Carlton Hobbs: A Carefully Cultivated Collection of 17th-19th Century Fine Arts and Antiquities

Since 1983, Carlton Hobbs LLC, Antiques and Fine Art, has served a discreet clientele of individual collectors and public and private institutions. The firm’s carefully curated gallery collection includes Continental and British pieces of distinguished provenance and merit from the 17th to 19th centuries. In addition to furniture, artwork, and sculpture, the gallery offers a full range of glass and decorative arts that includes mirrors and lighting.

Elaborately designed pieces currently featured on the gallery website include a pair of gilt-bronze late Louis XVI five-light candelabra, and a giltwood and opaline glass-painted lantern. Likely French in origin, the latter 19th century item is in an attractive geometric polygonal form. The opaline glass is painted with foliate patterns that derive from designs discovered in homes excavated in the mid-1700s. Those patterns had wide appeal among neoclassical applied arts designers of the following century.

A hallmark of Carlton’s approach to collecting involves intensive research, with a library encompassing several thousands of scholarly books, papers, and documents. The office and gallery are housed in a Upper East Side Manhattan Vanderbilt mansion, with pieces arranged in a museum-quality setting. Carlton Hobbs and longtime partner Stefanie Rinza take pride in unearthing “inscrutably obscure” pieces of high design content. Notable items recently displayed include a Russian strongbox set with (unloaded) pistols designed to go off when the box is not opened properly. Reflecting the idiosyncratic, handpicked nature of the collection, Carlton Hobbs at times acquires exceptional items of recent vintage, up through the 1960s.