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There is definitely a whiff of “if you need to ask the price you probably shouldn’t be there” about it at New York’s Winter Show.  Formerly the Winter Antiques Show this is a showplace for more than just billionaires.  Like just about everyone else in the global art and antiques market the organisers are making efforts to broaden their scope to attract new, younger, less wealthy collectors.  To spare the blushes of newcomers they have introduced an easy to read scale of coloured price tagging with legends like under $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 and so on.

The show reflects the current trend towards cross collecting and in the past two years contemporary design has been allowed in.

The leading art, antiques and design fair in America attracts a global audience to its Upper East Side location at the Park Avenue Armoury.  The focus is very much on quality and about 88% of what is on offer is antique.

Old Tiffany lamps and jewellery, magnificent English and American furniture and fine delftware rubs shoulders with ancient Egyptian art, Roman sculpture from the first century AD, Japanese art from the Edo period, Faberge,  Arts and Crafts, contemporary table lamps by Ayala Serfaty made of ceramic, glass tubing and polymer membrane, American art from Marsden Hartley to Basquiat and a series of miniatures by the American artist Maxine Helfman (born 1952) called “Forefathers” chronicling the 18 slave owning presidents of the US.  Objects on offer, all carefully vetted by an international committee to ensure that big buyers get exactly what it says on the tin, span more than 5,000 years from antiquity to contemporary photography.

The Winter Show is an annual benefit for the East Side House Settlement, a community based organisation serving The Bronx and North Manhattan.  The 2019 loan exhibition, Collecting Nantucket, Connecting the World, celebrates 125 years of collecting by the Nantucket Historical Association.  It presents the best the Association has to offer in painting, craft and folk arts. Nantucket, located off the north coast of Cape Cod, is known for its whaling heritage.  Among the items on display are the only surviving relics of the whaleship Essex whose destruction in 1820  by an angry whale inspired key aspects of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  This  year marks the 200th anniversary of Melville’s birth.  The Winter Show runs until January 27.