At auctions and galleries near the homes or on location for movie shoots, Mr. Merchant acquired pieces with shiny surfaces and lively, flared shapes.
What else is there left for Superman to do?" Away from his role as the man of steel, he portrayed a wide range of characters in films that included the love fantasy Somewhere In Time (1980); the thriller Death-trap (1982); Monsignor (1982), where, in the title role, he wore a cape again; and two Merchant-Ivory period pieces, The Bostonians (1984) and The Remains Of The Day (1993).
In 1873 the Dutch merchant Van Rijckevorsel gave the pieces he collected during a trip to Indonesia to the ethnographic museum in Rotterdam.
All I had to do to look put together really well was click on the links beneath the photos to go directly to the Web sites of the merchants selling the various pieces of my outfit.
If you've ever thought it would be romantic to purchase an eighteenth-century merchant vessel, read this piece first to make sure you have an accurate idea of just how much time you'll be spending fixing leaks and pumping bilge.
Founded around 1400 by a Malay-Hindu prince, Malacca, within a century, became Southeast Asia's most important trading port, luring an international cast of colonialists and merchants seeking a piece of the region's lucrative spice trade.
The result, based in part on letters to Fitzgerald from a real girl named Ginevra King, begins as retro chick lit and becomes, as Ginevra ages, more like a Merchant-Ivory period piece about a well-born woman's long fall from carefree grace.
Tall merchant houses alternated with blinkered pieces of modernism.
We will pass the next hour traipsing through the society archives, an expanse of four million books and journals and maps and weather charts, along with pieces collected by merchants in Azerbaijan, 18th-century traders plying the coast of Brazil and the Gobi desert of Mongolia, and fishermen bobbing in the swelling North Atlantic.
It's of a piece with those Merchant Ivory films set during the British Raj – their adaptations of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust and Shakespeare Wallah, and EM Forster's A Passage To India – that dramatised two cultures colliding, unequally, decorously and for the most part in suffocating good taste.
