About
Max A Kaplan and Rebecca Hanbury-Aggs grew up attending auctions and frequenting antique shops from their earliest days. Max studied American decorative arts with material culture scholar Barbara Carson at the College of William and Mary and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Costume Studies from NYU. His formative experiences in the arts inspired a particular interest in studying and collecting American Folk Art. Rebecca received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she studied Psychology and Art History. Over the course of her studies, she developed an eye for European decorative arts and small landscape paintings and she has been collecting ever since.
Perfect Old Things grew out of a shared love for the process of collecting. Together, Max and Rebecca began building a collection of historically and aesthetically significant decorative art objects, antiques, and fine artworks– each sibling offering their specialized knowledge and keen eye to the process. Max and Rebecca hope that their curated offerings inspire others to become custodians of these artifacts and build their own collections over a lifetime. It must be noted that Perfect Old Things is first and foremost a meditative art practice for both siblings. Max and Rebecca view the arrangement of artifacts within the context of aesthetic collections. Similar to the process of creating fine art compositions, Max and Rebecca’s aim is to thoughtfully reflect their current aesthetic interests through the cultivation of a balanced and complementary seasonal collection of Perfect Old Things.