Since we moved to New England, we have enjoyed antiquing on Sundays. The weekend, we returned to a huge shop we last visited about a year ago, Salt Marsh Antiques. I’d been looking for some tall vases for the top of a curio cabinet on the wall adjacent to our dining room. The cabinet, passed on by my mother-in-law, looked a little too petit in relationship to the high ceilings.
At Salt Marsh, I spotted some very tall French porcelain vases. The color worked really well with our gorgeous Persian rug (also from my mother-in-law) in the adjacent living room. The vases had been deaccessioned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but we made an offer and got them for a very reasonable price. I couldn’t wait to get them home and see how they looked in their new location. I couldn’t be more pleased.
In French, the word aliénation (al-e-ay-na-see-ohn) is the equivalent to the English word deaccession, or permanently removing items from a museum’s collection. If you think about a term like “inalienable rights,” rights that can’t be given away, the word aliénation makes perfect sense.
The Wrigtsman Galleries for French Decorative Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
One quality, the finest. 