's manufacture in Dublin, although her long digression into the imagined lives of these families strains reader patience. Nonetheless, so-called experts (all male) are deliciously proved fallible in this informative, creative exegesis on how antiques attain their value. (Nov.)
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Review

“Maryalice Huggins has mirror fever, and her quest to understand one special antique mirror makes great reading—part history, part love story, and an altogether fascinating look at the secretive, seductive world of rare things.” —Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

“Mixing antiquarian know-how with narrative suspense, Maryalice Huggins has somehow transformed an obsession with an antique mirror into an erudite nail-biter.” —Billy Collins

“I was mesmerized—not just by the history behind this story, but also by the passion that drove Huggins to delve into the past, and into herself, to figure out why we love what we love, and why finally understanding our passions is always bittersweet.” —Sara Nelson, author of So Many Books, So Little Time

“A rollicking read.” —The Providence Journal

“Huggins's passion for objects and history is contagious . . . [Aesop’s Mirror is] a short, suspense-filled whodunit, and you will know every name in it!” —Maine Antique Digest

“A knowledgeable frolic through the high-end world of the buying and selling of early American decorative arts . . . So-called experts are deliciously proved fallible in this informative, creative exegesis on how antiques attain their value.”—Publishers Weekly

“This entry will appeal most to readers interested in the world of antiques, who are sure to admire Huggins’s tenacity in a notoriously male-dominated line of work.”—Booklist

“A surprisingly complex story of American beginnings . . . In an age in which art’s bottom line is generally thought to be the bottom line, the book attests to the true reasons we cherish rare objects that have come down to us from the past: the way they elicit our desire to possess their beauty and their mystery.” —Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine

“It’s ‘Art Roadshow’ meets detective novel.”—Better Homes and Gardens, a “Good Read” selection

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2 edition (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374101035
• ISBN-13: 978-0374101039
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #920,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MARYALICE HUGGINS BIOGRAPHY

Maryalice Huggins is the author of Aesop's Mirror. The book was a finalist for the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She lives in Middletown, Rhode Island.

Growing up in an old house on Block Island hatched my love of history and antiques. That romantic experience laid the foundation for a long career in the decorative arts. I never thought of writing a book until 1995. That year I attended a country auction in Rhode Island, where I impulsively bought a gigantic gilded mirror bearing the symbols of the fable, "The Fox and Grapes." Investigating the mirror's provenance led me in a lot of different directions. There were so many related subjects and characters I wanted to include in the book that I finally decided to select everything I found amusing, including unanswered questions. Aesop's Mirror is a work of nonfiction, part history and part memoir, with observations about nineteenth-century politics and an 1870 love affair in Paris between a Rhode Island heiress and the great Irish politician, Charles Stewart Parnell. The story includes gossip about today's art world and how value is determined. Ultimately, the book explores the mystery of how we are affected by rare and beautiful things.

Articles, excerpts, and reviews about Aesop's Mirror and the author have appeared in The New York Times, Maine Antique Digest, Yankee Magazine, The Providence Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Art and Auction, and Harper's.
Interviews on TV and radio include NPR's "Tell Me More," with Jackie Leyden.
Book Tour talks 2010: The Museum of The City Of New York, Libraries, Athenaeums, Historical Societies, and Brown University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story by Maryalice Huggins, November 10, 2009

By 

Christina Bevilacqua (Providence RI, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story (Hardcover)

This book gives a wonderful and witty you-are-there look at the worlds of art, antiques and restoration, the auction business, and New England history. It's written with a breeziness that makes it fun to read and an honesty that can take you by surprise. More deeply, the author describes her voyage of philosophical discovery, tracing the trajectory of her obsession with an object to uncover what ultimately determines any object's "value". A great read - interesting, funny, informative, and iconoclastic.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I wish I had written this book!, November 19, 2009

By 

Donna Einhorn (Indianapolis, IN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story (Hardcover)

Let's face it, there haven't been many non-information driven books written about antiques and the people whose lives they touch. 'Aesop's Mirror' is worth having for those of us who regularly struggle with issues of provenance, authenticity and artistic attribution. It's a vicarious thrill that makes the telling of her manically thorough research project worthwhile.

The author - a restoration specialist and gilder - buys a very large (8.5 feet high) 19th century mirror at a Rhode Island auction in 1995. Based on preliminary research, she surmises it may have come from the estate of a well known Providence family, and the bulk of the story relates her extensive research of family records and interviews with descendants, hoping to find a link. 45 pages of historical fiction about the family in the 1870s is well written, and adds background to keep the book moving along.

A juicy little side story is the lambasting of Leigh Keno, as one of "a tight cabal of authorities who control the market". He is portrayed as a "ferociously ambitious" opportunist who buys a gem of a Classical dolphin sofa from Huggins for $50,000 (including her time and expenses to restore it) which he re-sells for more than three times that amount to the Detroit Institute of Art. This is almost ten times what she paid for it at a country auction, and no one else was biting at the time, but still she chafes at his fabulous profit. Her blunt candor about the experience would be a bridge-burning episode for most of us

The "love story" subtitle is a bit of hyperbole, although Huggins does wax poetic about how the carved figures on the mirror speak to her. Maybe I'm cynical but I'm unconvinced that she would have kept the mirror if she could have positively connected it to the Rhode Island family. But what the heck, it's a great read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Thinking Person's Bon-Bon, November 16, 2009

By 

Clarafy - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story (Hardcover)

I've bought too many books that, by page 30, were predictable examples of their category. Not so Aesop's Mirror. It jumps categories, pirouettes around expectations, and speaks in a voice at once knowing, witty, and snappy---a pinch of Dorothy Parker, a touch of the historian, a whiff of romance, politics, mystery, and suspense---and for me, a surprise finale! The book is at once profound and playful. It addresses Time itself. It describes in concrete terms what gives life, not only to objects but to oneself. I'll tell you no more. Whatever else you do don't miss this book. It is that very rare treasure: a one of a kind FIND!