2023 07 01TheMagazineAntiques

JULY/AUGUST 2023
Federal cherry tall case clock by Stephen Hasham

of Charlestown, New Hampshire, 1785 - 1810.
Height: 82 inches
Provenance: The Frederick and Susan Copeland Collection.

227 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011
212-628-7088 • bsdlinc@gmail.com
THE TILLINGHAST FAMILY PAIR OF

QUEEN ANNE SIDE CHAIRS
Possibly by John Goddard (1723/4-1785)
Newport, Rhode Island
Primary Wood: Walnut, Secondary Wood: Maple
Height: 37 1/4 inches Width: 20 1/2 inches Depth: 16 1/2 inches
Visit us on our website at www.levygalleries.com,

and Instagram/Facebook @levygalleries.
Gifford Beal, 1879–1956
Gulls in Moonlight, 1925
Oil on canvas
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6LJQHGDQGGDWHGORZHUULJKW*LIIRUG%HDO
Reuben Nakian, 1897-1986
Seal with Ball, 1930
Lifetime Bronze, dark brown patina
16 ¾ H x 11 ¾ W x 8 D inches
Signed on base: Nakian ‘30
Mounted to the original base bearing
the artist's studio label underneath
1 of only 2 lifetime casts (the other at

the Whitney Museum of Art, gifted by
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1931)
info@bgfa.com • 212-813-9797 • www.bgfa.com

View of New Brighton, Pennsylvania
Signed: J.O. Osborne/1850. Stunning landscape from across the Beaver River
looking toward the town of New Brighton. An extremely rare, early landscape
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Provenance: Descended in the McConnell family of New Brighton.
See us at the New Hampshire Antique Dealers Show

August 10-12 in Manchester, New Hampshire
www.kellykinzleantiques.com
(717) 495-3395
WE ARE ALWAYS INTERESTED IN PURCHASING
Austin T. Miller
americ an antiques, inc.
ATTRIBUTED TO L. W. CUSHING & SONS

(CUSHING & WHITE after 1872)
Running Fox Weathervane
Waltham, Massachusetts, circa 1867-1872
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10 ½ x 21 x 2 inches
We consider this model of running fox to be one of

the most beautiful of American weathervane forms,
and is also among the rarest. It is a delicate form
that nicely captures the animation and attitude of a
running fox.
Celebrating America austin@usfolkart.com | 614-395-8278

155 West Nationwide Blvd, Suite 175-A
www.usfolkart.com Columbus, Ohio 43215
David A. Schorsch Eileen M. Smiles
American~Antiques
358 Main Street South, Woodbury, CT 06798 • 203.982.7574
contact@schorsch-smiles.com • www.schorsch-smiles.com
Antiquarian Equities, Inc.
A fully developed sack-back Windsor armchair branded I • HENZEY with nine spindle back, knuckle arms, oval saddled
seat, and turnings characteristic of Joseph Henzey (1743-1796), Philadelphia, circa 1780, in outstanding condition
with beautifully worn dry brown paint. Height 38 1/2 inches.
An identical Henzey armchair is in the collection of Independence Hall.
JULY/AUGUST 2023
74 Clay, Water, and Spirit: An exhibition

of Pueblo pottery seeks to reveal the
soul that resides within the art
Laura Beach
18 EDITOR’S LETTER
Gregory Cerio
22 FIELD NOTES 82 Seamless Transition: An excerpt from

the book The New Antiquarians takes
Blind Spots us into the Maine home of a young
Elizabeth Pochoda clothing designer turned folk art
collector and dealer
24 CURRENT AND COMING

A self-taught artist in the internment camps, the
Michael Diaz-Griffith
sculpture of William Edmondson at Philadelphia’s

Barnes Foundation, and women of the Hudson River
school at the Thomas Cole House
90 Community Chest: Artist and artisan
Madeline Yale Wynne and the
founding of the Deerfield arts and
crafts movement
40 PERSONAL SPACE
One Artist’s Notes on Visiting an Art Fair Suzanne L. Flynt and Daniel S. Sousa
Laurene Krasny Brown
50 FACETS AND SETTINGS

Brooches as Books, Necklaces as Novellas: 100 From a Chain Gang to Art Museums:
Overcoming extraordinary adversity,
The narrative art jewelry of Barbara Paganin self-taught artist Winfred Rembert
Bella Neyman preserved his fraught past in words
and in startling images made of tooled
and painted leather
56 MUSEUM VISIT
David Ebony
Second Sight: The Intuit museum embodies Chicago’s
longstanding appreciation for self-taught and outsider art
Thomas Connors 106 Narratives in the Needlework:
Storytelling through quilts in the
collection of the American Folk
66 OBJECT LESSON Art Museum
A Blueprint for Early America: On Owen Biddle’s Emelie Gevalt and Sadé Ayorinde
1806 book The Young Carpenter’s Assistant
Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle
124 EVENTS
Sierra Holt
112 Making Faces: Federal American
Vernacular Portraits, 1790s to 1840s
Suzanne Rudnick Payne and Michael R. Payne
128 ENDNOTES
Making Choices
Eleanor H. Gustafson
Cover: Vase made by Lela (1895–1966) and Luther Gutierrez (1911–1987), c. 1963, from the Indian Arts Research Center, School for Advanced Research,
Santa Fe, New Mexico; Acoma jar with bird designs, early 1900s, from the collection of the Vilcek Foundation.
SHRUBSOLE
Antique Silver Jewelry
English Objets d’Art
American Gold Boxes
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An American Mixed-Metals “Saracenic” Coffee Pot

New York, c. 1882 by Tiffany & Co.
Height; 9 ¾”
Tiffany’s “Saracenic” style reached its full height at the time of the Paris
Exposition of 1889, when it merited Tiffany the grand prize, and saw the
genius of Edward C. Moore, Tiffany’s chief silver designer, recognized by
the French, who made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
Q U E S T R O YA L F I N E A RT, L L C
Important American Paintings
Paul Cornoyer (1864–1923)

Madison Square Garden at Night, 1912
Retail price: $47,500 Special price: $38,000
Joseph Pennell (1860–1926)

Returning from Staten Island (View of Lower Manhattan)
Henry Martin Gasser (1909–1981)

Sand, Sea, and Rocks
Irving Ramsay Wiles (1861–1948)

Paddle Wheeler and Schooner on the River, 1916
REQUEST THE SALE CATALOGUE

and visit www.questroyalfineart.com/special to see all of the paintings offered.
THE SPECIAL SALE June 8 – September 1, 2023
Over 150 important

paintings discounted
up to 50%
It has been our long-standing

tradition to offer about one third of
our inventory in a summer sale to
prepare for our continued acquisition
of exceptional American paintings.
For three decades, we have strived
to own the paintings we sell.
Commitment proves conviction,
perfects connoisseurship, and
has earned us the trust required to
sell to many of the nation’s most
important museums and collectors.
Louis M. Salerno, Owner
Fairfield Porter (1907–1975)

Broadway South of Union Square, New York
Q U E S T R O YA L F I N E A RT, L LC
Important American Paintings
903 Park Avenue (at 79th Street), Third Floor, New York, NY 10075 T: (212) 744-3586 F: (212) 585-3828
HOURS: Monday–Friday 10–6, Saturday 10–5 and by appointment
E MA I L : gallery @ questroyalfineart.com www.questroyalfineart.com
ASTOR HOUSE HOTEL
New York
Circa 1850
Oil on Canvas
39 ¼” H x 49 ½ ” W
New York, New York
NEW YORK SIDEBOARD, New York, Circa 1790-1810,

Mahogany and Walnut with Poplar Secondary, 42 ¾” x 72 x 28 ½”
116 W. Washington Street, Middleburg, VA 20117 • (270) 404-1558 • Taylor@thistleamericana.com

www.thistleamericana.com
RO B E RT H E N R I
(1865‒1929)
Sarah B, 1924, oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in.
Debra Force F I N E A RT , I N C .
13 EAST 69TH STREET SUITE 4F NEW YORK 10021 TEL 212.734.3636 WWW.DEBRAFORCE.COM
Editor Gregory Cerio
Art Director Martin Minerva
Senior Editor/Digital Media Producer Sammy Dalati
Digital Manager/Editorial Research Associate Sarah Bilotta
Consulting Editor Eleanor H. Gustafson
Editor at Large Elizabeth Pochoda
Digital Media and Editorial Associate Sierra Holt
Contributing Editors Glenn Adamson,

James Gardner, Barrymore Laurence Scherer,
Brian Allen, Michael Diaz-Griffith
Publisher Don Sparacin

Special Consultant for Educational Initiatives Lisa Koenigsberg
Production Director LR Production + Design
Board of Advisors
Richard T. Sharp, Chairman
Daniel K. Ackermann Margize Howell
Austen Barron Bailly Thomas Jayne
Bruce Barnes Eve M. Kahn
Laura Beach Patricia E. Kane
Sarah Coffin Peter M. Kenny
Mack Cox Alexandra A. Kirtley
Elizabeth M. Kornhauser
William Cullum
Robert A. Leath
Joseph Cunningham
Robert McCracken Peck
Pieter Estersohn Valérie Rousseau
Linda S. Ferber Tom Savage
John Stuart Gordon Elizabeth Stillinger
Leslie B. Grigsby Kevin W. Tucker
Ralph Harvard Gerald W. R. Ward
Stacy C. Hollander Philip Zea
Editorial inquiries: 1867 66th Street, #2, Brooklyn, NY 11204
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DCA LIC #0016371
Antique Jewelry ~ Silver ~ Objets ~ Porcelain ~ Glass ~ Handmade Sterling Flatware

AMERICAN PAINTINGS WANTED
ESTATES & COLLECTIONS
Celebrating 40 Years of Buying and Selling Fine American Art
The gallery is actively buying and consigning complete art collections & fine American paintings.
We specialize in American Fine Art with a focus on the Pennsylvania Impressionists, The Philadelphia Ten,
and students from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Fern Isabel Coppedge, Snowy Countryside, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Offering ART CONSERVATION SERVICES since 1984
Before & after images: Portrait of Sarah Keene, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches, Attr. to Jacob Eichholtz
5230 Silo Hill Road, Doylestown, PA 18902 / Tel: 215.348.2500

Hours: Wednesday through Saturday 10 - 6, Sunday 12 - 6, and by appointment
www.gratzgallery.com / email: pgratz@gratzgallery.com
EXCEPTIONAL AND RARE, FRANKLIN, CONNECTICUT
SOLIDLY STITCHED NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER
Dated 1803, worked by 12 year old Anna Huntington at Rev. Samuel Nott’s school.
Only two other samplers from this school are known, one in The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the other in a private collection. 16 1/8 x 15 ¼ inches sight.
Visit our website for more complete information.
ALWAYS INTERESTED IN PURCHASING FINE NEEDLEWORK
www.antiquesamplers.com
Forty Ferry Road YOld Saybrook, Connecticut 06475 YTel: 860.388.6809Yhubers@antiquesamplers.com
EDITOR’S LETTER
O
ne of my duties as editor of this maga-
zine is to attend numerous art and
antiques fairs throughout the year. If
that sounds more like a perk than a duty, I’ll
have you know that I go to these events not
to sightsee but to work—I look for ideas for
articles; visit with exhibitors who are or might
become advertisers; talk with subscribers, and
gently lobby potential new ones.
All that said, I won’t pretend it’s a hardship.
The opening night parties at the larger fairs
can be quite entertaining. For example, the
Winter Show opening gala at the Park Avenue Armory in New
York is a fun and chatty event that also manifests the elegance
and sophistication that make the city and its residents unique.
People watching on such nights is absolutely a perk of my job.
Still, the opportunity to learn is what makes a visit to the
fairs truly worthwhile. You have proximity to a huge swath of
compelling art of all types—much of it, at the top-flight shows,
extraordinary—in a relatively compact space, and with direct
access to art professionals who are happy to share their exper- have appeared in a more rarified show. One, presented by
tise. At a museum, you can’t just summon up a curator when Susan Wechsler of South Road Antiques, was a massive chunk
you have questions—unless, I suppose, a wing of the building of coal—about a foot-and-a-half tall and a foot wide—that
is named after you—but at an art fair you can get a rich educa- had been carved on four sides with images that included a
tion for the price of admission. nude, two portraits, and a tree. I’d never seen the like. (Note to
Later on in these pages you’ll hear from artist Laurene the American Folk Art Museum: buy this.) The other piece was
Krasny Brown on her approach to attending art and antiques offered by Adam Irish of the Providence, Rhode Island, gallery
fairs. In May she and I took in the New York edition of the fair Old as Adam. You may recall that Adam wrote for us in January
presented by the European Fine Art Foundation at the Armory. 2022 about a new class of young antiques dealers who special-
TEFAF, with its preponderance of exhibitors from around the ize in objects that are unintentionally works of art. It was such a
world, is perhaps the most cosmopolitan of shows on the thing that caught my eye: what I thought was a stylized metal
circuit, and it was intriguing to experience the fair through sculpture of an owl’s head was, in fact, a late eighteenth- or
Laurie’s eyes. She goes not only to learn about the art, but early nineteenth-century swage block—a tool used by black-
to learn from it—to see how other artists have worked, and smiths to shape beaten metal.
perhaps discover ways their art might influence her own art Later this summer I plan to attend two events in
making. Plus, she enjoys the people watching. Manchester, New Hampshire, that are among my best loved:
For all the splendors and fascinations they hold, art and the show organized by the New Hampshire Antiques Dealers
antiques fairs like the Winter Show and TEFAF, I must confess, Association—which, though it is held in a hotel event space
are not my favorites. I prefer small regional shows, where off- that features the most hideous carpet ever devised, has
beat and uncategorizable art and objects can be found—and, otherwise everything to recommend it—and the engaging
not incidentally, at a price point Antiques in Manchester fair, held at St. Anselm’s College. Folk
I might be able to afford. Over art and early American furniture are the focus at both of these
the Memorial Day weekend showcases, and I always look forward to the warm spirit of
I spent time at a fair I always humanity that surrounds such works of art. In Manchester, it’s
enjoy: the Spring Antiques at as thick as fog. See you there.
Rhinebeck show in upstate
New York. On this page you’ll
see two strange and wonder-
ful things that I came across,
neither of which would likely
Lyrical Spirit: The Natural World of Joseph Stella
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Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Portrait of Grace, 1944

Oil on canvas, 23 x 20 inches (58.4 x 50.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Joseph Stella / 1944
Signed on verso: Joseph Stella
ϭϬϬ,dtzEZ/s͕ZzEDtZ͕WϭϵϬϭϬΈϲϭϬΉϴϵϲͳϬϲϴϬttt͘sZz'>>Z/^͘KD
Douglas Stock Gallery
One of America’s most selective dealers in antique Oriental rugs
An exceptional antique Persian Heriz “Serapi” carpet, circa 1885. Size: 8’6” x 10’5”
Douglas Stock Gallery • Helen and Douglas Stock

21 Eliot Street, South Natick, Massachusetts 01760
(781) 205-9817 • douglas@douglasstockgallery.com
douglasstockgallery.com
July/August 2023 Index of Advertisers
Antique in Manchester............................................................67
Avery Galleries.........................................................................19
Austin T. Miller American Antiques.........................................6
Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts....................................................2-3
Bonhams Skinner....................................................................43
Copley Fine Art Auctions........................................................59
David A. Schorsch & Eileen M. Smiles.....................................7
Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. ........................................................13
Douglas Stock Gallery.............................................................20
Elle Shushan............................................................................25
Gratz Gallery...........................................................................16
Grogan & Co. Auctioneers.......................................................47
Gruyette & Deeter.…...................................................……...55
Heart-o-the-Mart...............................................................125
Historic New England.............................................................38
International Society of Appraisers...........................................37
James L. Kochan.......................................................................31
James Robinson, Inc. ..............................................................15
Jeff Bridgeman.................................................................Cover 4
Jeffrey S. Evans........................................................................49
Jeffrey Tillou Antiques.............................................................21
Jenness Cortez Studio & Gallery.............................................29
Kelly Kinzle Antiques.................................................................5
Levy Galleries............................................................................1
Lillian Nassau............................................................................4
M. Finkel and Daughter...........................................................27
Michael Diaz Griffith...............................................................41
Nantucket Antiques Show........................................................63
Nantucket by Design...............................................................65
Nathan Liverant and Son Antiques....................................Cover 2
New Hampshire Antique Dealers Show...................................69
The Newport Antiques Show...................................................127
Olde Hope Antiques................................................................14
Pook & Pook...........................................................................45
Questroyal Fine Art............................................................10-11
R. Jorgensen............................................................................33
Royal Oak................................................................................61
Ruby Lane...............................................................................39 Rare Chippendale Carved Wall Sconce, English or American, ca. 1780.
S.J. Shrubsole.............................................................................9 Carved giltwood, brass bobeches. Over-all in fine condition, minor shrinkage
Santa Fe Art Auction................................................................71 cracks and repairs to the eagle’s ankles. Replaced candle cups. Provenance:
Spencer Marks Ltd. .........................................................Cover 3 The Kindig Collection, Sotheby’s, New York. This fine and rare Chippendale
Stephen and Carol Huber.......................................................17
carved double-armed wall sconce with an urn-form floral motif center section
flanked by scrolled candle arms is surmounted with an eagle resting on a
Steve Elmore Gallery................................................................35
plinth. The gilt appears to be 19th c. over the original gilt. 28”h, 15 ¾”w.
Thistlethwaite Americana..…....................................……..….12
Thomaston Place Auction Galleries...........................................53

On the Green in Litchfield, Connecticut | 860.567.9693 | www.tillouantiques.com
Vilcek Foundation...................................................................72
Field notes
Blind Spots
W
hen this magazine’s annual issue dedicated to (as opposed to those made for display) a masterful work.
folk and self-taught art rolls around, I am re- Robert is not a decoy specialist he says, but he has a
minded of how much I enjoy the field—not just keen eye and a passionate appreciation for the working
for its utterly unexpected treasures like a James Castle ducks. As I trotted along after him at the Winter Show
scene done in soot and the artist’s saliva, but equally for one evening he tossed back some pungent observations,
those more familiar works that unite beauty to utility which he later repeated while cautioning me that there
the way an eighteenth-century whitework quilt can. I’m was a lot more to know. “The great ones,” he said, refer-
not suggesting that this kind of folk art constitutes some ring to working duck decoys made to deceive their live
kind of comfort zone; I am simply drawn to works that brethren, “weren’t made for our eye. You feel the life in
run against the art world’s tacit notion that utility dis- them, they capture the spirit of the bird, and that has
qualifies a work from consideration as art. Is it necessary nothing to do with verisimilitude. You can feel it.”
to point out, as the philosopher Arthur Danto once He had more to say but I wanted to experience that
puckishly did, that a fine artist can depict a beautiful spirit for myself so I set off knowing it was not to be
paint-decorated blanket chest but be incapable of mak- found in books or in Decoy Magazine (a bi-monthly
ing one? I think it is. publication). Jon Deeter of Guyette and Deeter, dealers
Having said this, I must now confess to secretly har- in decoys among other things, confirmed Robert
boring two embarrassing blind spots. Both are stellar Young’s sense that a perfect likeness is not at all what
examples of art joined to utility, and both are forms makes a perfect decoy. He gave me a very brief his-
brought to perfection by American artisans, and yet I tory of the field and urged me to value what my eye
have long ignored both duck decoys and weathervanes was drawn to. Eventually I did just that when I spotted
while trying not to erect my ignorance into a matter of the photo of an eider decoy with a mussel in its beak
pride or, in the case of decoys, disguise it as an aversion by Gus Wilson, a Maine lighthouse keeper and a
to hunting. In 2015, when I heard that a duck decoy carver known to all who know the field. One look at
brought $1.1 million at auction, I thought it was time I this smug old duck and I was certain that if I made a
had a course correction, so I called David Esterly (1944– sudden move he’d be off, his treasure tucked tightly in
2019), the brilliant master carver who replaced the his bill. I will leave the finer points of connoisseurship,
Grinling Gibbons carving at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court of paint and finish and balance to the experts, happy
Palace destroyed by fire. “I don’t get it either,” David re- enough with my first baby step toward the animating
plied, adding that, like me, he’d never really given the spirit that delights so many, and wishing David Esterly
decoy much attention. Secretly, I felt confirmed. were still here to share my discovery. I’m sure he, too,
It was not until I confessed my decoy prejudice to my would see the light.
friend the English folk art dealer Robert Young that my When it comes to weathervanes you don’t need one
head was turned around. Robert was not surprised that to know which way the wind blows, but it helps to have
David Esterly hadn’t seen what makes a working decoy a friend like Patrick Bell of Olde Hope Antiques willing
22 ANTIQUES themagazineantiques.com
By Elizabeth Pochoda
to waste a beautiful spring morning tutoring a dunce delight sparked a conversation about mules, about
at his Manhattan gallery. Was I suspicious that most of Missouri—where both Pat and I have family roots—and,
the great vanes were factory made and thus perhaps most amusingly of all, occasioned Pat’s description of
not exactly folk art? I was, but Pat, ready for that, ex- the animal husbandry that goes into the making of an
plained the amount of handwork and the several steps actual mule!
of production that went into the making of vintage Perhaps you have noticed that these two anecdotes
weathervanes. From there we went on to examine a come from a person who finds the world of tangible
few examples in the gallery, and here I can only character- objects almost as alluring as the conversations they can
ize his attention to surface, wear, movement, and rarity inspire—those moments of repose in a volatile, virtual
as meticulous. Can passion be meticulous? Oh, yes. world. That’s what the field of folk art, and of antiques
As we paged through Robert Shaw’s American Weath- in general, has given me. You can’t digitize that.
ervanes: The Art of the Winds, I began to see that there
was a great deal of valuable social history to be gathered
from the vanes for an enterprising scholar willing to dig
it out. I also noted that the many impressive weather-
vanes featuring Native Americans that are now more or
less out of favor also await an important study, one that
can join Native American scholars, tribal elders, and folk
art specialists to bring some historical grounding and
sanity to the matter. Already happy that I’d come here,
I was now much more so.
Did I learn to look at the vanes? To some extent,
yes, but did I lust after one of my own? Not re-
ally, and I was content to leave it at that
until I turned one more page of the book
and spied a mule weathervane that
really delighted me for putting
that beast of burden atop
a rod instead of at the
mercy of one. My
Eider drake by Augustus “Gus”

Wilson (1864–1950), c. 1900–
c. 1925. The neck, head, and
mussel clutched in the beak are
all carved from a single piece of
wood. Photograph courtesy of
Guyette and Deeter, Inc.
Mule weathervane, American,

c. 1890. Photograph courtesy
of Olde Hope Antiques.
Indian weathervane, American,

c. 1880. Olde Hope Antiques
photograph.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 ANTIQUES 23

Current and coming
T he sculptor William Edmondson is simultaneously one of

the most famous and one of the least known members of
the pantheon of great American self-taught artists. Born in rural
Tennessee in 1874, on the same plantation where his parents
were once enslaved, he had lived a modest and
William unremarkable life—working variously as a race-
Edmondson horse groom, on the railroad, and as a Nashville
hospital orderly—until 1931. Edmondson
at the Barnes offered little explanation why then, at the age of
fifty-seven, he raised a sign advertising “Tombstones and Garden
Ornaments”at his Nashville home and began to sculpt angels, ani-
mals, and Biblical characters from blocks of limestone, other than
to say he was answering a call from the divine. “Jesus has planted
the seed of carving in me. I was out in the driveway with some old
pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools
and start to work on a tombstone. . . . He hung a tombstone out for
me to make . . . then he told me to cut figures,” Edmondson told a
reporter in 1937.
That was the year Edmondson and his art came to wide public
notice, in comparatively spectacular fashion: as the subject of an of Edmondson’s work, reassesses his art on its own terms.
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Word of Edmondson emerges as an artist of complex motivations, whose
Edmondson’s creations had spread among academics and others creative expression derived not only from deeply held religious
in Nashville cultural circles, and eventually reached the ears of beliefs, but also from immemorial communal traditions and the
Alfred Barr, MoMA’s director. The Edmondson show has become facts of life as a Black man in the era of Jim Crow. Confronted with
famous as a watershed curatorial moment—the museum’s first “racial biases, and poverty, and denied the opportunity to obtain
solo show for a Black artist, as well as its first exhibition of a self- an education at the most foundational level, William Edmondson
taught artist. But what’s less remembered is the critical response transcended these harsh systemic realities,” art historian Leslie
to it, which can be described as appreciative condescension. King Hammond notes in the exhibition catalogue. “He was an art-
Edmondson was a “find” and a “discovery”; his work was “naïve” ist empowered by unwavering faith, epiphanies, and acute artistic
and “primitive” and marked by a charming “simplicity.” (In its sensibilities to stealthily navigate strategies of divine revelation,
reportage, Time magazine’s attempt to re-create Edmondson’s indomitable resilience, and resistance.”
southern diction is particularly cringe-worthy.)
Views have evolved over the decades. A new exhibition at William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision • Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia • to
the Barnes Foundation, which presents some sixty examples September 10 • barnesfoundation.org
Mermaid by William
Edmondson (1874–1951),
c. 1932–1941. Collection of
Dr. Robert and Katharine
Booth; photograph courtesy
of the Barnes Foundation,
Philadelphia.
William Edmondson by Louise
Dahl-Wolfe (1895–1989),
1937. Cheekwood Estate and
Gardens, Nashville, Tennessee;
photograph © Center for
Creative Photography, Arizona
Board of Regents, Tucson,
courtesy of the Barnes
Foundation.
actual size
Caribbean School, circa 1820

See: Miniatures in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,
London, 1950, illustrated, plate 125.
FINE PORTRAIT MINIATURES
www.PortraitMiniatures.com
Current and coming
While incarcerated, Fujii began to keep an illustrated

diary, which would end up nearly four hundred pages in
length by the time the camp closed in 1945. Along with
it, Fujii painted some 130 watercolors—a visual record of
a dark period in American history that still has resonance
today. These begin with the depiction of Japanese in
Seattle staring at a copy of Order 9066 pasted to a tele-
phone pole, and move on to include scenes of life in the
dusty, windblown encampment, as well as wistful views
of the world beyond the barbed wire.
The internment camp watercolors form the bulk of
the eighty-two artworks on view in the traveling exhi-
bition Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi
Fujii, curated by Barbara Johns, the author of The Hope
of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime
Witness. The show is now on view at the Morikami
Museum and Japanese Gardens, located a few miles
inland from downtown Delray Beach, Florida—a
contemplative oasis of culture amid the surrounding
landscape of strip malls and retirement communities.
A member of the first group of Japanese who, starting
in the late nineteenth century, immigrated to the
United States—known as the Issei generation—Takuichi Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii • Morikami
Fujii left his childhood home in Hiroshima for Museum and Japanese Gardens, Delray Beach, Florida • to October 6
Art and Executive Seattle in 1906 at age fifteen and eventually • morikami.org
Order 9066 started a business as a fish seller. At some

point and apparently without training—
beyond the tutelage in ink-and-brushwork that most
every Japanese grade schooler receives—Fujii took
up painting and drawing. His artwork first appeared in
public in 1930 as an entry in the Seattle Art Museum’s
juried Northwest Annual exhibition. Fujii painted in
the loose realist style associated with the artists of the
American regionalist school, in watercolor mainly and
occasionally oil. His work appeared regularly in the SAM
shows throughout the 1930s and in group exhibitions as
far afield as San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. In the
middle of the decade, SAM’s director even considered
Minidoka, “This area’s famous giving Fujii a solo show.
phenomenon of the sandstorm
can make even the day dark. Fujii’s work appeared in the Northwest Annual
It is really something” by of 1941, which closed in November. A month later
Takuichi Fujii (1891–1964),
1940s. Collection of Sandy and came Pearl Harbor, and soon after followed Franklin
Terry Kita; photograph courtesy Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, directing all those
of the Morikami Museum and
Japanese Gardens, Delray of Japanese descent living on the West Coast to report
Beach, Florida. for relocation as a wartime security measure. Fujii
Seattle, exclusion orders and his family would eventually end up among some
addressed to “all persons of
Japanese ancestry, both alien thirteen thousand people held at a camp in Minidoka,
and non-alien” by Fujii, 1940s. Idaho. (Another internee at Minidoka was architect and
Kita collection; Morikami
Museum and Japanese future studio furniture master George Nakashima, who
Gardens photograph. learned traditional woodworking while there.)
Current and coming
on view at the Cole site: Susie Barstow and Her Circle—

the first retrospective look at the life and work of a
well-known and much-admired member of the sec-
ond generation of Hudson River school artists whose
name virtually disappeared from the conversation
about the art of the style and period.
Of the family of a well-to-do New York tea merchant,
Barstow had artistic aspirations from a young age. She
studied at the Rutgers Female Institute—the first col-
lege for women in New York City—and at the Cooper
Union. She painted landscapes, the prestige genre
of the time, and in pursuit of subject matter would
become an indefatigable hiker, trekking across moun-
tainsides from the Adirondacks to the Alps. (One of the
exhibition’s more amusing sidelights is an annotated
period diagram of an ankle-length “ladies’ walking
dress,” which incorporated a sort of pulley system for
raising the hemline when traversing rough ground.)
Landscape by Susie M. Barstow (1836–1923), 1865. Collection of Betsy and Al Scott.

Except as noted, photographs courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site,
Catskill, New York.
Early October near Lake Squam by Barstow, 1886. Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon
Valley College Fine Art Collection, Lebanon, Pennsylvania; photograph by Andrew Bale.
T he Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark 1987

exhibition American Paradise: The World of the
Hudson River School marked, in the words of the New
York Times, “the full rehabilitation of
Women take the Hudson River School, a style that
was dominant in the art world until
the stage at the the 1870s and was then largely forgot-
Thomas Cole House ten” until well into the twentieth cen-
tury. But that show and its catalogue
famously—or perhaps infamously—failed to include
the work of even a single woman artist of the Hudson
River school, of whom there were many—and not a
few of them were as skilled, talented, and respected in
their day as their male counterparts.
Curators and art historians have sought to redress
that omission ever since. A significant salvo in the
effort was fired in 2010 at the Thomas Cole National
Historic Site in Catskill, New York, with the exhibi-
tion Remember the Ladies: Women of the Hudson River
School, co-curated by Nancy Siegel and Jennifer
Kreiger. Now comes Siegel with a new show, currently
28 ANTIQUES
JENNESS CORTEZ

“Charisma” © by Jenness Cortez, acrylic on 20” by 15” mahogany panel

In this painting I pay homage to Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) by depicting his imposing portrait of “Napoleon at the
Saint Bernard Pass” 1801. The original David is in the permanent collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Jenness Cortez
Private Commissions Accepted • Studio and Gallery • Averill Park, NY • Tel. (518) 674-8711

Current and coming
Painting en plein air or in her Brooklyn studio,

Barstow followed the Hudson River school model
of romanticized depictions of the land. One of her
favorite compositional strategies was the “cathedral in
the forest” approach—with sun- or moonlight seen in
the distance through an avenue of overarching trees.
The exhibition—mounted in the New Studio, a recon-
struction of the small building Thomas Cole designed
for himself in 1846, after painting for years in a section
of a storehouse—charts the evolution of her style.
Through study trips to France, Barstow absorbed the
influence of the more realistic landscapes painted by
the artists of the Barbizon school, and later, toward
the turn of the twentieth century, her paintings began
to evince something of the looser brushwork seen in consideration of late. Eliza Pratt Greatorex was the sub-
the work of the American impressionists. ject of a recent monograph by art historian Katherine
Throughout her career, Barstow’s work was regu- Manthorne; Fidelia Bridges’s work was included in
larly exhibited, and she enjoyed both strong patronage an important survey of nineteenth-century women
and accolades from newspapers such as the Brooklyn watercolorists at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
Daily Eagle, which described her as “a woman of keen 2017. But others in the current show deserve more
intellectual attainments” and “one of the best-known attention, among them Julie Hart Beers, an accom-
Brooklyn artists.” That Barstow fell off the art-historical plished landscape artist who took frequent painting
map seems inexplicable, and it is the goal of the pres- trips in the Catskills with Barstow, and Mary Josephine
ent exhibition to resuscitate not only her reputation, Walters, a student of Asher Durand who was embarked
but also that of several of her contemporaries. Some of on a promising career as a painter of intimate wood-
those with paintings on view have received renewed land scenes when she died prematurely at age forty-six.
Woodland Stream by
Julie Hart Beers
(1835–1913), 1877.
Private collection;
photograph courtesy
of Hawthorne Fine
Art, New York.
Barstow in a photo-
graph of about 1870.
Private collection;
photograph by
Dennis DeHart.
JAMES L. KOCHAN
Celebrating 25 years of service in the building of important public and private collections.
AMERICAN SCHOOL, c. 1805

Major Jonathan Cass (detail)
oil on panel, 29.75 x 23.25 inches, within original, black painted frame
ass responded to the exington larm in 775, ghting at nker ill and s bse entl recei ing a commission as an o cer in the ew ampshire
ontinental ine, ghting in n mero s actions thro gh the entire e ol tionar ar one of which is depicted in the backgro nd , incl ding renton,
rinceton, rand wine, ermantown, onmo th and the siege of orktown. fo nding member of the ew ampshire ociet of the incinnati, he left
his home in xeter to ret rn to militar ser ice as a captain in the rm in 79 , ser ing with distinction in nthon a ne s ndian campaigns, d ring
which he was promoted to ma or in 793. e resigned in and settled with his famil on acres of militar bo nt land in the sking m alle
of present da hio. ccording to one contemporar , ass had the look of one born to command, in height he was nearl or ite six feet, of perfect
form, witho t s per o s esh, piercing e es, and commanding brow , all of which are capt red in this colorf l portrait, probabl painted in hio or
possibl ew ampshire b an nidenti ed, itinerant artist.
www.jameskochan.com 207-687-8165 james.kochan58@outlook.com
Exhibiting at Antiques in Manchester, 9-10 August 2023

Current and coming
Susie Barstow and Her Circle is but one half Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow and Her Circle
of the current exhibition program at the Cole and Contemporary Practices • Thomas Cole National Historic Site,
site, which has the umbrella title Women Catskill, New York • to October 29 • thomascole.org
Reframe American Landscape. The other sec-
tion, called Contemporary Practices, is mounted Winter Passage by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee; 1935–), 2017. Photograph
in the main house at the Cole site and in the courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York.
Old Studio building, and presents the work of Spring, from Wendy Red Star’s (Apsáalooke/Crow; 1981–) polyptych Four
Seasons, 2006. Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown; photo-
twelve women artists along with that of the graph courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York.
arts collective Guerrilla Girls. In comparison to
the relatively tranquil art on view in the New
Studio, the commentaries and critiques the
contemporary artists make on environmental,
social, and cultural issues are bracingly forth-
right. Of particular note are an installation by
Teresita Fernández—comprised of a hand-
drawn charcoal mural and the twelve panels
of her ink-and-pencil Small American Fires 3
group (2016)—and Kay WalkingStick’s affect-
ing Winter Passage, a large oil-on-panel vista of
the Sierra Nevada mountains marked by a pat-
tern of motifs used in Paiute basketmaking—a
subtle reminder that, in the artist’s words, “we
are all living on Indian land, every one of us.”
Women Reframe American Landscape is
accompanied by a catalogue published
by Hirmer. The exhibition will be on view
at the New Britain Museum of American
Art in Connecticut from November 16 to
March 31, 2024.
R. Jorgensen FINE PERIOD ANTIQUES
Open 10am - 5pm • Sunday 12pm - 5pm
502 Post Road, US Route 1, Wells, ME 04090
(207) 646-0444 • Fax (207) 646-4954
www.rjorgensen.com
END GAME
My sister Pam and I have been passionately doing the antiques business for almost
50 years.
As I’ve always said to clients, “After you do the 10,000 hour thing so you actually
know what you’re doing, it becomes an endless treasure hunt.”
I remember at the beginning, going to auctions and taking apart thousands of things
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[GCTUQNF
WRVQCDQWVtRTGKPFWUVTKCNTGXQNWVKQPCEVWCNN[NQQMNKMG
correct tool marks, oxidation, shrinkage, style, brass type, lock type, etc. All backed
up by running our work shop for about 16 years.
It’s been such an exciting business that has taken us all over the world.
About a month ago, I asked my sister if she would like to list the place for sale, and
she immediately said, “Yes.” (She’s usually ahead of me.)
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Soooo...
Everyone that comes into the shop now that seems to show interest, I tell them our
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anything to make me an offer.
6JGTGJCXGDGGPCPWODGTQHXGT[JCRR[RGQRNG
I hope to see you soon.
With pleasure,
Ric and Pam
Current and coming
R eaders of this magazine

will remember design his-
torian Sarah Coffin’s 2022 fea-
ture article on art nouveau
architect-designer
Hector Guimard, Hector Guimard
Architecte d’art, and his wife, artist
Adeline—a sneak
at the Driehaus peek at the travel-
ing exhibition Hector Guimard:
Art Nouveau to Modernism, the
first stateside retrospective on
Guimard’s prodigious output
in more than six decades. The
show has arrived at Chicago’s
Driehaus Museum, with some
one hundred pieces of fur-
niture, jewelry, metalwork,
ceramics, drawings, and textiles
dating from the Belle Époque and interwar period Guimard’s big break—and the project for which
taking their place among the Gilded Age appoint- he is best known today—came in 1900, when on the
ments of the 1883 Samuel S. Nickerson House, home occasion of that year’s Exposition Universelle he was
of the Driehaus. commissioned to design new entryways for the Paris
Guimard was born in Lyon, France, the son of an subway. A keen and inventive self-promoter, Guimard
orthopedist and a maid. Accepted to the prestigious parlayed his newfound fame into partnerships with
École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as a teen- the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, the Saint-Dizier
ager, he displayed little interest in schooling, and in Foundries (for works in cast iron), and Langlois (for
1888 opened an architectural firm despite having glass-pendant lamps and light fixtures). Within a few
no professional experience in the field. A socialist, years, he also wooed and wed Adeline Oppenheim, a
Guimard advocated for design reforms that painter from a wealthy American family, for whom he
would simplify the building process, an inter- built his magnum opus, the Hôtel Guimard, a four-story
Hector Guimard (1867– town house and showroom in the 16th arrondissement.
1942) in a photograph
est that attracted him to the work of Gothic
of about 1900. New York revivalist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,
Public Library, Adeline
Oppenheim Guimard
as well as to the British designer Christopher
papers. Dresser, who combined mass-market mate-
Hôtel Guimard at 122 rials, such as cast iron and wall coverings,
Avenue Mozart, Paris, with a biomorphic aesthetic developed from
built 1909–1912.
Photograph by Paris 16 his studies in botany. Guimard adopted the
on Wikimedia Commons. naturalistic idiom for his art nouveau mas-
Entrance panel for the terpiece the Castel Beranger, built between
Paris Métro, designed by
Guimard, 1900. Richard 1895 and 1897, for which he designed
H. Driehaus Museum, everything in the house, from wallpapers to
Chicago, Illinois.
elements in Lincrusta, the embossed paper-
and-linseed-oil wall covering developed in
part by Dresser.
Nampeyo and Fannie:
Two American Modernists
Opening Friday, August 11th
Reception 4pm to 7pm
Nampeyo (1856–1942)
Storage Jar with Eagle Tail and Talon Design, circa 1900
Nampeyo (1856–1942) and Fannie (1900–1987)

Storage Jar with Migration Design Variation, circa 1925
839 Paseo de Peralta, Suite M • Santa Fe, NM 87501

(505) 995-9677
elmoreindianart.com
Current and coming
Art nouveau was on the wane Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino row-

by 1910, plowed under by the house system. The Guimards left the
nascent art deco style. Following country during the buildup to World
World War I, Guimard turned his War II, settling in New York, where
attention to affordable housing Guimard would die, almost forgotten,
designs, and founded the com- four years later.
pany Standard-Construction in Adeline spent the next quarter
1921 to investigate options for century securing his legacy with the
prefabricated buildings made of help of Museum of Modern Art director
wood, reinforced concrete, and Alfred H. Barr Jr., placing objects related
steel. Although he applied for to her husband’s career in stateside
eleven patents—for a paneled roofing academic libraries and museums such as the
system, blocks of interlocking composite stone, Cooper Hewitt and MoMA. The present exhibition thus
and wooden construction scaf- represents a reunion, of sorts, for long-ago dispersed
folds, among other inventions— objects such as a model for Madame Guimard’s gold
Guimard found little success, engagement ring and a sinuous pear wood, leather,
his efforts outshone by other and brass side chair, which would have given evidence
mass-production innova- of Hector Guimard’s all-encompassing design sense to
tions of the period such as anyone who visited his home.
Hector Guimard: Art Nouveau

to Modernism • Richard H.
Driehaus Museum,
Chicago • to November 5 •
driehausmuseum.org
Lustre Lumière hanging lamp

designed by Guimard, c. 1912.
Richard H. Driehaus Museum.
Model of Adeline Oppenheim
Guimard’s engagement ring,
designed by Hector Guimard,
c. 1909. Museum of Modern Art,
gift of Laurent Oppenheim Jr.
Armchair designed by Guimard,
c. 1899–1900. Museum of
Modern Art, New York, gift of
Mme. Hector Guimard.
Priceless
isn’t a
value...
Find out what it’s really worth. Every treasured possession

deserves an accurate evaluation from an expert who has
been trained according to the most exacting standards
in the apprasial industry. Look to the International Society
of Appraisers to find the perfect appraiser to value your
collection or to discover the pathway to becoming a
qualified appraiser yourself.
WWW.ISA-APPRAISERS.ORG
Current and coming
Discover and Explore
This is
your life,
Frederick
Douglass
T he National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution

inaugurated its One Life Gallery in 2006—a compact space
reserved for exhibitions of art and artifacts related to the life of
single historical figures. The gallery has been a showcase for the
stories of Marian Anderson, Walt Whitman, Babe Ruth, Sandra Day
O’Connor, Dolores Huerta, and Thomas Paine, among others, and
is now home to an exhibition devoted to the abolitionist Frederick
Douglass. The show opened, appropriately, on the long weekend
devoted to the celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks
the end of the institution of slavery in the United States.
While the venue is, perhaps, an ironically small setting in which
to relate the story of a man whose thundering oratory rattled
the rafters, the show ably captures the essence of Douglass’s life
and legacy. Among the thirty-five artifacts on display are the
ledger documenting Douglass’s birth on a Maryland plantation in
February 1818; copies of two of his three autobiographies; sheet
music for a song about his escape from slavery; and a pamphlet
containing the text of his caustic speech “What to the Slave Is
the Fourth of July?” Most telling are the portraits of Douglass,
Rundlet-May House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire in which his face charts
the passage of his life and
Explore four centuries of American decorative arts career: from self-assured
with Historic New England youth, to mature leonine
firebrand, to grizzled elder
statesman.
Visit HistoricNewEngland.org
One Life: Frederick Douglass •
National Portrait Gallery, Wash-
ington, DC • to April 21, 2024 •
npg.si.edu
Frederick Douglass [1818–1895], c. 1845.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC.
Douglass in a wood engraving in Harper’s
Weekly, November 24, 1883. National
Portrait Gallery.
Personal space By Laurene Krasny Brown
One Artist’s
Notes on
Visiting an
Art Fair
The entrance to the 2023 Note 1. Why subject myself?

edition of the European
Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) at the
Park Avenue Armory in New
York. Photograph by Jitske
Nap, courtesy of TEFAF.
V isiting an art fair has yet to prove a
waste of my time. The satisfaction
I take from attending these events is
The author, Laurene Krasny almost ensured by the realistic expecta-
Brown, an artist whose pri- tions I have in anticipation. In the first
mary medium is paper— place, news of an upcoming art fair
formed and painted, or col-
laged—at home in New arouses my curiosity. Every art fair is a
York. Photograph by Ellen marketplace with some guiding theme
McDermott with Bridget
Sciales.
or point of view. I think of an art fair as
a store, or maybe warehouse, filled with
a curated inventory. Instead of, say, gro-
ceries, paintings and sculptures are on
offer, selected for their beauty, materials,
size, political messaging, maker, cultural
history, or any number of marketable
ingredients. Like a plentiful buffet, these
wares are conveniently served all in the
same place to tempt one’s appetite.
Personal space
Note 2. The lay of the land: delight or dismissal
P art of the challenge when visiting an art fair is

negotiating the sheer volume of it. I enter, show
my ticket, and adjust to the floor plan. Booths often
rub right up against each other along corridors, or
in some other labyrinthian maze. A map might be
provided to guide my route. Because every installa-
tion beckons for customers, or at least viewers, it can
feel exciting, or overwhelming, or both. It is up to me
whether to be drawn in by a dealer’s bid for my atten-
tion. I am a free agent who chooses where to spend
time. Choosing is part of the adventure. Every dealer’s
booth presents a tiny universe, an environment cre-
ated explicitly for these goods.
This is a decadent exercise. A booth’s walls, floors,
and lighting have been to varying degrees designed
to create some desired mood. I am amazed—dazzled,

really—to consider how much money and effort are
spent each time a temporary fair opens for business.
Is it an interior that seems all of a piece? For example,
in shows of traditional nineteenth-century or even
older art, I’ve often noticed a preference for using
dark value walls and dim overall lighting that help to
focus attention on highlighted paintings or sculpture.
Every object looks carefully positioned. Booths like
this feel quieter to me and reference a kind of seren-
ity you might find in a museum. They present an aura
of seriousness. Or the dealer may want to produce
a brighter, louder, more contemporary effect within
which to display a more diverse selection of works.
That feels more like aiming to offer something for
everyone. Booth preparation is fascinating nonverbal
messaging. I also notice the dealer’s on-site office,
more or less discreetly built into the environment.
Brown was impressed by Finally, each environment is inhabited by the dealers
the dramatic lighting and or staff, who may exude an uncanny reflection of the
placement of this Native booth’s style.
American sculpture in the
booth of Donald Ellis I check the name of the gallery and note their place
Gallery at TEFAF. of business before heading in. I think of it as entering
Photograph by the author.
their lair. From past experience I know that they will
A pair of Clifford Pascoe adopt some tack on how much and exactly when to
chairs furnished the dis-
creet “office” in a corner of interact with booth visitors. It’s a skill set, a strategy
one TEFAF exhibitor’s that shows up as I approach. All this is part of the pack-
booth. Author’s photograph. age that I take in with some interest.
Bring it to
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A RARE AND IMPORTANT INLAID MAHOGANY

MARBLE-TOP SIDEBOARD, ATTRIBUTED TO
JOHN AND THOMAS SEYMOUR, BOSTON,
MASSACHUSETTS, C. 1798-1810.
ANATOLIAN VILLAGE RUG, EAST OR CENTRAL
ANATOLIA, C. THIRD QUARTER 19TH CENTURY.
1971 DOMAINE DE LA ROMANEE CONTI LA TACHE.
1959 CHATEAU MOUTON ROTHSCHILD
Skinner Auctions LLC. MA LIC. 2304. 274 Cedar Hill St, Marlborough MA
Personal space
pleasure in this. By its very nature, entering a work also

means disregarding its surrounding hectic chatter
and energy. For a few moments, everything else in the
room falls away. There is only the work and me viewing
it. It’s a little like being in love.
Note 4. An aside
W hen and if viewing art gets too intense, I can

always pause to observe the other visitors! I stand
back against the wall or find a bench—a vantage point
from which to watch the art fair audience travel by.
This is another sort of visual wealth, the people visit-
ing the fair, their faces, their fashions. It’s a whole other
show in which to engage. If an art fair is so big that I
am satiated with looking before I’ve finished my route,
there might be a caf« where I call an intermission.
Note 3. Visiting the artwork Always a helpful respite.
I t takes at least one artwork of interest to lead me into a

dealer’s booth. It might be a familiar piece that I now have the
opportunity to see up close. Or it is the work of an artist I admire.
Perhaps the subject matter is already on my mind. More often,
it’s just a work that calls out to me for its materials, color palette,
form, composition, novelty—maybe all of the above.
That is the mystery and glory of exercising personal taste.
To visit a piece of art (on its own terms) is why I come to an art
fair. To me, seeing an artwork means witnessing, appreciating
its formal content first. It’s as if I’m looking through the piece,
beyond any recognizable reference or function. I study how
it became this object before me, and the myriad decisions its
creator made in the process. I examine the materiality of its
paint, its paper or canvas, and absorb all the technical ways
these elements have been transformed into something else.
It may in fact be a clay vase in which to arrange a bouquet of
flowers (its transactional job), or an oil painting that records a
Argentinian artist Mónica real world landscape. That recognition comes after I have seen
Giron’s knitted sweaters for all the details of its aesthetic vocabulary. There is perceptual
endangered bird species in
Patagonia were exhibited by
the gallery Barro at the 2023
Frieze art fair in New York.
“I’m very moved by these
soft sculptures,” Brown says.
Note 5. Personal inspiration
“My own paper-made birds
are a work in progress.”
Author’s photograph. T here often exists, somewhere in the fair space, art
that speaks directly to my current projects—pieces
that inform and can be applied to my own art making.
A pencil-drawn still life by
Giorgio Morandi was pre- Being able to see and study them is an extra reward.
sented by Galleria d’Arte I usually bring a notebook with me, and of course it’s
Maggiore at TEFAF. “The
absolute stillness and ele- easy enough to photograph anything now. But I do still
gant simplicity of his work feel uncomfortable taking pictures of other people’s art.
have a profound effect on
my thinking,” Brown says.
They have so much value for me, it seems like a theft.
Author’s photograph. It is my great good fortune to come upon a piece
Brown’s Homage à l’Orange, of art that reveals something specific about what I
a still-life collage. Gouache am doing. With contemporary art, I occasionally get
on cut paper. Photographs of to meet and speak with the artist whose work is on
Brown’s work are courtesy of
the artist. exhibit. For example, I have been adding to a body
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Personal space
Brown’s Parcheesi in Gilt

Leaf, a paper assemblage
inspired by antique game
boards. Gouache, metal
leaf, cardboard, cut paper.
Brown’s Sanity of Citrus
Number 1, a still-life col-
lage inspired by nine-
teenth-century American
theorem paintings.
Gouache and colored pencil
on cut paper.
of still-life collage for a few years now. Given the sheer

longevity of still life as a genre, there’s a good chance
I will come across some examples at any given art fair.
Visiting these works brings a special pleasure because it
always educates me in some way, even when it tells me
what not to do.
Lessons in framing also enhance my art fair experi-
ence, especially when many works by the same artist
are framed differently. This easy opportunity to compare
and contrast their effectiveness is ripe for the taking.
All this has been handed to me. I am grateful.
Note 6. Art fairs showcasing antiques
E xtra layers of history come along when an art fair

features antiques. The older an object, the longer its
story. What is its prior ownership (provenance)? Where
is its place in a country’s material culture? How good a
specimen is it within its genre? Do we know who made
it? Its backstory accompanies the aesthetic vocabulary
of any piece of art.
Doing justice to describing an antique requires
historical expertise. There is, as well, the history that
shows up on the object itself, the wear of time and
patina visible on its surfaces. Dealers in antiques usu-
Now accepting jew elr y c o ns ignme nts
for our upc o ming auc ti o n s eas o n.
CON TACT:
Ta y lo r P. S e e
J e w e l ry Di re ct o r
t a y lo r @gro ga n c o. c om
G R O G A N C O. C O M 2 0 C H A R L E S S T R E E T, B O S T O N , M A 0 2 1 1 4 617.720.2020
Personal space
Note 7. The marketplace for fine art
T here has been much conversation about the

effects these commercial trade shows have on our
perception and appreciation of fine art. Does it honor
fine art more or less, being for sale on the floor? It is
being treated like any commodity now that we have
removed it from the cathedral and the museum. Yes,
its value can be bartered in terms of price; however,
with good art, there is always additional, unmeasur-
able value. Like any market, an art fair can be noisy,
crowded, and somehow superficial.
But art fairs serve other purposes to good effect.
Exposing viewers to so much material is something
of an education. The very informality of a fair may
make fine art seem friendlier, more within the grasp
of people who otherwise are intimidated by galleries
and institutional settings. It can be fun visiting an art
fair—there’s so much energy. It has probably changed
the whole tilt of how dealers make their living, but
that is the subject of another essay. As an artist visitor,
for me an art fair is a gift.
Brown’s low-relief sculp- ally are well informed about their inventory. Just by
ture Settlement. “This
work feeds upon the
asking, I learn about the furnishings or other objects
format used in many I admire. Longer life, more storytelling. I am a huge
nineteenth-century fan of American antiques and folk art. When art fairs
American quilts, where
patterned squares are feature such material, it is like visiting my people. So
repeated in variation many times, I have found inspiration in this work, be
amid a grid,” Brown it nineteenth-century quilts, basketry, game boards,
says. Gouache, acrylic,
wire mesh, thread, theorems on paper, or painted furniture. Their beauty
corrugated paper. and craftsmanship often extend far beyond any utili-
A view of one section of tarian function.
Brown’s studio in her New The fact that these works are so accessible and at
York home. McDermott
and Sciales photograph. least theoretically could be purchased adds another
dimension to all this looking. There is an edge of
excitement to buying and selling that steams up in
the booths doing business. It’s an efficient way to
shop, too, if you are looking to buy: one-stop shop-
ping. My game is always to imagine that I’m allowed
to take home one piece, and so must make a final
selection before leaving. This is me honing a muscle
or skill of choice.
*NQPSUBOUAmericana 4FQUFNCFS
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glass and ceramics, and fine antiques of all types. Conducting monthly
catalogued auctions as well as providing appraisal and museum services. 540.434.3939 | jeffreysevans.com | info@ jeffreysevans.com
Facets and settings
Brooches as Books, Necklaces

as Novellas THE NARRATIVE ART JEWELRY OF
BARBARA PAGANIN
T
he jeweler Barbara Paganin is a proud Venetian. purchased in Venetian antiques stores, to create her
She’ll tell you exactly where she was born: singular, wearable works of art.
in the same place where her family lived for These days her studio is located on the mainland in
generations, and where she had her first studio, a the town of Oriago, where nobles came on holiday in
house on Fondamente Nuove, in the historic center the sixteenth century and Andrea Palladio designed
of Venice. “There, you could see the sun rise over villas for them. To step inside is to find oneself
Murano and set in the direction of the Madonna immersed in the artist’s life, the things that she holds
dell’Orto church,” she says. It is no surprise that this dear, and in memories of places that are now gone.
bit of information is included when she introduces She recalls, for example, bringing home bits and pieces
herself, because Venice is a key character in the found on the street after the devastating Venetian
tales she so beautifully crafts. Paganin is a maker of flood of 2019. Paganin is a collector of cultural flotsam:
narrative jewelry—necklaces, brooches, and brace- ivory charms, dolls, antique lace, small photos, glass
lets made of elements that range from trinkets to beads, porcelain figurines, and more. Glass display
gemstones and that, taken together, suggest the cases that line the walls of her small studio contain
outlines of a story. (Read more about the narrative beautifully arranged tchotchkes waiting to be plucked
jewelry genre in the July/August and placed in a brooch or necklace.
2020 issue of The Magazine Some of these “gems” will be
ANTIQUES.) Paganin cast in silver and collaged
e m p l oys fo u n d together; others will
objects, either be fixed between
gathered or prongs like
Barbara Paganin (1961–) wear-
ing her Memoria aperta (Open
Memory) brooches, 2014.
Photograph by Alice Pavesi Fiori.
More (Blackberries) necklace by
Paganin, 2013. Oxidized silver,
polymethyl methacrylate,
gold; length 9 ¾ inches.
Private collection; photograph
by Michael Zanin.
By Bella Neyman
a blank page. Paganin, however, rarely tells you what her

work is about, and the titles she gives her pieces hardly
give it away. She wants each wearer to interpret the jew-
Contenitori (Containers)
elry as they wish, writing their own story. This idea is the necklace by Paganin, 2015.
basis for a major body of her work called Open Memory, Oxidized silver, porcelain,
bone, ivory, polymethy
or Memoria Aperta, which she began in 2011. “In the methacrylate, wood, gold;
Memoria Aperta collection, I use some elements to tell height 13 ¹/₈ , width 9
inches. Except as noted,
stories that are not entirely defined because the observer photographs courtesy
must find his own emotion, his own memories,” she says. of Paganin.
precious stones and placed into perforated, oxidized

silver settings, each one playing an important part of
the story she is telling. “My work looks like it’s from
the nineteenth century due to the materials I use and
the care with which they are made,” she says. The way
she approaches her work is contemporary, however: it
speaks of personal stories and memories.
The jewelry form she most frequently employs is the
brooch, perhaps because it’s the form that most suggests
There is harmony in the way that Paganin arranges Memoria aperta n. 22 (Open
Memory no. 22) brooch by
the found objects. “There are objects that fascinate Paganin, 2011–2013.
me, such as miniature portraits on ivory. While I adore Oxidized silver, miniature on
ivory, ivory, coral, tourmaline,
each individual piece that makes up a brooch or neck- gold; height 3 ¾, width 3 ¾
lace, I never neglect the compositional balance,” she inches. Photograph by Alice
Pavesi Fiori.
says. “There are elements that repeat themselves such
Memoria aperta n. 13 (Open
as shoes, mice, trees. In some works, I have combined Memory no. 13) brooch by
shoes that I think could have belonged to the person Paganin, 2011–2013. Oxidized
silver, morganite, photo, silver,
portrayed. When they are an accumulation, a stack- porcelain, ivory, gold; height 4,
ing, they make one think of the past. They remind you width 3 ¼, depth 1 ¼ inches.
Pavesi Fiori photograph.
of the sensation of the first walk, of the first steps.” If

Facets and settings
body from disease. Paganin began creating replicas

of vegetables in pâte de verre at a glass-making ate-
lier on the island of Murano. She now makes them
from polymethyl methacrylate—a ceramic-like syn-
thetic polymer used to make artificial teeth. (Paganin
learned how to use it from a dentist.)
Paganin’s latest work is still about memories, but
also about play. Using children’s beach toys as molds
she has developed a technique that combines porce-
lain and iron to make jewelry that is both lightweight
Memoria Aperta n. 27, Il profes- brooches are a blank page, she thinks of necklaces as
sore di disegno (Open Memory
no. 27, The Professor of Design) a frame: “To wear a necklace we insert our head in the
brooch by Paganin, 2018. center and then the necklace frames our face.”
Oxidized silver, porcelain, glass,
photograph, aquamarine, gold; While Paganin most often uses an assortment of
height 3 ¼, width 4 ½, depth objects, recently she has singled out one for repeated
1 ³/₈ inches.
use. The cavolfiore, or cauliflower, has become one
Nontiscordardimè (Forget-Me-
Not) necklace by Paganin, 2015. of her favorite elements. Vegetables—such as cauli-
Oxidized silver, glass, porcelain, flowers, cabbage, or broccoli—have been part of the
bone, ivory, bronze, painted
gold; length 11 ¹/₈, depth 1 ³/₈ Memoria Aperta series, “the glass trees are actually
inches. Private collection; sections of cauliflower,” she says. The vegetable forms
Zanin photograph.
are a means for her to introduce more color into her
work. “They create a polychrome composition and
always have a symbolic meaning—life, death, good,
and evil,” Paganin says, adding that a cabbage resem-
bles the human lymphatic system, which protects the
-8/< Ɉ
$8*ɌɌ Ɍ
Facets and settings
and durable. “Usually in my work I start from a thought

and then I look for the best way to convey it,” Paganin
says. The most recent piece, called You Are Braver Than
You Think, is a necklace with a unicorn pendant similar
to a stuffed animal her daughter had as a child. The
title comes from a film adaptation of the Winnie-the-
Pooh children’s books. When you pulled a cord, the
stuffed unicorn would say a few phrases, and Paganin
heard this one all day long.
Like Venice itself, Paganin's work is full of romance,
history, and stories. You never know what you will
stumble on, but you know it will be magical. The
artist’s imagination, like her collection, knows no
bounds—and with more than twenty-five years of
teaching and exhibiting already under her belt, there
are many chapters left for her to write, in her life and
in her work.
BELLA NEYMAN is an independent curator, lecturer, and writer

specializing in contemporary art jewelry. She is the co-founder of
New York City Jewelry Week, a citywide celebration held annually
in November.
Impronte romanesche
(Imprint Romanesque)
brooch by Paganin, 2016.
Oxidized silver, polymethyl
methacrylate, smoked
quartz cabochon; height
6 ¾, width 4, depth
1 ¹/₈ inches.
You Are Braver Than You
Think necklace by
Paganin, 2023. Porcelain,
gold, diamonds; height
4 ¼, width 4 ¼, depth
1 ¹/₈ inches (pendant);
chain length 31 ½ inches.
Photograph courtesy of
Galerie Marzee, Nijmegen,
Netherlands.
*X\HWWH 'HHWHU,QF
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The Kenneth and Betty Lay Collection

(YHU\IDPLO\FROOHFWLRQWHOOVDVWRU\7KH/D\)DPLO\&ROOHFWLRQ FROOHFWLRQWRLQFOXGHJUHDWH[DPSOHVRI,PSUHVVLRQLVP
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UHQRZQHG$PHULFDQDUWLVWV%HWW\DQG.HQQHWK/D\IURP VLJQLILFDQWZRUNVIURPDUWKLVWRULFDOO\VLJQLILFDQWVFKRROV
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HDUO\LQWHUHVWLQ(GPXQG2VWKDXVLQWKHVWKH\JUHZWKHLU
Winslow Homer, 20.5” x 15” Mary Cassatt, 18” x 15” John George Brown, 18.25” x 14.25”
$300,000 - $500,000 $400,000 - $600,000 $30,000 - $40,000
Kenneth and Betty Lay were lifetime appreciators of art and would be excited
to know that their collection will be cherished by a new generation of
collectors, who will recognize the works’ importance and help preserve them.
George Bellows, 16.5” x 24” John Frederick Peto, 6” x 8.75” Edmund Osthaus, 30” x 34”
$120,000 - $180,000 $15,000 - $25,000 $20,000 - $30,000
ZZZJX\HWWHDQGGHHWHUFRP67DOERW6W8QLW$6W0LFKDHOV0'
Jon Deeter | 440-610-1768 | jdeeter@guyetteanddeeter.com
Zac Cote | 207-321-8091 | zcote@guyetteanddeeter.com
Museum visit
Second
Sight THE INTUIT MUSEUM EMBODIES CHICAGO’S LONGSTANDING
APPRECIATION FOR SELFTAUGHT AND OUTSIDER ART
By Thomas Connors
I
In 1941, the Arts Club of Chicago gave a show to
self-taught, Pennsylvania-born artist Horace Pippin,
a disabled World War I vet whose work had been
included in the 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular
Painting at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A
decade later, the club’s members invited the iconoclas-
tic French artist Jean Dubuffet to speak, and listened
to him urge the embrace of “instinct, passion, caprice,
violence, madness” in art-making. In the ’50s and ’60s,
educators and artists at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago—including Kathleen Blackshear, Whitney
Halstead, Ray Yoshida—urged students to look beyond
the mainstream as they developed their notions of art.
In the 1970s Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind pioneered
the market in outsider art, showing the work of locals
Henry Darger and Joseph Yoakum, among others. By
1979 Chicagoans had fostered the emergence of what
Dubuffet called art brut to such an extent that the city’s
Museum of Contemporary Art was able to present an
exhibition, Outsider Art in Chicago, comprised entirely
of work by area artists.
The centrality of outsider work in Chicago was made
tangible in 1991, when art collectors Susann Craig
and Scott Lang, along with dealer Carl Hammer and
others, founded the Society for Outsider, Intuitive, and
Visionary Art—now known as Intuit: The Center for Installation view of the
Intuitive and Outside Art. Since 1999 Intuit has oper- exhibition Teacher
Fellowship Program
ated from a 150-year-old, red brick building on North 2021–22 Student
Milwaukee Avenue. Welcoming some ten thousand Exhibition at Intuit: The
Center for Intuitive and
visitors annually (by a pre-Covid-19 count), and with an Outsider Art, Chicago.
operating budget of approximately $1 million, Intuit Photograph by Cheri
Eisenberg. All photo-
is no behemoth. Yet as one of the few museums in the graphs courtesy of Intuit.
country dedicated solely to self-taught and outsider Intuit’s Milwaukee
art—and boasting robust online programming—it Avenue facade.

Museum visit
enjoys a national profile among curators, collectors,

and critics. As the recent recipient of a $5 million
development grant from the city of Chicago, Intuit
hopes to increase its appeal to the public by under-
going a significant enhancement of its facility.
Intuit’s renovation program will double exhibi-
tion space; create a dedicated education area and
art-making studio; and re-envision its Henry Darger
Room, an installation featuring contents from the
tiny apartment where the Chicago janitor created his
famed fantasy epic of violence and curious sexuality,
fashioned from cartoons, advertisements, coloring
books, and other ephemera. In addition, the renova-
tion—conceived by the Chicago architectural firm
Doyle and Associates—will provide Intuit a friendlier
new street facade. “I think that will be the most trans-
formational piece of all,” says Intuit’s president and
CEO, Debra Kerr. “The current facade is rather forbid-
ding. People even struggle to find the door.”
Intuit’s permanent collection is composed of
approximately thirteen hundred works, all of which
were donated. Artists represented include William
Installation view of the

Henry Darger Room
Collection at the museum.
Photograph © John Faier.
Mt. Mourner in Maritime
Alps near Diane France
by Joseph E. Yoakum
(1890–1972), 1968. Intuit:
The Center for Intuitive
and Outsider Art, gift of
Martha Griffin.
THE SPORTING SALE 2023 | JULY 13-14
FEATURING DECOYS FROM
THE THOMAS M. EVANS JR. COLLECTION
COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS, LLC | info@copleyart.com | 617.536.0030

MA #2428
Museum visit
Installation view of Dawson, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Lee Godie, ists—what were the circumstance that allowed them
Roman Villarreal:
South Chicago
Mr. Imagination, Michel Nedjar, Wesley Willis, and to be creative?”
Legacies exhibition, Yoakum. “Until now, we haven’t been able to afford Kerr is especially keen to ramp up opportunities for
2022–2023. Eisenberg
photograph.
(nor have we really needed) an acquisitions budget,” artists and the public to meet. Last year, in tandem with
says Kerr, “but our Young Professionals Board has the exhibition Roman Villarrel: South Chicago Legacies,
embarked on an acquisitions project and will be visit- Intuit offered a workshop conducted by the artist, a
ing galleries and artists’ studios.” former steel mill worker. “There’s something special
In recent seasons, Intuit has presented the bio- that happens when we have a living artist here,” says
graphically driven assemblages, portraits, and land- Kerr. “There’s a program in Illinois designed to obtain
scapes of Chicagoan Marvin Tate; the poetry-infused release for seniors serving time for armed robberies in
drawings of Philadelphia artist Justin Duerr; and the which no one was harmed, so that they can finish up
work of Kentucky-born George Widener, a math whiz their lives in meaningful ways. One of those is an amaz-
fascinated by calendars and numbers. Intuit closed for ing artist, Arkee Chaney, who came to art-making while
renovations in June, and plans to re-open sometime in prison. He came to Intuit and was very open about
in the summer of 2024 with a show focusing on artists his experience. The young people who heard him were
who began their artistic practice after immigrating especially impressed. Here was someone who had dif-
to Chicago, such as Derek Webster, who came from ficulties, had barriers to overcome, whose experience
Belize, and Drossos Skyllas, a Greek-born painter was relevant to their lives.”
whose work was discovered by dealer Phyllis Kind after If there is one lesson that Intuit and the artists whose
his death. “We’ll be asking what made them turn to art,” work is presented there can impart, it is this: that the
says Kerr. “Was it homesickness, exposure to other art- will to creative expression can defeat any impediment.
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Object lesson By Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle
A Blueprint for Early America

was not wrong insofar as he conveyed the sense of
isolation felt by American carpenter-builders and
housewrights of the era. They felt themselves to be
playing second fiddle to the builders of Europe, hav-
ing to make do with whatever they could find among
the scraps of the European cultural banquet. Men like
Biddle were determined to see this change.
When Europeans first built permanent settle-
ments in North America, they brought with them
the construction methods and styles they knew from
their homelands. The early colonial era of American
architecture—especially the architecture of New
England, New York, and Pennsylvania—is defined
by adaptations of Tudor and late medieval styles.
These styles were slowly replaced with elements of
the Georgian style, reflecting the influence of British
tastes and training. Even as towns and cities in the
colonies became more sophisticated and craftsmen
grew more specialized and skilled, the built environ-
ON OWEN BIDDLE’S 1806 BOOK, ment continued to look like the European models
THE YOUNG CARPENTER’S ASSISTANT then in vogue.
A
The copy of Owen Biddle s the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris and gun
(1774–1806), The Young
Carpenter's Assistant; or, A barrels cooled across the newly minted states,
System of Architecture, the leaders of the new American Republic
adapted to the Style of
Building in the United States began the arduous work of creating the fabric of a
(Philadelphia, 1805), in the new society. As part of that program, a need was felt
collection of Andalusia
House, Gardens, and for a new architecture, weaned from the fawning
Arboretum in Bensalem fashion for European styles, and celebrating the vigor
Township, Pennsylvania, is
bound in well-worn leath- of a New Age—a new classicism for a new republic.
er, indicative of use. “I have experienced much inconvenience, for want
Photograph by John Vick.
of suitable books on the subject,” Owen Biddle Jr.
Title page of Andalusia’s
Young Carpenter’s Assistant. wrote in 1805 in the preface to the first edition of
Vick photograph. his book The Young Carpenter’s Assistant; or, A System
of Architecture, adapted to the Style of Building in the
United States. “All that have yet appeared, have been
written by foreign authors, who have adapted their
examples and observations almost entirely to the
style of building in their respective countries, which
in many instances differs very materially from ours.”
It was time, Biddle believed, for the codification of an
architecture made just for America.
While Biddle was technically incorrect in his
assertion that all books on architecture available in
the United States at that time had been written by
foreign authors—Connecticut-born Asher Benjamin
(1773–1845) wrote the first book of American archi-
tecture, The Country Builder’s Assistant, in 1797—he
Alabama Maryland
B. Hannah Daniel Antiques Firehouse Antiques
Connecticut Lisa McAllister
Find Weatherly LLC Indiana
Roberto Freitas John Sinning Antiques and Folk Art
The Hanebergs Antiques New Hampshire
Hanes and Ruskin Thomas Clark
Allan Katz Country Cupboard Antiques
Bettina Krainin Frandino Antique Oriental Rugs
Derik Pulito Michael Hingston Antiques
Delaware New Jersey
Richard Worth Antiques A Bird in Hand
Georgia H&L Antiques
Larry Thompson* New York
Kansas Aarne Anton/Nexus Singularity
American Spirit Antiques Ericson St. Antiques*
Maine J & G Antiques
B.D.K. Antiques and Design Kruggel Antiques
Peter H. Eaton Antiques James Wm. Lowery
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2023
James L Kochan Daniel and Karen Olson
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Antiques Associates of West Townsend Robert Conrad Antiques
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August 9th -10th South Carolina
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Leatherwood Antiques 10 am - 6 pm both days Michael Hall Antiques*
Hilary and Paulette Nolan Vermont
Christopher Settle Sullivan Arena, on the beautiful Norman Gronning Antiques.
Elliott and Grace Snyder
Victor Weinblatt*
campus of St. Anselm College, Virginia
Neverbird Antiques
Ohio Manchester, New Hampshire Stonecrop Antiques*
Hannah Humes Thistlethwaite Americana
Jane Langol *New dealers this year
Latcham House Dealer list in formation
“This is one of the best shows I got to—not only

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but because of the way I feel when I am here!”
Presented by:
Collect more details at:
www.disaiamanagement.com ANTIQUESINMANCHESTER.COM Admission: $15.00

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Object lesson
This process of aping and adaptation is a far cry

from the rough-hewn construction by unskilled but
eager workers that many imagine characterized most
structures built in the young nation. These early build-
ings were, rather, the product of well-understood
general methods and designs being adapted to a
given clime and the resources available. Which adap-
tations were needed was learned through experience,
but familiarity with techniques and design elements
was acquired either through an apprenticeship with
an experienced builder or by reading guidebooks.
Most often, a young builder learned from both. This
was true for many trades at the time, as attested to by
The Arch Street Meeting
House, Philadelphia, the prevalence of furniture made to the specifications
designed by Biddle and of Thomas Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-
built 1804–1811.
Photograph courtesy of maker’s Director of 1754. In the late eighteenth cen-
the Arch Street Meeting tury, anyone who made furniture knew Chippendale’s
House Preservation Trust,
Philadelphia. Director, and many learned how to build a chair with
A fold-out page in The one eye regularly glancing at its pages for guidance.
Young Carpenter’s Biddle’s Young Carpenter’s Assistant was one of
Assistant. Such pages
were often cut out of the these vade mecums. The book was manual, glossary,
book to hang in work- and guidebook. It presented design vocabulary, his-
shops and drafting
rooms, and the presence tory, and practice from Biddle’s perspective—that of a
of them significantly builder who was translating what he considered to be
increases the value of
a copy. Vick photograph the best of English architecture into a package espe-
for Andalusia. cially fit for the early American landscape.
A carpenter-builder, as Biddle called himself, was an

architect, general contractor, and construction worker
all in one. The son of a clockmaker, one of ten children,
and a member of the fifth-generation of Biddles born
on North American soil, he found a passion for shap-
ing the built landscape of his native Philadelphia.
After apprenticing under Joseph Cowgill from 1799
to 1801, Biddle struck out on his own at twenty-seven
and became a member of the Carpenters’ Company
guild. He was involved in the construction of the first
covered bridge in the young country, the Schuylkill
Permanent Bridge, and designed and built homes
in Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood that still
stand today.
A committed Quaker from a line of committed
Quakers dating back to William and Sarah Biddle,
who arrived from England in 1681, Owen Biddle
Jr. also designed and built the Arch Street Meeting
House between 1803 and 1804. Biddle wrote the
Young Carpenter’s Assistant at the same time as the
building of the meeting house, which is in a sym-
metrical, neoclassical style and connects strongly to
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Object lesson
The library at Andalusia. the vision put forward in the book. The two, the book north of Philadelphia—while another sold at Sotheby’s
Photograph by Sandy
Stolzman Photography. and the building, are, in a way, a pair. The building is in January 2023 for $3,000. Raptis currently has a finely
the incarnation of both the dream and direction the re-bound first edition copy on offer for $15,000 in its
book puts forth. gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. For Andalusia, holding
Biddle passed away before his dream could be Biddle’s book is part of the institution’s evolving effort
completely realized. He built the center hall and East to “widen the institutional definition of the Biddle
Room in 1804, but the West Room wasn’t completed family,” says John Vick, director of the estate and its
until 1811, five years after his death in 1806 at the age collections, “beyond those who lived at Andalusia and
of thirty-two. He was laid to rest in the meeting house their descendants to include descendants of all Biddles
cemetery, which would be closed to new burials in going back to William and Sarah.”
1880. The graves of most of the estimated twenty Matthew Raptis advises those considering books as
thousand individuals interred there are unmarked, as collectable objects to let their own reading interests
is Quaker tradition. The meeting house, however, is lead them into the pastime. Though he began his col-
still in use, and prospective visitors can book private lection as a kid with Civil War books, he now cherishes
tours or visit virtually online. his first edition of Don Quixote. As a book dealer, he
Biddle’s book has gained value among collectors sees his role as being more matchmaker than sales-
because his death at a young age resulted in few person. Books are intensely personal, they require
published editions, and because many copies had careful storage and handling to maintain value, and
their drawings removed for use as shop references, yet beg to be used. He says the provenance of his copy
making complete early editions particularly valuable. of Biddle’s book has yet to reveal itself, but the name
According to Raptis Rare Books, only two copies of the “Rob Davidson”* inscribed inside provides a clue,
book have appeared at auction in the last fifty years. along with a pencil drawing of a flower.
One is now in the collection of Andalusia Historic
*Like Owen Biddle, Pippa Biddle is a descendant of William and Sarah Biddle.
House, Gardens, and Arboretum—which maintains the There is no known relation between Benjamin Davidson and the “Rob Davidson”
Biddle family’s historic eighteenth-century estate just of the inscription.
MARIA MARTINEZ (San Ildefonso, 1887 - 1980)
POPOVI DA (San Ildefonso, 1923 - 1971)
Polychrome Vase, 7 1⁄2 x 9 3⁄8 in., Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000
UPCOMING CALENDAR
July 21 – 22 New Mexico Now: Spanish Colonial to Spanish Market
Aug. 11 – 12 American Indian: Classic to Contemporary
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July 13, 2023 The exhibition is open to the public at the
Vilcek Foundation by appointment only.
through To schedule a tour, please go to
https://vilcek.co/gic-tour or scan the QR code.
June 2, 2024
Grounded in Clay continues in the American
Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Acoma jar with bird designs, early 1900s

The Vilcek Collection, VF2019.02.02
JULY/
AUGUST
2023
featuring...
Clay, Water,
Spirit
and
By Laura
Beach
Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha):

“Pictorially and materially, both pots embody growth and the
renewal of life—gentle reminders of the beauty and fragility of
the natural world on which we humans depend.”
Here and elsewhere, quotations are from the individual who selected
the object under discussion for inclusion in the traveling exhibition
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery.
A
Fig. 1. Cochiti storage water jar made about 1720 by a then repaired, the jar that same year became the
jars. Left: Clay and paint,
c. 1800–1820; height 18, member of the Zuni people sums first artifact to enter the now more than twelve
diameter 20 inches. Right:
Clay and paint, 1890– up the occasionally fraught history thousand–object collection of what became the
1900; height 18 ½,
diameter 17 inches. of archaeological research and the preservation Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) at the School
Collection of the Vilcek
Foundation, New York.
movement in the American Southwest. Damaged for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe. Along
Except as noted, photo-
graphs courtesy of the
at a 1922 dinner party convened by members of with masterworks from the collection of the Vil-
Vilcek Foundation. the Anglo elite, who long dominated northern cek Foundation, selections from SAR’s holdings
New Mexico’s legacy cultural institutions, and form the bulk of Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of
Erin Monique Grant (Colorado River Indian Tribes):
“The jar had previously passed through hands that believed
its decoration was of a fish, an ‘abstract fish’ at that. Yet
through talks with Acoma relatives and simple research, I
found out that it is a thunderbird—a design its ancestors
have been depicting and developing for centuries. Not a fish.
I state again: Pueblo voices should always be prioritized when
one talks about, interprets, and exhibits Pueblo pottery.”
Jason Garcia (Tewa/Santa Clara Pueblo):

“Avanyu (serpent) is often portrayed on Santa
Clara pottery, symbolizing water. Avanyu may rep- An exhibition of Pueblo
resent heavy flooding after a torrential storm and
also the gentle, soft flow of a river or stream.”
pottery seeks to reveal the soul
that resides within the art
Pueblo Pottery, a traveling exhibition making its F. Brown, the cultural anthropologist presiding Fig. 2. Avanyu vase by Lela (1895–
1966) and Luther Gutierrez (1911–
current stop in New York City. over the institution’s ambitious set of programs 1987), Santa Clara, c. 1963. Clay
and paint; height 13 ½, diameter
Founded in 1907 as the School of American in the arts and social sciences, which range from 7 ½ inches. Created by the mother-
and-son pottery duo Lela and
Archaeology, SAR is today a far more nimble and residencies for artists and scholars to symposiums Luther Gutierrez, this pot won the
grand prize at the 1963 Santa Fe
socially responsive place than it was a century and an academic press. Indian Market. Collection of the
ago, when Ivy League–educated men dominated Activities at SAR unfold on the grounds of what School for Advanced Research,
Santa Fe, New Mexico.
the field. “Our elevator pitch needs a fifty-story was once an estate known as El Delirio—the home Fig. 3. Acoma jar with bird designs,
early 1900s. Clay and paint; height
building,” acknowledges SAR president Michael of arts patrons Martha Root White and Amelia 6 ¾, diameter 9 inches. Vilcek
Foundation collection.
Nora Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara):
“Do not forget: Lonnie [Vigil] built his monumental
vessel on his kitchen table. Who does that? A
master artist with passion, that’s who.”
L. Stephine “Steph” Poston (Sandia Pueblo):

“The piece was Maria’s signature black-on-black pottery—
but it was the etched ‘selfie’ that continued to intrigue.
At one point while studying the plate in my white gloves,
I became wrapped up in the knowledge that I was holding
and touching the work of the great clay genius Maria
Martinez. It was a surreal and powerful moment for me.”
Elizabeth White, sisters whose terraced gardens and

swimming pool, a Santa Fe first, beckoned the stylish
set. Amelia Elizabeth was among the first to promote
Native American art in Manhattan, opening a shop
for Indian arts and crafts on Madison Avenue in Change at IARC accelerated under the leadership
1922 and helping to organize the Exposition of Indian of its current director, Elysia Poon, and two predeces-
Tribal Arts at New York’s Grand Central Galleries sors, Brian D. Vallo (Acoma Pueblo) and Cynthia
Fig. 4. Plate by Maria in 1931. Chavez Lamar (San Felipe Pueblo/Hopi/Tewa/
M
(1887–1980) and any observers now take a nuanced view of Diné), the latter now director of the Smithsonian’s
Julian Martinez
Santa Fe’s history, softening their embrace National Museum of the American Indian. The trio
(1885–1943), San
Ildefonso, c. 1921–
of the city’s colonial past while acknowl- helped draft IARC’s Guidelines for Collaboration,
1923. Clay; height edging the truth of settler usurpation of the land which—along with the Standards for Museums with
1 ½, diameter 12 ½ that Tewa-speaking people call O’gah’poh geh Native American Collections and the Indigenous
inches. School for Owingeh—a name that translates as White Collections Care Guide, all detailed on the SAR
Advanced Research Shell Water Place. IARC’s purpose has website—have elevated SAR’s reputation as
collection. also shifted over time, from man- a leader in contemporary approaches to
Fig. 5. Jar by Lonnie aging a premier collection of managing institutional collections of
Vigil (b. 1949), southwestern Native American
Nambé, 1995. Clay art on behalf of a clique of schol-
and mica; height ars and collectors, to preserving Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo):
25 ⅝, diameter 28 ⅜ and interpreting artifacts with “The mono (Spanish for monkey) is es-
inches. School for
the participation of the com- sentially a Cochiti perspective on the peo-
Advanced Research
collection.
munity that made the work.
ple and culture of the outside world, and
As a research collection, IARC’s
Fig. 6. Cochiti holdings have long been on view Cochiti artists create these figurines to
mono figure,
c. 1900. Clay and
by appointment only. Two handsome sell to those people alongside traditional
paint; height 13 ¾,
open-storage vaults house baskets, polychrome pottery. The monos rep-
width 6 ¾, depth jewelry, katsinam (carved figures of
resent the curiosity of the artists who
6 ⅛ inches. School spirit beings), paintings, and textiles,
for Advanced Research plus more than 4,750 pieces of pottery, make them, and also their fear, humor,
collection. from ancient to contemporary. trepidation, and financial need.”
76 ANTIQUES
Native American art. “It’s a lesson in what a small
institution can do by bringing people from big insti-
tutions together to formulate policies,” Brown says.
IARC’s first traveling exhibition since its found-
ing a century ago, Grounded in Clay adheres
to a foremost tenet of the guidelines: engage
communities of origin as partners in project
development and execution. Poon notes:
“Developing relationships with descendant
communities is not new. A good example
of an early community-driven project is the
evolving, semi-permanent installation Here,
Now and Always, which first opened at Santa
Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo):

“I chose this pot because it
represents a transition from
traditional Pueblo pottery
to more contemporary forms
in the late 1960s and early
(Above) Elysia Poon, director of the ’70s. Works by Popovi Da
Indian Arts Research Center and co- and, shortly thereafter, Joseph
organizer of Grounded in Clay, chose Lonewolf and Tony Da were
this circa 1720 Zuni water jar as a influential in that shift. Their
way of honoring the memory of vessels inspired many emerging
her late friend and colleague Tim Native artists, me included, to
Edaakie (Zuni Pueblo), a member develop new techniques in not
of the Pueblo Pottery Collective and just pottery and design, but also
a 2019 SAR Native Artist Fellow. Native art forms as a whole.”
Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC)

in 1997. What is new is offering Pueblo voices as
a group curatorial expression and raising awareness
nationally by traveling Grounded in Clay to other Fig. 7. Zuni k’yabokya
museums and regions.” de’ele (water jar),
The project’s exuberant heart is the sixty-eight- c. 1720. Clay and paint;
member Pueblo Pottery Collective. First convened height 10, diameter
12 inches. Vilcek
in 2019 by Poon, the group includes potters and
Foundation collection.
other artists, as well as writers, poets, educators, com-
munity leaders, and museum professionals. Most are Fig. 8. Acoma storage jar,
from twenty-two Pueblo communities, nineteen of c. 1880. Clay and paint;
height 15 ½, diameter
which are in New Mexico. Poon invited each partici-
17 ¾ inches. Vilcek
pant to act as a curator and select one or two pieces Foundation collection.
of pottery for Grounded in Clay. Expressed in essay,
verse, and video, the curators’ observations about the Fig. 9. Seed jar by
Joseph Lonewolf (1932–
ceramics weave through the show, its accompanying 2014), Santa Clara, 1972.
catalogue, and a documentary film produced by Clay and paint; height
New Mexico PBS. 3 ½, diameter 3 ⅝ inches.
Deep, soulful, and celebratory, Grounded in Clay is School for Advanced
a listening tour—Pueblo community curators listen- Research collection.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 77
ing to the modeled, painted, and fired earth that many members regard as spiritually
animated, while visitors in turn listen to Pueblo voices. An inability to hear prevents
us from seeing, the presentation seems to say, wisdom with broad meaning for North
America’s tortured past and tumultuous present.
Pueblo voices are not monolithic, as we are reminded by a text panel thanking visi-
tors to the show in seven languages and several dialects spoken by the curators. Neither
are Pueblo stories, which defy strict categorization but together form a rich, oral tradi-
tion. “Make your stories worth telling. Those are the ones that live the longest. They
bring us back home,” writes Monyssha Rose Trujillo (Cochiti/Santa Clara/Laguna/
Jicarilla Pueblos/Diné), who chose a clay figure of a storyteller, a subject popularized
by Cochiti Pueblo potters.
I
n New York, Grounded in Clay is on view in two locations: at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and, by appointment, at the Vilcek Foundation town house on
East 70th Street. At the Met, the show follows the powerful exhibition Water
Memories in what the museum informally calls Wolf North, a rotational space that
T
he day I met Brian D. Vallo at Down- Vallo—a consultant whose clients include Yount, the curator in charge of the Met’s
Changing Minds, town Subscription, a coffee bar and the Vilcek Foundation in New York, the Field American Wing, and with Vilcek Foundation
One Pot at a Time newsstand near Canyon Road in Museum in Chicago, the de Young Museum president Rick Kinsel, long involved with
Santa Fe’s historic arts district, the former in San Francisco, the Heard Museum in helping collectors Jan T. Vilcek and Marica
Acoma Pueblo governor and current trustee Phoenix, and the Shelburne Museum in Vilcek shape their holdings of Pueblo pottery.
of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Vermont—helped write the School for As Kinsel explains, “For years, the Vilceks and
American Indian was in a celebratory mood. Advanced Research’s Guidelines for Collabo- I considered how we might create an exhibi-
Congress had days earlier passed the STOP ration, a resource for institutions seeking tion that would allow us to share items in
Act, legislation barring the exportation of partnerships with the Native communities our collection with the public. And from
Native American sacred objects and imposing that are the sources of artworks. the start, I was looking for a partner in the
increased penalties for the theft and traffick- A joyful expression of SAR principles, endeavor—a partner institution to work
ing of Native American cultural patrimony. Grounded in Clay evolved from parallel with who could establish and support mean-
“We have been working on this since conversations that Vallo, a community ingful connections with Pueblo artists and
2016,” says Vallo, for whom art and advo- advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s cultural leaders. We identified the School for
cacy have long been joined. A past director installation Art of Native America: The Charles Advanced Research and Brian Vallo as project
of Santa Fe’s Indian Arts Research Center, and Valerie Diker Collection, had with Sylvia partners early on.”
Patricia Marroquin Norby, the museum’s associate curator of Native American art, uses
for imaginative explorations of issues and themes suggested by the adjacent long-term
installation of Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection. Norby
sees the two temporary exhibitions as a continuum. The elements—earth, wind, fire,
and water—are intrinsic to Pueblo art and belief. As community curator Tony R.
Chavarria (Santa Clara Pueblo) reminds us, “Through humble elements of the earth,
gifts of the Clay Mother, we are connected.”
Norby has made the space a welcome spot for contemporary Native expression, newly
vibrant on the international stage thanks to institutions such as Santa Fe’s Institute of
American Indian Arts (IAIA), a fulcrum for Native arts education since 1962, and
an array of exhibitions, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jaune
Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, a retrospective look at the work of another lauded
New Mexican artist of Indigenous descent, on view in New York through August 13.
In the Met’s iteration of Grounded in Clay, Norby introduces the work of four
contemporary Pueblo artists known for mediums other than clay. By doing so, she
Brian D. Vallo (Acoma) co-curated the

installation of Grounded in Clay: The
Spirit of Pueblo Pottery at the Vilcek
Foundation in New York. Photograph
by Garret Vreeland.
Seen here, from left, at the opening of
Grounded in Clay at the Museum of
Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in
Santa Fe in July 2022: Santa Fe’s
Indian Arts Research Center (IARC)
director Elysia Poon, MIAC curator
of ethnology Tony Chavarria (Santa
Clara), Vilcek Foundation curator
Emily Schuchardt Navratil, School
for Advanced Research (SAR) presi-
dent Michael F. Brown, Vilcek Foun-
Of the more than one hundred ceramics are on view by appointment in the Vilcek Foun- Through its support of the exhibition, dation president Rick Kinsel, and
featured in the initial iteration of Grounded dation’s town house galleries at 21 East 70th catalogue, and associated efforts, the community curator and Vilcek advi-
in Clay, twenty-four belong to the Vilceks or Street. Himself a member of the Pueblo Pottery Vilcek Foundation amplified Pueblo voices sor Brian Vallo. The traveling exhibi-
tion was organized by IARC at SAR
their foundation. Emily Schuchardt Navratil, Collective, Vallo—who co-curated the section for a dramatically expanded audience and New York’s Vilcek Foundation.
the foundation’s curator, says the couple on view at the Vilcek Foundation—chose nationwide. “The Vilcek Foundation recog- Photograph by Terrance Clifford,
became interested in Pueblo pottery, one of two Acoma pieces for the exhibition. He first nizes the challenges that indigenous com- courtesy of the Vilcek Foundation.
four major focuses of their collection, after encountered one of the ceramics, a circa 1880 munities in the United States and around The Indian Arts Research Center at
the School for Advanced Research
first visiting Santa Fe in 1988 and returning storage jar decorated with stylized clouds, the globe have experienced as a result of houses more than twelve thousand
for twenty-two consecutive summers. The rainfall, and cornfields, at a San Francisco auc- colonization and imperialism,” Kinsel says. examples of southwestern Native
foundation’s exceptional trove now numbers tion house in 2006 and saw it again on a 2019 “With Grounded in Clay, we wanted to cre- American art in two open-storage
vaults open to visitors by appoint-
just over fifty pots, bowls, and jars dating visit to the Vilcek Foundation. He relates, “Hav- ate an exhibition that not only showcases ment. Photograph courtesy of the
from around 1100–1300 to the early twen- ing the privilege of holding the jar, connecting historic pieces of Pueblo pottery from the School for Advanced Research.
tieth century. with its form and construction, I spoke to it Vilcek Collection but celebrates the living Acoma Pueblo’s Sky City Buffalo
Ram Dancers performed during
In Manhattan, slightly more than half the in my Acoma language: I introduced myself, cultures and artistic traditions of Native
the Santa Fe opening of Grounded in
pieces in the original Santa Fe presentation of shared words of admiration, and gave thanks American people and communities in the Clay. Clifford photograph, courtesy
Grounded in Clay, or sixty-one ceramics in all, for the opportunity to meet again.” United States.” – L. B. of the Vilcek Foundation.
The gallery’s largest wall is reserved for a newly
commissioned diptych by Michael Namingha
(Hopi/Ohkay Owingeh) and Mateo Romero (Co-
chiti Pueblo). Working in contrasting styles but
joined by a shared keynote of color, the two award-
winning artists—both members of the Pueblo
Pottery Collective—contemplate the meanings of
landscape for Pueblo people.
A
descendant of the great Hopi potter Nam-
peyo (c. 1860–1942), Namingha has in re-
cent years experimented with photographs of
distant landscapes, sometimes captured via drone or
Google Earth and mounted on shaped acrylic. These
irregular forms push the limits of two-dimensional
perspective and, in the abstract, suggest pottery
fragments collaged together—a faint echo of an ap-
proach to patternmaking employed by Namingha’s
grandmother Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo (Tewa/
Hopi) (1928–2019), whose 1980 jar he chose for
Grounded in Clay.
Felicia Garcia (Santa Ynez Band of Cool and remote, Namingha’s meditative images
Chumash Indians/Samala Chumash): are as much about art-making as about landscape.
“The artist was just twelve years old when he cre- For the Met, he created a photo silkscreen on a
ated this pot. . . . We rarely see children’s artwork in shaped, wooden panel, seeking advice from master
museum collections, but it is evidence of the ongoing
cultural and artistic traditions of our communities.”
creates tension between the traditionalism of Pueblo

pottery, remarkably constant over the last millen-
nium, and new art that moves assertively between
two worlds, Native and non-, synthesizing both to
project portraits of indigeneity defiantly at odds with
old stereotypes.
Murals by De Haven Solimon Chaffins (La-
guna/Zuni) and Mallery Quetawki (Zuni) are the
first things visitors to the Met see. Environmental
Fig. 10. “Dinosaur”
water jar by William
themes, especially the toxic toll of uranium mining
Andrew Pacheco on or near Native land, interest both artists, who
(1975–; Kewa/Santo deftly manipulate Pueblo motifs and patterns across
Domingo) 1987. Clay fields of luminous color. Trained in science and the
and paint; height arts and keenly aware of her role as a communicator,
8 ½, diameter 8 ¾ Quetawki says, “Art creates a common language and
inches. School for we artists are a vital part of storytelling and record-
Advanced Research keeping for our cultures.”
collection.
Farther along in the Met show, a community table
Mark Mitchell (Tesuque Pueblo):
Fig. 11. Bean pot set with pottery suggests the medium’s ubiquity in
with lid by Lorencita Pueblo life, where it is used for storing, cooking, and “My grandmother, Lorencita Pino, worked with
Pino (1899–1986),
serving food and water. “Even today, when people this orange clay and often incorporated faces and
Tesuque, 1963. Clay
and mica; height
visit, we offer them a dipper, a glass, or a bottle of animals into her designs. The handles on this ves-
12 ½, width 13 ½ water. By keeping this custom and the knowledge
sel are foxes, but they have stripes on their tails like
inches. School for behind it alive, we honor the water and all our ances-
Advanced Research tors and grandmothers,” writes community curator chipmunks; animals that live in our communi-
collection. Diane Bird (Kewa/Santo Domingo Pueblo). ties are a part of everyday life and prayer.”
80 ANTIQUES
I use preexisting indigenous names for places and Fig. 12. Storage jar by
spaces. Language creates meaning.” Arroh-a-och, Laguna,
c. 1870–1880. Clay
If one notion describes Grounded in Clay it is
and paint; height
the extent to which Pueblo pottery is the col- 20 ¼, diameter 24 ½
lective artistic expression of people who care for inches. School for
one another and are joined by traditions that, Advanced Research
against the odds, have survived history’s adverse collection.
currents. Only spiritual conviction can explain Fig. 13. Mesa Verde
such durability. As Albert Alvidrez (Ysleta del Sur mug, c. 1150–1300,
Pueblo), one of the exhibition’s curators, tells us: and ladle, c. 1050–
“Our journey teaches us to be patient, that we must 1300. Clay and paint;
rest and let time travel, but when we emerge, we go height (of cup) 4 ½,
forward with enthusiasm, grace, and focus. Today, I diameter 4 inches;
join my clay brothers and sisters gathered to reflect height (of ladle) 2 ¼,
length 11 ⅞, depth
on our journey, share our song, and sow seeds of hope 5 ½ inches. School
and encouragement for all those who encounter us. for Advanced
Our pottery voices remain resilient and continue to Research collection.
be heard.”
Max Early (Laguna Pueblo):
“There are several ollas attributed to Arroh-a-och in Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery is on view at the Met-
museums across the country. I use the gender pronouns ropolitan Museum of Art from July 14, 2023 to June 4, 2024, and
‘she,’ ‘her,’ and ‘hers’ when referring to Arroh-a-och. at the Vilcek Foundation, where it may be viewed by appointment,
She was a two spirit. This is an alternative gender from July 13 to June 2, 2024. (To schedule a tour, visit https://
vilcek.co/gic-tour). The exhibition will subsequently travel to the
in various Native American cultures. At Laguna,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
a transgender female, or k’ukwi-mu, wore women’s
attire and performed tasks traditionally assumed by
women, such as grinding corn and making pottery. . . .
Lorraine Gala Lewis (Laguna, Taos, Hopi Pueblos):
The excellence of her work distinguishes Arroh-a-och as
“I love walking the same paths as those walked
one of the most talented potters at Laguna Pueblo.”
by my ancestors, following their footsteps, feeling their
presence, seeing pottery, and studying drawings.
printer Luther Davis on printing with a combination I introduce myself to my ancestors, tell them of my
of ink and sand, the latter gathered from clay beds intentions, leave my offering, and thank the ancient
visited by his forebears. The work incorporates a
double-printed view of Fajada Butte in Chaco Cul- ones for walking with me and showing me their home.
ture National Historical Park, a place of profound I experience a place of gathering for our people,
spiritual importance for Hopi people, but one lately and feel and understand the environment and its
menaced by environmental degradation. Namingha elements. In these surroundings, I always feel a
says, “Grounded in Clay is about looking at our heri-
tage—our design heritage, our family heritage—and sense of renewal and balance. This is reflected
the vessels our ancestors created. In my case, it’s in my re-creations of ancestral pottery.”
also about looking for clues within my own artistic
practice and how they link me to my past. Chaco is
a place where we all come from.”
“Pueblo people are sublimated in the landscape,
not apart from it, as observers of a natural sub-
lime,” says Romero, whose loose, expressionistic
landscapes are sometimes inhabited by enigmatic
figures. “The Tewa have a word for it, poeh-ha,
which means breath of life. I’m trying to capture
a piece of that connection to the landscape—the
energy, the movement. My landscapes are not
invented or remembered; they are specific spaces.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 81
By Michael Diaz-Griffith
An excerpt from the book The New Antiquarians takes us into the Maine
home of a young clothing designer turned folk art collector and dealer
I
n another time, in another place, a young of the North, and feel the terror and thrill of
person in search of a new life might have an entirely new life awaiting them at the end
boarded a ship to a distant land. Sailing of the highway.
into a strange port beneath an earth-straddling
colossus, such a person might have looked
up, inhaled the scent of unknown spices, and
felt the terror and thrill of an entirely new life
awaiting them on the approaching shore.
Today, in New York City, a young person
in search of a new life might pack up their car
and point it toward Maine. Driving into that
strange state beneath a vault of pines, such a
person might look up, inhale the sharp scent
Fig. 1. A view of the kitchen in Samuel Snider’s 1820s–1830s Cape-style cottage in Wiscasset, Maine. Antique cutting boards,
Victorian wire fly covers, and other useful antique objects decorate the space. The framed drawing of a tureen was bought as-is,
since Sam liked the over-the-top gilt frame. All photographs © Brian W. Ferry, courtesy of Monacelli, New York.
Fig. 2. Sam in his shop, Samuel Snider Antiques, on Water Street in Wiscasset. The generously scaled Queen Anne armchair next
to him has Spanish feet, a later green-painted surface, and loads of charm.
S
amuel Snider is just such a person. During the Fig. 3. This
Covid-19 pandemic he gave up his Manhattan theorem-painted
apartment, his fashion business, and his cosmo- velvet cat from
politan métier and set off for a new life in the Maine France or Germany
has been amusing
woods. He had some advantages over the ancient
viewers since the
traveler. Having spent a number of childhood sum- nineteenth century.
mers in Vacationland, he was well acquainted with
the state’s special strangeness, not to mention its hard, Fig. 4. A symmetri-
cal vignette
cold beauty. He was acquainted, too, with the local
highlights a silk-
inhabitants: antiques dealers. These soon became his on-linen sampler
mentors. Today, instead of hustling in Babylon, Sam wrought by Polly
continues the great tradition of collecting—and deal- Alexander of
ing—that some have feared gone from this world. Dunbarton, New
News of Sam’s existence reached me through one of Hampshire, in
his mentors, who is also a mentor of mine. 1818. It is mounted
“There’s a new antiques dealer in Maine,” the in a nineteenth-
century gilt frame
veteran dealer reported, as if a creature thought to be
sourced from Amy
extinct had been spotted in the wild. Perhaps it had. Finkel, an expert
“He’s young.” The word rang out, italicized, in the air, in American
before an even more dramatic pronouncement was samplers well-
made: “He loves Americana.” known to readers
By this point I had been tracking the young collec- of this magazine.
tors who I call New Antiquarians for years, and many
“There’s a new
antiques dealer
in Maine,” the veteran
dealer reported, as if a
creature thought to be extinct
had been spotted in the
wild. . . . “He’s young.”
The word rang out, italicized,
in the air, before an even
more dramatic pronouncement
was made: “He loves
Americana”
84 ANTIQUES
Fig. 5. Sam’s commitment to a sustained practice of serial collecting is evident in his impressive collection of mocha ware and feather-edge Leeds
creamware. Both types of pottery are perennially popular among Americana enthusiasts, and with their fresh, charming appeal on display in this
nineteenth-century New England step-back cupboard, you can see why.
Fig. 6. Fitting within a hair’s breadth of the ceiling beam in Sam’s bedroom is an untouched Maine pencil-post bed, circa 1830, with its original testers. Unusually, the
netting is period. A nineteenth-century watercolor theorem hangs on the wall behind the bed, bestowing sweet dreams, and the antique log cabin quilt is in active use.
Indeed, everything you see here is equally old, fresh-looking, and usable. Do not let anyone tell you that antiques are not for today.
of them (including myself ) favored
American art and material culture,
which was undergoing a re-evaluation:
the manifold contributions of Black
craftspeople were finally being recog-
nized, and a fresh cycle of appreciation
had begun for Shaker material, pro-
duced with unusually exacting rigor
in a rational manner that could be
seen, ahistorically but compellingly, as
proto-modernist. Strange and colorful
examples of folk art were beginning to
filter into Instagram feeds. Few new
dealers had emerged in the field, how-
ever, and none were precisely young.
I
f you saw the clothing line that
Sam produced in his city days,
these words would not be needed.
Reminiscent of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century workwear, his gar-
ments—stitched from unbleached
linen, with curved hems and roomy
work pockets—were a sartorial cri de
coeur for simplicity, functionality, and
a primitive kind of refinement. It is
easy to understand why, in an era that
favored streetwear and ribald eclecti-
cism, he abandoned the business. It
is equally easy to see why country
furniture, antique tools, organic forms,
and homespun textiles appeal to Sam,
whose soul recognizes, and therefore
demands as a requirement, the beauty
of integrity. Why design anew and
create waste when so many things of
integrity exist already? Such questions
emerge naturally in the clearing of a
new life. Happily they do not need to Fig. 7. Within his collecting practice Sam favors
be answered, only acted upon. humble objects, including schoolgirl samplers and
With the encouragement of his other forms of women’s work, rather than focusing
mentors, Sam acted. His home and on acknowledged masterpieces of design such as
weathervanes. This New England schoolgirl water-
shop, pictured here, follow loyally—
color from the 1830s hails from the collection of
which is to say, radically—in the New Robert Bishop, director of the American Folk Art
England tradition of collecting and Museum from 1977 to 1991, whose life was cut
displaying antiques, and Sam loyally— short by AIDS.
which is to say, radically—attends the
Fig. 8. For all the fuss over mixing antiques with
regional antiques shows and country modern and contemporary material, the purism of a
auctions his elders have frequented period room remains peculiarly compelling. Imagine
for decades. Recently we discussed the this one illumined only by candles and the spirit of
concessions at these events. Chili dogs youth. What could be more opulent? The textile
and chowder, we agreed, are not mil- mounted on the wall is an appliqué wool and velvet
lennial staples. While we may abstain table rug from the 1830s. Every stick of furniture was
from consuming them, however, we produced in New England between 1800 and 1820.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 87
88 ANTIQUES
enjoy watching our mentors enjoy their naughty Fig. 9. A view of
treats. Someday the food will suit us better, but Sam’s antiques shop,
something will be lost in the change. which appears exactly
A
s antiques dealers know: for one thing as such a shop might
have appeared fifty
lost, another is gained, though never in
or even one hundred
quite the same form. Sam knows this, years ago.
and, knowing his own mind, he is not shy about
bringing new life to an old trade. He prefers Fig. 10. Three velvet
strawberry emeries—
material from the first quarter of the nineteenth pincushions filled
century—a bit “late,” believe it or not, in the with sand or ground
context of early American furniture and folk pottery, which keeps
art. And while I doubt he prefers social media to needles sharp—rest
hooked rugs, pincushions, rocks, and moss, he on a Leeds creamware
does his duty as a young dealer and promotes his platter encircled by
wares—and the practice of collecting—online, pretty painted decora-
conducting quilt-washing tutorials and AMA tion. These emeries
once were functional
(Ask Me Anything) question-and-answer ses- objects. Now they are
sions with candor and quiet verve. diminutive sculptures.
Today, anywhere in the country, a young per-
son in search of a new life might pack up their
car and point it toward the source of those videos.
Samuel Snider will be there, ready to receive
the next generation of collectors just as he was
received, and helped into a new life, not long ago.
This article is excerpted and adapted from The New Antiquar-

ians: At Home with Young Collectors, published by Monacelli
(June 2023)
JULY/AUGUST 2023 89
Community
Chest
Artist and artisan
Madeline Yale
Wynne and the
founding of the
Deerfield arts and
crafts movement
By Suzanne L. Flynt
and Daniel S. Sousa
I
f Madeline Yale Wynne (Fig. 3), an artist and noted in a memorial volume for Wynne, who died the
leading voice for the American arts and crafts same year. At some later time, it traveled with a family
movement, had not marked an oak chest she to South America, where it stayed until it was given to
designed “MADE/ IN/ AMERICA/ 1903/ -MYW-,” the family’s nanny. The chest returned to England with
it is doubtful we would be celebrating the discovery of her, and she later gave it to the son of the next family for
1
that piece today (Fig. 1). The chest was unquestion- whom she worked. It was he, near the end of his life,
ably Wynne’s greatest artistic accomplishment, and who in 2015 sent it to auction, where it was purchased
she considered it “per- by the London dealer
haps better than any- from whom Historic
2
thing she had done.” Deerfield in Massachu-
Known as the Garden setts acquired it.
of Hearts chest for Time had not dulled
the decoration on the luster of Wynne’s
its inner lid depict- creation. The chest is
ing a landscape of now the centerpiece of
three inverted heart- the museum’s current
shaped trees standing exhibition Garden of
alongside a winding Hearts: Madeline Yale
river, this chest is a Wynne and Deerfield’s
tour-de-force of arts Arts and Crafts Move-
and crafts design (Fig. 2). ment. The show fea-
Designed, built, and tures work by Wynne
decorated when Wyn- and other Deerfield
ne was fifty-eight, it artisans from the col-
stands not only as a lections of Historic
reflection of her creativity and confidence as an art- Deerfield and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial As-
ist, but also of her talents as a painter, metalsmith, and sociation’s Memorial Hall Museum and tells the story
woodworker. Likely commissioned by an unknown of Wynne’s remarkably diverse artistic talents and her
patron for a bride moving to or living in England, the innovative and progressive spirit.
specific whereabouts of Wynne’s masterpiece was un- Wynne was born on September 25, 1847, in
known for much of the twentieth century.3 The chest Newport, New York, to Catherine Brooks and
was in England until at least 1918 when its location was Linus Yale Jr.—inventor of the cylinder lock and
Fig. 1. Garden of Hearts chest by Wynne, probably Deerfield, Massachusetts and Chicago, 1903. Incised “MADE/ IN/ AMERICA/ 1903/
MYW” on the back. Oak, copper, iron, cabochons, paint; height 30, width 45, depth 21 inches. Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts;
photograph by Penny Leveritt.
Fig. 2. Detail of interior of the lid of the Garden of Hearts chest. Historic Deerfield; Leveritt photograph.
Fig. 3 Madeline Yale Wynne (1847–1918) in a photograph by Frances (1854–1941) and Mary Allen (1858–1941), Deerfield, Massachusetts,
1908–1910. Platinum print, 6 ⅜ by 4 ¾ inches. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts.
co-founder of the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company.
She and her family lived briefly in Philadelphia and
Eagleswood, New Jersey, before moving to Shelburne
Falls, Massachusetts, in 1861. There, at age eighteen,
Wynne married Henry Winn and had two children.
The unhappy marriage dissolved in 1874, and in 1883
she changed the spelling of her last name from “Winn”
to “Wynne.” With her mother’s help rearing her sons,
Wynne was able to pursue her love of art.
Wynne’s earliest art training came in the small village
of Deerfield—a place she would later call home. There,
in 1872, she studied painting with Deerfield native
George Fuller, who worked in the lyrical Barbizon style
of landscape painting. Five years later, in 1877, Wynne
entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
Philadelphia, and she continued her studies the follow-
ing year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston. During her brief time there, Wynne seems to
have excelled as a student—she would teach drawing
classes at the school—before moving on to attend the
Art Students League in New York in 1880.
Wynne was not only a tireless

promoter of arts and crafts
MHISPSK]MR(IIVÁIPHshe lived
it through her artwork. Her most creative
expressions came in metal, notably in the
decoration of her Garden of Hearts chest
There, she continued her study of painting under Walter

Shirlaw, an artist of the Munich school, which emphasized
dark tonal qualities. His influence can be seen in Wynne’s
portrait of her friend’s daughter, Madelene Isadore Taylor
(Fig. 7). Wynne followed her formal training with an
extended trip to Europe where she met other women
artists, including her future lifelong companion, Annie
Cabot Putnam of Boston. Although capable in multiple
mediums, including oils and watercolors, Wynne never
considered herself a proficient painter. As she wrote to a
friend: “I do paint, but it is mostly in my head and heart,
for my unruly servant of a body refuses to obey many
of my requests, and insists on playing lord and master.”4
After returning from Europe, Wynne and Putnam set up
a studio in Boston for painting and metalwork.
92 ANTIQUES
Fig. 4. The Manse in
Deerfield in a photograph
by Frances and Mary
Allen, Deerfield,
Massachusetts, c. 1900.
Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association’s
Memorial Hall Museum.
Fig. 5. Arts and crafts
exhibition in Deerfield in
a photograph by Frances
and Mary Allen, 1899.
Pocumtuck Valley
Fig. 6. Interior of the
“Little Brown House” in
Deerfield, used as a studio
by Wynne and Annie
Cabot Putnam (1850–
1924) in a photograph by
Frances and Mary Allen,
c. 1890. Pocumtuck Valley
Fig. 7. Portrait of Made-
lene Isadore Taylor
(1878–1962) by Wynne,
c. 1882. Oil on canvas,
31 ⅜ by 25 ⅜ inches
(framed). Historic Deer-
field; Leveritt photograph.
E
ager to return to rural western Massachu- ing studio (Fig. 6). Their home and studio (later
setts, Wynne purchased the 1770 Joseph used as a reception space and venue for artisans’
Barnard house in Deerfield along with lectures) eventually became important centers for
Putnam in 1885 as a summer home and renamed the village’s burgeoning arts and crafts movement.
it the Manse (Fig. 4). They had a small forge built While Wynne considered Deerfield her home,
in a barn behind the house to pursue their metal- she and Putnam typically resided there only during
work. Their workspace was greatly augmented in the summer months. Their participation in urban
1890 when Putnam purchased the 1785 Hitchcock arts and crafts activities created significant networks
house (also known as the “Little Brown House”) in for Deerfield. In Chicago, where Wynne resided
Deerfield, which she and Wynne used as a paint- with her brother, Julian Yale, during winters from
JULY/AUGUST 2023 93
1890 to 1909, she not only served as a founding
member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society in
1897, but also practiced and exhibited her met-
alwork and pursued writing, publishing her first
Fig. 8. Chrysanthemum book of fiction, The Little Room and Other Stories, in
bowl by Wynne, 1895. The following year, Wynne’s reputation was
Shelburne Falls, further established when the Chicago Daily Tribune
Massachusetts, 1880.
Inscribed “MADELENE/
likened her artistic and literary versatility to that of
YALE/ WYNNE/ 1880”
the great men of the Renaissance.5 Putnam spent
on the underside. Brass; her winters participating in the Society of Arts and
height 3, diameter 12 ¼ Crafts in Boston as a member and from 1908 to
inches. Pocumtuck 1912 as a juror reviewing work for the society’s
Valley Memorial salesroom and exhibitions.
B
Association’s Memorial eginning in 1899, annual summer exhibi-
Hall Museum. tions in Deerfield (Fig. 5) showcased linen-
Fig. 9. Detail of a on-linen embroideries by the Deerfield
counterpane, Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework (Fig. 9),
Society of Blue and an organization founded in 1896 by Margaret
White Needlework,
Whiting and Ellen Miller; as well as photography
Deerfield, Massachu-
setts, 1898. Plain
by Frances and Mary Allen and Emma Lewis Cole-
weave linen and linen man; furniture; and metalwork by Wynne and
embroidery, 100 by Putnam (as seen on the mantelpiece and to the right
104 inches overall. of the fireplace in Fig. 5).
Historic Deerfield; In 1901 Wynne took important steps to formalize
Leveritt photograph. these local craft initiatives by gathering a group of
local residents at the Manse to create the Deerfield

Society of Arts and Crafts, which incorporated the
needlework group. Wynne was elected president—
a position she held for life. The same year, Wynne
invited a small number of women to her home to
learn raffia basket weaving. The group became
formally known as the Pocumtuck Basket Mak-
ers in 1902 (Fig. 11). Handicrafts produced
under the aegis of the Deerfield Society
of Arts and Crafts eventually expanded
to include weaving by Luanna Thorn,
Eleanor Arms, and others; wrought-iron
work by Cornelius Kelley; basketry by
the Deerfield Basket Makers alongside
the Pocumtuck Basket Makers (Fig. 10);
furniture by Madeline Wynne, Edwin
Thorn, and Caleb Allen; pottery by
Chauncey Thomas; and candlewicking (or
tufted work) and netting by Emma Henry
and others. The village was not only one of
the earliest but a leading arts and crafts center
in America, and through handicrafts Deerfield’s
farsighted women effectively revitalized the eco-
nomic life of the village and helped shape it into a
cultural destination.
As an organization, the Deerfield Society of Arts
and Crafts strove to maintain “a standard of excel-
94 ANTIQUES
work, a brass bowl of 1880
etched with chrysanthemums,
shows her mastery of the mate-
rial and refined sense of design
(Fig. 8). Over time, she embraced
looser, less representational designs.
Wynne’s distinctive handwork, use of
semiprecious gemstones, pebbles, and
lesser metals such as copper and brass
on her hand-hammered bowls, hairpins,
jewelry, and belt buckles resonate with
the ideals of the arts and crafts movement
(Figs. 12, 13, 16). A November 23, 1902,
Chicago Daily Tribune reviewer described
her silver as having “the odd charm of look- Fig. 10. Old Indian
ing quite primitive, while in perfection of House basket by Sarah
form and finish they are equal to the best Cowles (1845–1922),
modern work.” Deerfield, c. 1903.
Wynne’s creativity and originality can also Raffia, dye; height 9 ⅛,
width 11 ¼ inches.
be seen in an undulating poppy-shaped cop- Historic Deerfield;
per bowl featuring punch-worked designs and Leveritt photograph.
a patinated red interior (Fig. 15). She exhibited
Fig. 11. Basket makers
her metalwork nationally to critical acclaim as well
on Wynne’s porch in a
as in summer exhibitions in Deerfield from 1899 photograph by Frances
to 1914. Ahead of their time, Wynne’s modernist and Mary Allen, 1901.
designs incorporating vigorous lines and animated Pocumtuck Valley
lence of design and integrity of workmanship” in its surfaces paved the way for the next generation of Memorial Association’s
handicrafts.6 To ensure consistent quality, in 1903 metalworkers and artists. Memorial Hall Museum.
Wynne, Putnam, and painter Augustus Vincent
Tack were chosen as jurors to vet work produced
by society members. In 1906 the Deerfield Society
of Blue and White Needlework split from the
Deerfield Society of Arts and Crafts, which then
changed its name to Deerfield Industries. The vil-
lage gained further prominence in 1908 when, as
a vice-president (along with Arthur Wesley Dow)
of the National League of Handicraft Societies,
Wynne helped organize the group’s first annual
convention there—an important showcase for local
artisans and an opportunity to hear about advances
in craftsmanship.
Wynne was not only a tireless promoter of
arts and crafts ideology in Deerfield, she lived it
through her artwork. Her most creative expres-
sions came in metal, notably in the decoration of
her Garden of Hearts chest. She credited her inter-
est in the craft to her father’s workshop: “Being the
daughter of Linus Yale Jr. the inventor of the Yale
Lock I had a training in mechanics and access to
shop and machinery, and thus naturally became
interested in Arts & Crafts, developed my own
line in metal work and enamels without instruc-
tion except as it had been gained by the foregoing
experiences.”7 Wynne’s earliest piece of metal-
JULY/AUGUST 2023 95
Between 1899 and 1903 Wynne used “that in Louisville, Kentucky. Unlike other arts and
inventive brain of hers, and those deft hands so crafts furniture, Wynne’s chests are imaginatively
skillful in many arts,” to design and build artistic painted, carved, and ornamented with decorative
furniture.8 A skilled woodworker, she created metalwork.9 Well-versed in late seventeenth- and
at least seven boxes (Fig. 18), and two full-sized early eighteenth-century furniture-making tradi-
“bridal chests,” as they were called in those days. tions of the Connecticut River valley, Wynne wrote
The other besides the Garden of Hearts chest was an article on the topic for the September 1899 issue
made in 1899 for Bertha Bullock Folsom, daughter of House Beautiful. The overall form of the Garden
of the owner of a Chicago shoemaking firm, and of Hearts chest takes its inspiration from examples
is now in the collection of the Speed Art Museum such as the Abigail Allis, or “AA,” chest of about
Fig. 12. Daffodil bowl

by Wynne, Deerfield,
c. 1896. Copper with
tin overlay; height 4,
diameter 8 inches.
Pocumtuck Valley
Fig. 13. Belt buckle
by Wynne, Deerfield,
c. 1907. Silver and
turquoise; height 1 ⅝,
width 2 ½ inches.
Pocumtuck Valley
96 ANTIQUES
to the three inverted heart-shaped trees in Wynne’s
landscape. While the heart-shaped motif was a
common one in early American decorative arts
and was used to decorate a variety of items, from
wrought-iron toasters to domestic textiles, Wynne
did not confine herself to following historic prec-
edent, but added her own joyful exuberance to the
form she described as a bride’s chest.
T
he chest facade and sides feature stylized mo-
tifs in hammered-copper panels, and the lid
exterior shows a majestic hammered-copper
peacock outlined with wrought-iron strapping, and
elves and rabbits nestled beneath a large oak tree,
likely symbols that were meaningful to the bride for
whom it was made (Fig. 20). The lid’s interior reveals
Wynne’s brilliantly carved and painted landscape fea-
turing orange trees with blossoms and fruit outlined
in gold paint, and “the river of life [flowing] through
the garden and the web of circumstances, some of
earth, some heaven-born” (Fig. 2).10 To achieve some
1690 (Fig. 17). Similar to the Allis chest, the Garden of this carving, Madeline employed pyrography—
of Hearts chest is built primarily using frame and ornament created by burning wood with a hot metal
panel construction. Wynne also re-created subtle tool. The landscape is framed in the upper corners by
period details, including the chamfered edges along hammered- and pierced-copper butterfly wings set
the rails surrounding the front and side panels, and with cabochon stones (Fig. 19). Wynne likely com-
the molding along the corner posts and the drawer missioned a blacksmith to create wrought ironwork
facade. However, in other areas, Wynne’s construc- of her design for the chest. Known to have traveled by
tion followed her own designs. For instance, unlike train between Deerfield and Chicago with projects in
the Allis chest, she did not use wooden pins to join tow, Wynne likely worked on various components of
the rails to the posts. Additionally, instead of using this chest in both locations.
a single large dovetail or nails to join the drawer In 1911 Wynne and Putnam started wintering in
sides to the drawer front—a technique commonly the artistic community of Tryon, North Carolina.
found on early chests—she used multiple small There, Wynne continued writing. She published the
dovetails. Also departing from period examples, short story collection Si Briggs Talks in 1917, and
Wynne’s drawer is not side hung, but runs along the died the following year in Asheville, North Carolina,
case bottom. Wynne’s use of a green stain and large on January 4. Although Deerfield’s handicraft pro-
strap hinges are also more characteristic of arts and duction was paused by World War I and a change
crafts furniture than of period examples. Wynne
was therefore not seeking to replicate the earlier Fig. 14. Sash buckle by Wynne,
examples, but to pay homage to their overall Deerfield, c. 1902. Copper with
semiprecious stones; height 3,
appearance, and to use their surfaces as
width 2 ⅞ inches. Pocumtuck
a canvas of sorts for her own artistic Valley Memorial Association’s
creations. Memorial Hall Museum.
Wynne’s decoration of the
Fig. 15. Poppy bowl by Wynne,
Garden of Hearts was also likely
Deerfield or Chicago, c. 1899.
inspired by the inverted-heart Marked “MYW” on the underside.
motifs and elaborate vine and Patinated copper; height 2 ½,
leaf carvings found on the Massa- diameter 5 ½ inches. Historic
chusetts pieces known as “Hadley Deerfield; Leveritt photograph.
chests” and boxes. The three front Fig. 16. Watch fob by Wynne,
panels of a chest initialed “SH,” in Deerfield, c. 1907. Silver and rock
the collection of the Pocumtuck Valley crystal; length 5 ⅛ inches.
Memorial Association’s Memorial Hall Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Asso-
Museum, also bear an interesting resemblance ciation’s Memorial Hall Museum.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 97
of leadership at Deerfield Industries after Wynne’s
death, crafts continued to be produced under the
organization’s auspices until 1941.
Employing all of her talents as a woodworker,
metalworker, and painter, the Garden of Hearts
chest truly stands as Wynne’s magnum opus and as
Fig. 17. Chest, Hatfield, a celebration of hand craftsmanship. As a missionary
Massachusetts, area, of arts and crafts philosophy, Wynne left a legacy not
c. 1690. Carved “AA” on only through her artwork but also through craft orga-
the front. Oak and yellow nizations that inspired the work of many artists. One
pine; height 35 ¼, width
50, depth 20 inches.
friend aptly captured Wynne’s spirit, writing in 1918:
Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association’s She gave freely of herself to all with whom she
Memorial Hall Museum. came in contact, and no one met her, even casu-
Fig. 18. Wynne’s Peacock
ally, who did not retain a vivid impression of
Minuet box in a photo- her gracious, “generous-seeking” personality. She
graph by Frances and was so much more than the sum of all her varied
Mary Allen, 1899. gifts—a beautiful woman, with singular, excep-
Platinum print, 5 ¼ tional charm of voice, manner, gesture; artist,
by 6 ½ inches. Pocumtuck craftsman, unique story-teller, writer of prose Garden of Hearts: Madeline Yale Wynne and Deerfield’s Arts and Crafts
Valley Memorial and poetry (too little known); loving daughter, Movement is on view at Historic Deerfield’s Flynt Center of Early
Association’s Memorial
sister, mother, and most satisfying friend.11 New England Life in Deerfield, Massachusetts, to March 3, 2024.
Hall Museum. A related exhibition on the arts and crafts movement in Deerfield,
Fig. 19. Detail of upper Skilled Hands and High Ideals, is on permanent view at the Pocum-
left corner of lid interior
It was precisely Wynne’s versatility and her ability
tuck Valley Memorial Association’s Memorial Hall Museum. Visit
on the Garden of Hearts to find the genius in everyone that allowed her to
artscrafts-deerfield.org
chest. Historic Deerfield; become a critical leader not only in the develop-
Leveritt photograph. ment of the arts and crafts movement in Deerfield,
Fig. 20. Detail of the
but in communities throughout the country. In the 1 Much of the information presented in this article on Wynne’s life and
exterior of the lid on the creation of the Garden of Hearts chest, Wynne gave the arts and crafts movement in Deerfield is drawn from and discussed
it her heart and soul, resulting in what is perhaps more extensively in Suzanne L. Flynt, Poetry to the Earth: The Arts and
Garden of Hearts chest. Crafts Movement in Deerfield (Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press Editions,
Historic Deerfield; one of the most significant pieces of American arts in association with Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield,
Leveritt photograph. and crafts furniture made by a woman. MA, and Hudson Hills Press, Easthampton, MA, 2012). 2 Annie Cabot
Putnam to Isadore Pratt Taylor, December 1, [1918], Taylor Papers,
Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library, Deerfield, Massa-
chusetts. 3 The chest was well known at the time it was made after be-
ing reproduced in Madeline Yale Wynne, “The Influence of Arts and
Crafts,” Good Housekeeping, vol. 37, no. 1 (October 1903), p. 329. 4 Mad-
eline Yale Wynne to Isadore Pratt Taylor, October 7, 1891, Taylor Family
Papers, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library. 5 “A Gifted
Chicago Woman: Versatile Madeline Yale Wynne,” Chicago Daily Tri-
bune, January 26, 1896. 6 Constitution of Arts and Crafts Society, Deer-
field Industries Minutes Book I, 1901. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial
Association Library. 7 Society of Arts and Crafts Boston questionnaire,
1906. Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. 8 Harriet Mon-
roe, “An Easter Bride’s Chest,” House Beautiful, vol. 11, no. 6 (May
1902), pp. 365–366. 9 See “Chicago Women’s Wedding Chests,” Chi-
cago Daily Tribune, January 4, 1903. 10 Wynne, “The Influence of Arts
and Crafts,” p. 329. 11 Elizabeth Head Gates, in In Memory of Madeline
Yale Wynne (n.p., [1918]), pp. 22–23.
SUZANNE L. FLYNT was curator of the Pocumtuck Valley Memo-

rial Association’s Memorial Hall Museum for thirty-five years, and
is the author of Poetry to the Earth: The Arts and Crafts Movement in
Deerfield (2012). She is now a trustee at Historic Deerfield.
DANIEL S. SOUSA is assistant curator at Historic Deerfield with
primary responsibility for the furniture collection. With Suzanne L.
Flynt, he co-curated the exhibition Garden of Hearts: Madeline Yale
Wynne and Deerfield’s Arts and Crafts Movement.
98 ANTIQUES
From a Chain Gang
Overcoming extraordinary adversity, self-taught artist

Winfred Rembert preserved his fraught past in words and
in startling images made of tooled and painted leather
to Art Museums By
David
Ebony
T
he remarkable biographies of some self- works of art. Born in Americus, Georgia, in the Jim Fig. 1. All of Me by
Winfred Rembert (1945–
taught and outsider artists can sometimes Crow South, with enforced segregation and dire 2021). Dye on carved and
tooled leather, 30 ½ by 33 ¾
overshadow the art itself, while the lives poverty an everyday reality, Winfred Rembert (Fig. 4) inches. Except as noted, objects
illustrated are © 2023 The
of others—Henry Darger or Eugene Von Bruen- was given up by his mother for adoption at three Estate of Winfred Rembert /
ARS NY; except as noted,
chenhein, to name two examples—are tame or months of age. He was handed over to his great
photographs courtesy the estate,
inconsequential compared with the wild abandon aunt, Lillian Rembert (called Mama), who lived in Fort Gansevoort, New York,
and Hauser and Wirth.
of their artworks. One self-taught artist, however, Cuthbert, Georgia, and raised the child as best she Fig. 2. Caint to Caint II, 2016.
has an exceptional life story, expressed in written could amidst the often-insurmountable difficulties Dye on carved and tooled
leather, 28 ½ by 33 inches.
form and in equally compelling and adventurous facing the Black community there.
L
argely illiterate, forced by necessity to 2021 autobiography, Chasing Me to My Grave: An
work in the cotton fields as an adolescent, Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South. These incidents
Rembert in his teens became a rebel and an in his life are also conveyed in equally disturbing—
activist, attracted to the work of the NAACP amid and riveting—works of art that he created in his
the nascent Civil Rights Movement of the early later years. Counterbalancing the episodes of brutal
1960s. Outspoken and charismatic, an impressive violence, however, in words and images, are humor-
singer and dancer, and well known in small-town ous anecdotes and warm profiles of local residents
Cuthbert, he was a frequent target for Black-hating that enliven the visual and verbal narratives. They
vigilante groups, as well as local also offer unique insights into daily life in poor Black
authorities. In 1967, following an communities of the rural South.
incident involving a stolen police In 2022 Rembert was posthumously awarded
car, he survived a near lynch- the Pulitzer Prize in biography for the book, which
ing—stripped, hung upside- recounts how, beginning at age fifty-one, with
down from a tree branch, beaten, the encouragement of his wife, Patsy, he began
stabbed in the groin, and almost to convey the story of his life through art and
castrated. He was subsequently literature. For his visual art, he used an unusual
sent to prison to serve time at medium: tooled leather painted with dye, using
hard labor on a chain gang. techniques he learned in prison to make decorated
Many brutal incidents of vio- leather handbags and wallets that he sometimes
lence against the Black community sold to prison visitors. Rembert spent seven years
in Cuthbert are described in vivid, on that Georgia chain gang, during which time
exacting, and sometimes heart- he met Patsy Gammage, whom he married soon
wrenching detail in Rembert’s after being released from prison. He moved to the
102 ANTIQUES
Northeast with her, found work in Connecticut in a shipping yard, settled down
for a time, and fathered eight children.
A knee injury left him suddenly unable to work, and in a desperate effort to support
his family, he got entangled with drug dealers peddling heroin, which he himself never
used. His activities, nevertheless, eventually led to another, four-year, prison sentence.
This time, Patsy was able to convince a judge to release Rembert early, with the promise
that he would never again deal drugs. It was a promise that Rembert kept.
He always enjoyed drawing, and now, living in a New Haven housing project,
Rembert started to tell his life story via works on paper and on carved and painted
leather. Artistically and stylistically, he found inspiration and motivation in a book of
1920s works by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, Negro Drawings, that he saw in
a local bookstore. The shop’s proprietor, Phil McBlain, became a friend and an early
champion and collector of Rembert’s art. McBlain lined the walls of his shop with
Rembert’s paintings, an act of kindness and faith in his talent that would transform
the budding artist’s life.
In his autobiography, Rembert recounts how a big break came for him in 2000, when
he crashed an invitation-only meeting at the Yale Graduate Club, which planned to
donate money to artists in the local community. He brought with him one of his leather
panels, which greatly impressed Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gal-
lery, who happened to be at the meeting. Soon after, Reynolds visited the bookstore
to see more of Rembert’s work and offered him an exhibition later that year at the Yale
University Art Gallery. The success of that show, from which the museum acquired a
triptych, launched Rembert’s career as a professional artist.
Since that time, his work has appeared in many prestigious art institutions and gal-
leries throughout the US. In 2011 he was the subject of a feature-length documentary,
All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Earlier this year in New York, the art
gallery Hauser and Wirth presented Winfred Rembert: All of Me, a posthumous career
survey containing forty-four works, from 1990 to 2018.
Fig. 3. Flour Bread,

1998. Dye on carved
and tooled leather,
23 by 33 ½ inches.
Fig. 4. Rembert in
2017. Photograph
by Renan Ozturk,
courtesy of Hauser
and Wirth.
Fig. 5. Jeff’s Pool
Room, 2003. Dye
on carved and tooled
leather, 23 ¼ by
35 inches.
Fig. 6. Civil Rights -
I Have a Dream,
1999. Dye on carved
and tooled leather,
35 ½ by 23 ¾ inches.
JULY/AUGUST 2023 103

carefully constructed composition corresponds to
the work of a host of modernist painters, from Jacob
Lawrence to Milton Avery. Similarly, the radiant
cerulean tones and vibrant swimmers and divers
featured in The Curvey bear comparison to works
by adventurous painters like Marsden Hartley, or
Katherine Bradford in her recent canvases.
M
any of Rembert’s works examine in blunt
detail the horrific abuse Black citizens
suffered at the hands of white figures of
authority in the rural South. They often illustrate
specific incidents, and some of the most painful
episodes he endured in his youth. Inside the Trunk,
for instance, depicts the moment in 1967 when
Rembert was shoved into the trunk of a car by a
white vigilante group wielding clubs, knives, and ax
handles, to be driven off to a wooded area where he
was to be lynched by the mob (Fig. 7). The Deputy
(2001) retells an earlier incident in which he was
sadistically beaten by an armed deputy in his jail cell,
just before Rembert decided to fight back.
Some of the most visually powerful works center
on the groups of cotton pickers toiling for scant
wages in the blistering Georgia heat. There is a sense
of forlorn and tragic beauty in paintings such as Just
Fig. 7. Inside the The refined, medium-size leather panels included Another Cotton Field and Caint to Caint II, which
Trunk, 2014. Dye depict the people, places, things, and key events that show—in rhythmic patterns of line and color—
on carved and tooled
shaped Rembert’s life, many of which are reproduced workers dressed in brightly hued garb, with black
leather, 22 ¼ by
and described in his book. Domestic scenes such bags slung over their shoulders, moving through
29 ¼ inches. the fields punctuated with touches of pearly white
as Flour Bread have a rather familiar folk art feel,
Fig. 8. Patsy and Me, featuring an interior scene of a kitchen with skewed pigment representing cotton bolls (Fig. 2). The title
2000. Dye on carved
perspective (Fig. 3). The schematically rendered Caint to Caint refers to the long hours that the cot-
and tooled leather, ton pickers were made to work—they couldn’t see
32 by 34 ½ inches. female figure standing at the kitchen table wears a
white apron and has a white cloth covering her nose in the darkness of the pre-dawn hours when trucks
and mouth. At first glance, what might appear as brought the workers to the field, and couldn’t see
a pandemic-era image turns out to be a portrait of much in the diminished visibility at dusk, when the
Mama. Rembert explains in the autobiography that workers headed home.
his adoptive mother was allergic to flour, but contin-
ued to bake bread and cakes for her family despite
the fact that the effort made her ill.
Civil Rights: I Have a Dream is an homage to
Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights dem-
onstrations that Rembert participated in during
the 1960s (Fig. 6). Here, demonstrators holding
placards reading “Don’t Hold Me Back,” “I Am
Somebody,” and “We March for Education,” are as
relevant today as ever.
Within Rembert’s oeuvre, works such as Jeff’s Pool
Room (Fig. 5). and The Curvey (2017), are relatively
lighthearted slice-of-life images, youthful recollec-
tions of the times when he frequented juke joints
and swimming holes in Cuthbert and its environs.
The former shows a lively pool hall seen from above.
Populated by brightly colored, stylized figures, the
104 ANTIQUES
Rembert’s images of a chain gang, including Green his autobiography. “I didn’t want to play any of the Fig. 9. Mixed Rows
Field (2014), All Me (2004), All of Me (Fig. 1) and parts, but I had to be somebody. I couldn’t walk (A Chain Gang), 2013.
Dye on carved and
Mixed Rows (A Chain Gang) (Fig. 9), are nearly around and be nobody, so I became all of them.
tooled leather, 32 by
abstract in the pulsating patterning of black and It’s like I was more than one person inside myself. 31 ⅞ inches.
white markings of the prisoners’ uniforms in each In fact, if I hadn’t decided to play the all me role in
composition. They suggest the synchronized move- the chain gang, I wouldn’t have made it. Taking that
ments of the men working in fields, digging ditches, stance—all me—saved me.”*
or breaking rocks. In this series of works, Rembert As a virtuoso painter and author, Rembert is
had a personal, yet conceptual strategy in mind, as perhaps unique in the world of self-taught art. The
he speaks about the necessity of submerging his in- visual art he created is as assured and evocative as the
dividuality in order to survive the brutal, communal emotionally wrought words in his self-told story.
reality of the chain gang, with prisoners all shackled
together in one line. * Winfred Rembert, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of
“All Me—that’s how I painted it. Each person in the Jim Crow South, as told to Erin I. Kelly (New York: Bloomsbury,
the picture has a role to play,” Rembert explains in 2021), p. 148.

Narratives in the
Needlework By Emelie Gevalt
and Sadé Ayorinde
Storytelling through quilts

in the collection of the
American Folk Art Museum
Fig. 1. Installation view of What That Quilt Knows About Me, on view at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, until October 29. All objects illustrated are in
the American Folk Art Museum; all photographs are courtesy of the museum.
Fig. 2. Family history quilt made by Hystercine Rankin (1929–2010), Port Gibson, Mississippi, 1990–2000. Cotton with ink, 40 by 62 inches. Gift of Evelyn S. Meyer;
photograph by Gavin Ashworth.
“My whole life is in that quilt . . . my hopes and fears, my joys
and sorrows, my loves and hates. I tremble sometimes when
I remember what that quilt knows about me.”*
T
his poetic quotation from an anony- keeper, carrying stories from one generation to
mous elder needleworker conjures up the next.
the seemingly magical power of quilts. What That Quilt Knows About Me, an exhibi-
Protecting the body, comforting the mind, trans- tion on view now at the American Folk Art Mu-
forming the old into something new: quilts serve seum, reflects on this notion, presenting quilts
all these profound purposes and, somehow, still and related textiles as collections of intimate
do more. Pouring effort into her work day after stories. The idea that these objects have the ca-
day, the maker of a quilt sees her project grow in pacity for “knowing”—containing information
concert with her own changing life; imbued with or narratives about the human experience—
this energy and the events of passing time, the expands the scope of the textile beyond its maker,
pieces are vested with meaning. The final result exploring how material things can gather, retain,
is larger than its parts. Often handed down in a and pass down histories of an individual, family,
family, the quilt also takes on the role of history and community.
* Unnamed great-grandmother of Marguerite Ickis, in Carleton L. Safford and Robert Bishop,

America’s Quilts and Coverlets (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980), p. 88.
U
nlike many quilt exhibitions, this one is not
organized by time period, style, culture, or
technique. Drawing from the museum’s
collections of American textiles from across two
centuries and into the present, the show offers tales
of the quiltmakers themselves, as well as those of
many others connected to their works. Alongside
the quilts’ visual beauty and masterful craftsman-
ship, the viewer is invited to consider the quilt as an
archive—looking within and beyond the simplicity
of utilitarian function to focus on the intimacy of
the human-textile relationship.
Quilts tell stories in various ways. Some are quite
literal—constructed as a series of vignettes in a linear
format that encourages us to follow the thread of an
illustrated history. Written or stitched text might also
provide labels to advance the story. One example is
Quilts tell stories in various found in the “family history quilt” made by Hys-
ways. Some are quite literal: tercine Rankin in the late twentieth century (Fig. 2).
Rankin learned to quilt from her grandmother, and
constructed in a linear format of a series of by age twelve she was making bedcovers for her ten
brothers and sisters. As a young married woman with
vignettes that encourages us to follow the seven children of her own, Rankin continued quilting,
thread of an illustrated history. Other constructing multiple quilts to keep her family warm.
pictorial quilts contain mysteries, personal It was not until Rankin was in her fifties that her
practice became pictorial. Along with elaborate star,
references that we can no longer quite decode nine-patch, and log cabin variations, Rankin became
well known for her “memory quilts.” Organizing her
Fig. 3. Whig rose and
swag-border quilt, possibly
made by Ellen Morton
Littlejohn (b. c. 1826) and
Margaret Morton (c. 1833–
1880), who were enslaved
at The Knob, the Morton
family plantation, Russell-
ville, Kentucky, c. 1850.
Cotton, 88 by 104 inches.
Gift of Marijane Edwards
Camp; Ashworth photograph.
Fig. 4. Another installation
view of What That Quilt
Knows About Me.
108 ANTIQUES
compositions into a grid of small vignettes, she used
techniques of appliqué and embroidery to create
scenes of family life.
Through squares with inscriptions such as “Fam-
ily Going to Church” and “Mother Feeding the
Chickens,” Rankin highlights themes of hard work
and religion. Her work also frequently comments
on the traumas of Black life in the Jim Crow South.
In one of her quilts, Black students walk to school
as white children pass them riding a bus.
Other pictorial quilts contain mysteries, personal
references that we can no longer quite decode. At
center right in a quilt by Sarah Ann Garges, an amor-
phous yellow patch obscures a male figure (Figs. 5, 5a).
Why was he covered up? Though curators at AFAM
discovered this curiosity years ago, we will probably
never know the quilter’s reasons for removing him
from the scene. The quilter’s determination to con-
ceal him suggests the specific and personal nature
of her work. Rather than generalized figures, the
characters populating her quilt may well have been
intended to represent people from her life.
Figs. 5, 5a. Appliqué
bedcover made by Sarah
“Sallie” Ann Garges
(c. 1833–c. 1901),
Doylestown, Pennsylvania,
1853. Cotton, silk, wool,
and wool embroidery,
98 by 96 inches. A
patterned yellow patch
in Fig. 5a covers over, for
reasons unknown, a male
figure in the composition.
Gift of Warner Communi-
cations Inc.; photograph
by Schecter Lee.

Q uilts often speak for those who histori-
cally have gone unheard. Although there
are exceptions, such as the Bellamy quilt,
women have most often been the makers of quilts,
and these objects can serve as singular documents
of lives unrecorded in the written archive. In this
sense, even as it encapsulates tradition, the quilt
is inherently radical. By chronicling women’s
lives through fabric, quilts are highly visible and
enduring manifestations of otherwise buried his-
tories—the daily experiences of women and girls
so often missing from our textbooks.
In an unusually direct acknowledgment of en-
slaved people’s contributions to early American
craftsmanship, an old note pinned to the back of
a nineteenth-century Kentucky quilt chronicles
its history. Although the quilt might otherwise
have been assumed to be the project of a wealthy
white planter’s wife, in fact, enslaved women in
the household made it. The possible makers have
been identified as Ellen Morton Littlejohn and
her sister Margaret (Fig. 3).
Although little is documented about the sisters’
experiences, family histories recall Ellen Littlejohn
as a seamstress and Margaret Morton Bibb as a
cook. Their mother, Eve, cared for the plantation
Fig. 6. “Sacret Bibel” According to family tradition, the bedcover was owners’ children. Together the three women lived
quilt top signed by Susan made to celebrate the engagement of Sarah “Sallie” alongside at least thirteen other enslaved members
Arrowood, possibly West
Ann Garges to her groom, Oliver Shutt. Scenes from of their Kentucky plantation household.
Chester, Pennsylvania,
1875–1895. Cotton, silk,
agricultural life enliven the geometric composition,
wool, and ink, with cotton likely drawn from everyday experiences on the family What That Quilt Knows About Me is on view at the American Folk
embroidery, 88 ½ by farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Grounding the Art Museum through October 29.
72 inches. Gift of the design with a house and a barn at either end of the
Amicus Foundation, Inc., central diamond, Garges depicts men at work, hunt- EMELIE GEVALT is the Curatorial Chair for Collections and
and Evelyn and Leonard ing, plowing, and chopping. Distinctive motifs such Curator of Folk Art at the American Folk Art Museum.
Lauder; Lee photograph. as a beehive, squirrels, and bugs further personalize SADÉ AYORINDE is the Warren Family Assistant Curator at the
Fig. 7. Pieties quilt made the scene. The quilter initialed and dated her work American Folk Art Museum.
by Maria Cadman Hub- in the center with the year of her engagement, 1853,
bard (b. c. 1769), probably and signed her initials “SAG.” Garges had three
Austerlitz, New York, 1848. brothers, but one died young, suggesting a possible
Cotton, 88 ½ by 81 inches.
Gift of Cyril Irwin Nelson
candidate for the covered figure.
in loving memory of his
While some quilts are highly personal, others tell
parents, Cyril Arthur and well-known stories. For example, a playful and highly
Elise Macy Nelson; photo- engaging quilt made by Raymond Bellamy chronicles
graph by John Parnell. fifty-three deities, heroes, and other characters from
Fig. 8. Greek myths quilt Greek mythology (Fig. 8). Each patch illustrates a
made by Raymond Bellamy story, encouraging the viewer to participate in a game
(1885–1970), Tallahassee, of seek and find: Icarus falls from the sky having just
Florida, c. 1955–1963. lost his wings; the nine Muses jump and twist, each
Cotton, 74 by 83 inches. in a different pose. The range of bright colors and
Gift of Ray Bellamy; photo- the varied shapes of the patches contribute to the
graph by Adam Reich.
dynamism and wit of the composition, producing a
lively expression of the joy the quilter took in both
subject and medium.
110 ANTIQUES
Making Faces
By Suzanne Rudnick Payne and Michael R. Payne
I
magine, just for a moment, that
it is the early 1800s. You are a
typical resident of the north-
eastern United States, living in a town
with fewer than twenty-five hundred
residents, surrounded by miles of farm-
land. The area’s major roads intersect
at the town center, where churches,
a hotel, and several stores are located.
You and your neighbors are excited
because an itinerant portrait painter
has arrived in town and advertised that
sample portraits are on display. While
your Bible and books have a few dark il-
lustrations, the artist is painting vividly
colored, life-sized portraits of people
just like you. Everyone comes to see
these marvels and watch the painter at
work. The artist Susanna Paine (1792–
1862) described her stay on Cape Ann,
Massachusetts, in 1833: “As there were
few places of amusement in this out of
the way place; my painting-room was
a place of general resort; I was liberally
patronized.” Even in a larger town like After the Revolutionary War, Ameri- Federal American
Salem, Massachusetts, her “exhibition- cans continued to embrace a trans-
Vernacular Portraits,
room was constantly thronged with planted academic English portrait style
callers; frequently more than one hun- that emphasized objective realism.
1790s to 1840s
1
dred in a day.” For the first time, the Artists went to England for training Clockwise from top left: Details of Figs. 8, 10, 9, and 4.
Fig. 1. Sarah S. L. Dean [1782–1850] attributed to
idea of having a portrait of yourself or and then returned to America. How- William M. S. Doyle (1769–1828), Boston, c. 1820.
family members enters your mind. You Pastel on paper, 28 ½ by 21 inches (sight). The
ever, starting in the late 1790s and
portrait is executed entirely in brilliant pastels.
even imagine that perhaps you could continuing through the 1840s, a new Every part of it, including the elaborate bonnet,
draws the viewer to closely study the sitter. The
guide the artist to produce a portrait generation of artists, born and trained reflections, folds, and colors of her dress create an
animated impression of mass and presence. All
of a deceased child or parent. in America, developed an innovative works illustrated are in a private collection.
While European royalty and elites had traditionally been the subjects and
patrons of portraiture, an extraordinary new era began in America around the turn of the nineteenth
century, in which almost every home was able to afford a portrait done by a professional artist
Fig. 2. Woman with portrait style that reflected the changes and new styles and mediums—such as silhouettes, water-
Flowered Shawl, Ameri- ideas occurring in American society. Today these colors, pastels, and oils on canvas—with prices
can, c. 1835. Oil on
paintings are often called “American folk por- ranging from twenty-five cents for two silhouettes
canvas, 27 ¾ by 28 inches
(sight). All the elements
traits,” a term that does not adequately distinguish to twenty dollars or more for an oil portrait. While
of this portrait, flattened them from any other amateur art. The name also European royalty and elites had traditionally been
against the picture plane, implies that they were inferior to academic por- the subjects and patrons of portraiture, an extraor-
are shown with equal traits and painted by artists with limited training. dinary new era began in America, in which almost
focus and clarity. Four To correct these misconceptions and provide this every home was able to afford a portrait done by
additional portraits by portrait genre with a defining name, we prefer to a professional artist. One artist advertised that, if
this artist are known. call them “Federal American vernacular portraits.” you paid two dollars a week, after just twelve weeks
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, a few in- you would own your own oil portrait.2
trepid men and women believed they had enough This was a time of unprecedented growth in art
talent to be professional artists. They quickly education. Private academies that taught practical
learned about the difficulties of obtaining art sup- drawing were common in major cities, and art in-
plies, convincing sitters of a portrait’s value, and struction books by American authors were popu-
collecting payment. To enhance their chance of lar.3 There were many ways to learn how to paint:
success, they often advertised a variety of portrait an apprenticeship, lessons from a practicing artist,
114 ANTIQUES
rest of his life as an artist traveling in New Eng- Fig. 3. Joseph H. Richardson—
land and New York State.7 Military Officer in Uniform with
J
ames Guild (1797–1844) wrote of his first Sword attributed to Sheldon Peck
attempt to paint a portrait: “it could not (1797–1868), probably Vermont,
c. 1820s. Oil on canvas, 29 ½ by 23
be caled [sic] a painting, for it looked more
inches (sight). The frame is painted
like a strangle [sic] cat than it did like her.” He directly on the canvas. Note the con-
later paid a painter five dollars for lessons, which trast between the intense, piercing
included receiving one of the artist’s paintings.8 eyes—typical of Peck—and the
Susanna Paine described her decision to begin barely-painted ear. The sitter’s dynamic
painting at the age of thirty-one, after a divorce stance and ready sword capture
and the death of her only child: “I thought, in military bravado. His specific military
this extremity, to try my hand at painting por- company cannot be identified because,
in the early nineteenth century, every
traits, having painted several in crayons, which
officer provided his own uniform.
proved to be a correct likeness, I commenced the
labors of an artist.” During 1826 in Portland, Fig. 4. Woman in a Green Dress
Maine, she advertised oil portraits for eight dol- attributed to Erastus Salisbury
Field (1805–1900), New England,
lars or in crayon for four dollars. c. 1830. Oil on canvas, 34 by 28 inch-
Every artist had to acquire the skills needed es (sight). The sitter’s face is empha-
to prepare the materials required for painting sized by clouds and her elaborate white
because only limited amounts of commercially bonnet. While the completely frontal
manufactured art supplies, mostly imported pose appears stiff to modern viewers,
from England, were available in America.9 the woman’s self-confidence is evident
In Boston, importer Samuel Tuck advertised in her fashionable clothing, hairdo,
in 1807 that he had thirty-eight pigments, sofa, purse, and bonnet.
or just starting with an instruction book. John C.

Bell and his son Thomas advertised in Alexandria,
Virginia in 1808 that they taught “Water Colors 6
dollars per quarter and for Oil colors, ten dollars.”4
In Portland, Maine, twelve different schools offer-
ing painting instruction advertised in the Eastern
Argus newspaper between 1820 and 1830. Several
artists also specifically described that they learned
to paint by commissioning their own portrait.
Interest was particularly fostered at the numerous
academies for young ladies, where the students’
education often included instruction in painting
from paid art teachers.5
To become an artist often required youthful
brashness and a desire for self-improvement. For
example, Isaac Augustus Wetherby (1819–1904)
wrote: “I commenced painting . . . at age 15. . . . A
miserable blotch of a Painter came to Norway Vil-
lage [Maine] . . . & my Father had me go to learn to
paint portraits with him, his name was Rice. I had
not been with him long before I could paint better
portraits.” Wetherby also owned several drawing
instruction books and a book about famous artists.6
Augustus Fuller (1812–1873), who was deaf and
mute, learned both sign language and painting.
In 1833 his father took him to Boston for several
weeks of lessons with the artist Chester Harding
(1792–1866) at a cost of $64.50. Fuller spent the

Fig. 5. Mary Ann Cleveland by watercolors, crayons, and solvents for sale. How-
Adams Cleveland (1784–1848), ever, many artists complained of the expense.
Massachusetts, c. 1825. Inscribed
Hundreds of books were published in America
“Mary Ann Cleveland died at the
age of 18 years” and “Adams
describing how to prepare and work with artists’
Cleveland painted this portrait” materials. Earlier texts written in England, such
on the back. Oil on canvas, 24 ¾ as Robert Dossie’s Handmaid to the Arts (1758)
by 22 inches (sight). The alluring and Thomas Bardwell’s Practice of Painting and
blue tones and the seemingly infi- Perspective Made Easy (1756), were considered
nite background impart tranquil- particularly reliable and were repeatedly reprinted
ity to this possibly posthumous in this country.
vision of idealized femininity.
For an oil portrait, each color pigment, which
The relationship between the sit-
ter and artist, if any, is unknown.
could be a mineral, plant extract, or a manufac-
tured chemical, had to be either purchased or
Fig. 6. Ursula Glover [1799– prepared by the artist. The pigment was then
1868], New York State, c. 1815.
Oil on wood panel, 28 by 21 ½
made into usable paint by following a labor-
inches (sight). Portraits by this intensive recipe that required grinding and mix-
unidentified artist all feature sit- ing with oils and various additives using a stone
ters with an elongated body and and muller. While some prepared paints could be
a facial expression that suggests stored for a short time in a leather pouch, many
impatience. The portrait conveys needed to be freshly made for each day’s sittings.
a vivid human presence in an Stretched canvas had to be primed to form a
image that seems loud and yet flat surface, but a constant complaint was that
oddly tranquil.
a primed canvas cracked or poorly bound the
paints. Difficulties with art materials meant that

every artist had to continuously experiment with
new recipes and supplies.
Starting in the late 1830s, American-made art
supplies became increasingly available as new
professional “colormen” opened stores. Between
1841 and 1842, John Goffe Rand, an American
painter in London, developed collapsible tin tubes
that allowed oil paints to be commercially sold.
Even so, many artists continued to make their own
paints into the 1850s.
Most artists were itinerant, regularly moving
from town to town seeking commissions. Travel-
ing with one’s possessions and cumbersome art
materials by wagon or stagecoach was arduous,
expensive, and slow at the four-miles-per-hour
speed of a horse. Susanna Paine described that, as
a single woman, she would never travel at night
and that she moved between towns by first sending
letters of introduction to a boarding house recom-
mended by a friend. She would still demand to
inspect the premises before deciding to stay.
Upon arriving in a new town, the first task was
to rent a painting room in a prominent location
with plenty of natural light. Sample portraits were
displayed to help attract sitters and the studio was
open for all to see the artist at work. Advertise-
ments in a local newspaper, or a printed flyer,
coaxed townspeople to visit by announcing that
116 ANTIQUES
shop $15- Candy . . . $6.” From Ithaca, Fig. 7. Daughter of the Robert
New York, he wrote: “we took miniatures Goold Family attributed to
to the Amt. of $80 in all . . . Cash $50, Benjamin Greenleaf (1769–
Shoes $5.50- Webster’s large dictionary 1821), New England, c. 1810.
Oil reverse-painted on glass,
$4- A N.Y. State Atlas . . . $12 other things
14 by 9 ½ inches (sight). This
$8.50.”10 Isaac Augustus “recorded that large bust-length profile focuses
payments for his oil portraits were often on the sitter’s features, so that
received as small sums over several years, her character could be read
as well as in the form of groceries, dental using physiognomy and
work, a coffee mill, and even shares in the phrenology. A similar portrait
“Dorchester and Milton railroad.” of another Goold daughter
These portraits were immensely popular descended with this one.
as they mirrored the major intellectual and Fig. 8. Sarah Morgan
aesthetic changes occurring in American Walbridge [1787–1824]
society. The philosophy of romanticism attributed to Ammi Phillips
and the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy (1788–1865), Lansingburgh,
New York, c. 1820. Oil on
and phrenology deeply influenced Ameri- canvas, 32 ½ by 26 inches
cans’ perception of the world around them (sight). Large areas of color
and each individual’s conscious thoughts. jostle with each other and the
Romanticism, a literary and artistic move- sitter’s face for visual dominance.
ment that began in Europe during the The image is an exploration of
late eighteenth century, encouraged the color, texture, and light. Every-
expression of emotions, spontaneity, and thing is exaggerated, including
the individual self. A philosophy that the bold contours of the
curtains, the too-perfect shape
embraced the positive powers of imagina-
of the face, and the intricacy of
tion and creativity, romanticism offered the lace collar.
a new freedom of artistic creation using
the artist would be in residence for

only a limited time. Oil portraits for
the more prosperous citizens had
an average price of twenty dollars,
equivalent to the price of two horses
at the beginning of the nineteenth
century (Figs. 4–6, 8).
M
any advertisements did
not specify a portrait’s
price and payment usually
required negotiations. Money at the
time was a combination of English
currency, foreign and United States
coins, and, most prominently, paper
banknotes issued by private local
banks, which decreased in value
the farther one traveled from the
originating bank. Many people
expected to pay with farm produce
or by trading goods. Justus Da Lee
(1793–1878), who produced small
watercolor portraits, wrote in 1845:
“I was in Geneva [New York] about
14 weeks; took 93 ports [portraits]
made about $110 in cash- A New
Dress Coat $15-Trade at store & Tin
the first literary movement in American history.13
During the same decades, itinerant artists were
producing portraits for an eager public using the
new romantic style of painterly expression.
A
merican’s interest in portraiture was also
heightened by attempts to understand hu-
man personality and behavior. Physiognomy
and phrenology were widely accepted as ways to
analyze a person’s character with “scientific” preci-
sion. Physiognomy, popularized by the Swiss theo-
logian Johann Caspar Lavater, taught that character
traits could be understood from a person’s physical
features, particularly the face. Phrenology, developed
in 1796 by Franz Joseph Gall of Vienna, held that
mental traits were correlated with specific areas of
the brain. Johann Kaspar Spurzheim, another pro-
ponent of phrenology, asserted that since the skull’s
contour replicates the brain, the bumps and shape
of the skull were manifestations of “faculties,” each
regulating a separate aspect of a person’s character.
Examination of the face and skull became extremely
popular ways to judge one’s strengths and weaknesses
and to learn ways for self-improvement.14 Portrait
artist Joseph Whiting Stock (1815–1855), who
painted illustrations for professional phrenologists,
Fig. 9. Lady with a Diaphanous heightened expression and imagery. The romantic
Costume, American, c. 1820. Oil philosophers also encouraged art as a career, see-
on wood panel, 26 ½ by 19 ½
ing artists as heroic figures who raised the quality
inches (sight). The artist has ex-
pressed the sitter’s character by
of society.11
concentrating on her alluring The portrait painter Ira Chaffee Goodell (1800–
face. The lace of her bonnet and 1877) described the deep influence romantic
cape dissolve in light and airy literature had on him. The son of a poor farmer
simplification, with brushstrokes in rural Belchertown, Massachusetts, he wrote:
that are seen only on close in- “when I was 14, 15 and 16, I used to . . . lay a good
spection, while the viewer must deal of cobble stone wall. . . . I often had a book
imagine her body.
of poems spread out upon the wall before me, so
Fig. 10. Woman with Elaborate that, as I laid up a stone or two I could snatch a
Hair attributed to the Borden line or so of poetry, and in that way I could com-
Limner, New England, c. 1830. mit to memory.”12 He fondly remembered read-
Oil on canvas, 24 by 19 ¾ inches
(sight). A romantic blend of repre-
ing works by Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and
sentation and impression, this
Byron, among others. American romantic novels
likeness is centered and stabilized included Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle
by the well-modeled face. The and Legend of Sleepy Hollow and James Fenimore
finely detailed hair, with its radiant Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. They, along with
color and painted reflections, numerous other still-beloved books, constituted
appears almost three-dimensional. an “age of romanticism” that has been described as
118 ANTIQUES
owned a plaster phrenology head as well as texts on both startling and exciting. Light, color, shape, ten- Fig. 11. Woman with Appliqué
the subject (Fig. 7).15 sion, and motion have been used to stimulate, often Necklace, Philadelphia, c. 1837.
Along with a commitment to produce a recogniz- unconsciously, the viewer’s eye and mind. The por- Watercolor and gold foil on
able image of the sitter, Federal American vernacular traits were described as undeceiving in their lively paper, 27 by 21 inches (sight).
This unusually large watercolor
portrait painters were influenced by these new ideas and heightened expressions of the sitters. While
is backed with the June 10, 1837
that celebrated creative imagination. As one maga- the portraits appear to be spontaneous renditions, Philadelphia Saturday Courier
zine noted in 1812, the fine arts “are the produce of or perhaps a distillation from memory, sitters and newspaper. The portrait is a
the imagination, their essence consists of expression, artists wrote of the lengthy multiple sittings that marvel of innovation, with its
their end pleasure.”16 The portrait became part fact were required. No preliminary sketches have been rich orchestration of texture,
and part fancy: a vivid, innovative representation of located, so the likenesses were apparently painted edges, and limited hues. Gold
the sitter’s character using simplified form, expressive directly onto the canvas. Some sitters complained foil enhances the jewelry, and her
color, and an enhanced decorative impression. In that they were painted in a studio full of people necklace is an unusual appliqué
of colored paper beads.
these works, the sitter appears at the surface of the eager to see an artist at work, an uncomfortable
canvas, ready to step into the viewer’s
world. The frame acts as a window
through which to view the subject,
who is often so close to that window
that the sides of the body could not
be included in the image (Figs. 9, 10).
The artifice of the portrait is loudly
announced. The expected three-di-
mensional modeling and perspective
have been minimized, making the
sitter appear as a mosaic of interlock-
ing flat shapes. Shadows are minimal,
even though the portrait is illuminated
by a flood of light that appears to
enter from the viewer’s world, and
often lends a sculptural quality to
the image. The colors are bright, and
when they abut one another, there is
rarely any blending or transition. This
encourages the viewer to focus on one
component at a time.
Facial details often provide a youth-
ful appearance, while eyes frequently
convey intensity with a prominent
limbal ring (the dark ring around the
iris), which signifies attractiveness
and a penetrating mind.17 The sitter’s
and the viewer’s eyes meet, creating a
sense of intimacy. In many portraits
there is minimal interior space, with
an empty background reduced to a
single color, while others include a
backdrop scene with varying degrees
of detail (Figs. 12–14). Some artists
use expressive brushstrokes in the
background and the sitter’s clothing,
adding further visual interest (Figs.
15–18). Stylish clothing with a profu-
sion of ruffles often idealizes the sitter.
At the time they were painted,
these vivid portraits must have been

advertise that he would “paint likenesses on ivory or
paper at Daguerreotype prices.”19
Modern viewers often ask why the sitters in these
early American portraits never smile, relax, or show
warmth. We look at these paintings very differently
from the original viewers, who believed that physical
features were a manifestation of the sitter’s inner char-
acter. Today, any relationship between anatomical
traits and personality is adamantly rejected. Instead
of trying to understand the sitter’s inner self from the
portrait, we see people wearing their finest clothing,
projecting a fashionable identity that fills the canvas
with a quiet dignity.
Fig. 13. Mr. Cole in His Library attributed to H. K. Goodman,

c. 1840s. Oil on canvas, 30 by 42 inches (sight). With its abstracted
components, this large portrait is startlingly modern. The unusual
interior setting has been simplified into fractured space. A compan-
ion portrait of Mrs. Cole (private collection) shows the same unusual
imagery, as do several standard-size portraits with unusual composi-
tions. Although several are signed “H. K. Goodman,” the artist has
not been identified.
Fig. 12. Daniel Mitchel [1808– experience, with fellow townspeople staring at
1875] by Samuel Jordan (b. 1804), them and loudly expressing their opinions of the
Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1833.
artist’s work.
Signed and dated “S. Jordan/
P
Pinxit/ 1833 at lower left and in-
ortraits became part of everyday life, with
scribed “Mr. Daniel Mitchel/ hundreds of artists at work during the first
Haverhill/ Mafs” on the letter at half of the nineteenth century, particularly
bottom. Oil on canvas, 27 ½ by in the more populated northeastern states. In 1842
23 ¼ inches (sight). Mitchel was a Charles Dickens toured America and commented
penmanship instructor and then a on this unique American portrait style, seeing it as a
hatter in Haverhill. This remark- reflection of the spirit of optimism in America. He
able depiction of his world incor-
noted the portraits of an innkeeper and his infant
porates elements of the latest fancy
style: the smoke-grained table, the
son “looking as bold as lions and staring out of the
brass buttons on his jacket, his canvas with an intensity that would have been cheap
decorative key chain, the cross at any price.”18
with pearls at his neck, the uphol- Artists’ careers were buffeted by economic and
stered sofa, leather-bound books, technological changes. The Depression of 1837,
wallpaper with a horizontal re- perhaps the most severe economic downturn
peat, and perhaps a view of his in American history, forced many artists to seek
home through the window. Even
other livelihoods. Then, in 1839, Frenchman Louis-
so, his youthful face is still the cen-
ter of the image.
Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented photography.
By 1842 a portrait painter in New York City had to
120 ANTIQUES
Federal American vernacular portraits from the
late 1790s through the 1840s represent a notewor-
thy artistic genre with a unique American identity.
The new nation experienced major philosophical
and cultural changes during this period, as well
as extraordinary growth in business, learning
opportunities, and entrepreneurial desires. The
portraits reflected these changing times with en-
hanced creative expression that combined form,
tension, and color, which enlivened them with
the spirit of romanticism. The untold number of
portraits painted and their integration into the
lives of average citizens indicate that they were an
important aspect of American cultural identity.
Today, we marvel at the originality, simplicity,
use of color, and freshness of these likenesses. The
different styles each artist developed also heighten
our interest in the paintings. We have to stop and
remember what these appealing portraits repre-
sented and accomplished during the first half of
the nineteenth century.
Fig. 14. Three Children attribut-

ed to I. Gillbert, New York State,
c. 1820–1830. Oil on canvas, 31
by 29 inches (sight). The figures,
emphasized by the shadows sur-
rounding them, are pushed
against the picture plane. Their
faces are precisely painted to be
identifiable, while the energetic
patterns, colors, and shapes add
a sense of liveliness to the canvas.
Fig. 15. Sarah Fiske (1805–
1882), Massachusetts, c. 1810.
Oil on wood panel, 23 by 19 ¼
inches (sight). The wood panel
was lightly scored to emulate the
texture of canvas. This portrait
was purchased in 1935 by Edith
Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in
New York City, along with two
other Fiske family portraits by the
same artist. With its heightened
color bathed in rich light and vig-
orous individual brushstrokes,
this likeness explores the tactile
possibilities of paint to create tex-
ture, vivacity, and freshness.

Fig. 16. Woman on a Patterned Chair with Rose
attributed to the Prior-Hamblin group of artists,
probably George Hartwell (1815–1901), Boston,
c. 1840. Oil on canvas, 26 by 20 ½ inches (sight).
The image is created with sweeping brushstrokes and
energetic lines, while the dynamics of color and form
produce a sculptural solidity.
Fig. 17. Baby in Pink with Swirled Stick Candy
attributed to Hartwell, Boston, c. 1840s. Oil on
canvas, 26 by 21 ½ inches (sight). The face has been
rendered in thin paint with little evidence of brush-
work, while quick, broad strokes and shades of red
and pink render the child’s body and blanket
powerfully, yet simply. Though pink might suggest
to modern viewers that this is a girl, that is not
certain. The use of pink and blue to represent gender
did not become commonplace in America until after
World War I. The portrait could be celebrating the
novel manufacture of swirled stick candy, which is
first recorded in 1837.
Fig. 18. Adeline Bartlett [1812–1884] by Ruth
(1802–1882) and Samuel Shute (1803–1836), Lowell,
Massachusetts, c. 1832. Watercolor, gouache, graph-
1 The information and Susanna Paine quotations in this article are from Michael R. ite, and gold foil on paper, 24 ⅝ by 19 inches (sight).
Payne and Suzanne Rudnick Payne, “Roses and Thorns: The Life of Susanna Paine,” Inscribed “Mifs Adeline Bartlett/ Lowell Mafs” in
Folk Art, vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter 2005/2006), pp. 62–71. 2 Mona L. Dearborn, “Guy At- Ruth’s handwriting on the letter. This flat, frontal
kinson and the Itinerant Artists of Fairfax Street, Alexandria,” Journal of the Early South- portrait communicates an illusion: the sitter was a
ern Decorative Arts, vol. 22, no. 1 (Summer 1996), p. 18. 3 Peter C. Marzio, The Art Crusade:
young textile millworker whose aspirations for the
An Analysis of American Drawing Manuals, 1820–1860 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1976), p. 1. More than 145 drawing instruction book titles were pub- future are suggested by the sophistication of her
lished by American authors between 1820 and 1860. 4 Alexandria (VA) Daily Advertiser, highly fashionable dress, hairdo, and unnatural body
March 14, 1808. 5 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak (Chapel Hill: University of shape, none of which she likely possessed. To be sure
North Carolina Press, 2008). 6 The information and Wetherby quotations in this article that the sitter would be recognized, her name appears
are from Michael R. Payne and Suzanne Rudnick Payne, “The Business of an American on the letter.
Folk Portrait Painter: Isaac Augustus Wetherby,” Folk Art, vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 2007),
pp. 58–67. 7 Michael R. Payne and Suzanne Rudnick Payne, “Augustus Fuller: Triumph
over Disability A Deaf Folk Portrait Painter in Nineteenth-Century America,” Antiques
and Fine Art, vol. 16, no. 4 (Winter 2017), pp. 90–95. 8 James Guild, “From Tunbridge,
Vermont, to London England—The Journal of James Guild, Peddler, Tinker, School-
master, Portrait Painter, From 1818 to 1824,” Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Soci-
ety, vol. 5, no. 3 (September 1937), pp. 249–314, available at vermonthistory.org, selected
articles, 1930–1939. 9 Information about preparing and acquiring the needed art mate-
rials is from Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, American Painters on Technique: The Colonial
Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011). 10 Suzanne Rudnick Payne and
Michael R. Payne, “To Please the Eye: Justus Da Lee and His Family,” Folk Art, vol. 29,
no. 4 (Winter 2004/2005), pp. 46–57. 11 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the
Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987); and Tim Blanning, The
Romantic Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Librar y, 2011).
12 The authors have transcribed the letters of Ira Chaffee Goodell, the source for this
quotation, in preparation for publication. 13 Richard Harter Fogle, The Romantic Move-
ment in American Writing (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966). The era of romanticism in
American literature has been variously described as 1790–1840 and 1820–1870. 14 Chris-
topher Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” Journal of Early American Literature, vol. 39,
no. 3 (2004), p. 413–464. 15 Juliette Tomlinson, The Paintings and the Journal of Joseph
Whiting Stock (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976). 16 Editor, “The Fine
Arts,” Halcyon Luminary and Theological Repository, vol. 1, issue 1 (January 1, 1812),
p. 19. 17 Darren Peshek et al., “Preliminary Evidence that the Limbal Ring Influences
Facial Attractiveness,” Evolutionary Psychology, vol. 9, no. 2 (2011), pp. 137–146. 18 Charles
Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1842),
p. 232. 19 New York Evening Post, October 24, 1842, p. 3.
SUZANNE RUDNICK PAYNE and MICHAEL R. PAYNE are collectors

and members of the American Folk Art Society. This is their twenty-second article
about early American folk art.
122 ANTIQUES
EVENTS | exhibitions symposiums lectures By Sierra Holt
ALABAMA from the Mary and Dan Solomon Collec- DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape”;
tion”; August 1 to November 5. • “Giaco- to September 4.*
Huntsville Huntsville Museum of Art: “The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:
mo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye”; July 18
Rise of Modernism: European Prints from “Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirsh-
to October 29.* • “Pastel Portraits: Drawn Richard H. Driehaus Museum: “Hector
the Permanent Collections”; July 15 to Oc- horn Collection”; to September 17.
from Life?”; to September 17.* • “Play and Guimard: Art Nouveau to Modernism”; to
tober 15.
Pastimes in the Middle Ages”; to August 6.* November 5.*
National Gallery of Art: “Canova: Sketch-
Mobile Mobile Museum of Art: “Decades: ing in Clay”; to October 9.* • “Going
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Press- Smart Museum of Art, University of Chica-
Looking Back/Moving Forward 1900– through Hell: The Divine Dante”; to July
ing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from go: “Ted Stamm: In Transit”; to August 6.
1919”; to November 25. 16. • “Looking Up: Studies for Ceilings,
Mexico and Germany”; to July 22.* • “Sam
1550–1800”; to July 9.* • “Philip Guston
Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflow- INDIANA
Montgomery Montgomery Museum of Fine Now”; to August 27.*
ing”; to July 16.* Fort Wayne Fort Wayne Museum of Art:
Arts: “Art: Invention”; to August 13.
National Portrait Gallery: “One Life: Freder- “Art Deco Glass from the David Huchthau-
Pasadena Norton Simon Museum: “All
ick Douglass”; to April 24, 2024. sen Collection”; to August 6.*
ARIZONA Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food”;
to August 14. Accompanying lecture: “Daily IOWA
Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: “Move: The
Bread: Food as Motif in Murillo’s Paintings”
FLORIDA
Modern Cut of Geoffrey Beene”; to July 23. Ames Iowa State University Museums:
by Maggie Bell; August 12, 5 pm. • “Word Delray Beach Morikami Museum and Jap-
as Image”; August 11 to January 8, 2024. anese Gardens: “Witness to Wartime: The “Growing up Victorian”; to October 31. •
Tucson Tucson Museum of Art: “The Sto- “Reflections of Iowa: The History of Iowa
Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii”; to Octo-
ry of a Painting: José Gil De Castro’s Carlo- Sacramento California Museum: “Black Questers through Glass”; to July 23.
ber 6.*
ta Caspe y Rodríguez”; to July 23. Pioneers: Legacy in the American West”;
to October 1.* Miami Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Muse- Cedar Rapids Cedar Rapids Museum of
um, Florida International University: “Alle- Art: “Overalls: Grant Wood’s Depictions of
San Diego Mingei International Museum: gories for Learning: 16th- to 18th-Centu- Denim”; to August 27.
“A World of Beads”; to August 27. ry Italian Works on Paper from the Georgia
Museum of Art”; to September 10. Davenport Figge Art Museum: “Ansel Ad-
San Diego Museum of Art: “Modern Wom- ams, the Sierra Club, and the Making of
en”; to November 7. Sarasota John and Mable Ringling Muse- a Landscape Icon”; to August 17. • “The
um of Art: “Art Deco Lacquer and Textiles Life and Art of Charles M. Schulz”; to Sep-
San Francisco de Young Museum: “Ansel tember 2.
from Japan”; to October 22.
Adams in Our Time” to July 23.*
St. Petersburg Dali Museum: “Where LOUISIANA
Legion of Honor: “The Tudors: Art and Majes-
Ideas Come From: Dalí’s Drawings”; to Oc- New Orleans The Cabildo: “Creole New
ty in Renaissance England” to September 24.*
tober 22. Orleans, Honey! The Art of Andrew LaMar
San Marino Huntington Library, Art Mu- Hopkins”; to September 30.
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg: “Last-
seum, and Botanical Gardens: “Printed in
ing Impressions: Japanese Prints from the New Orleans Museum of Art: “Fashioning
1085: The Chinese Buddhist Canon from
Read-Simms Collection”; to August 13.* America: Grit to Glamour”; July 21 to No-
the Song Dynasty”; to December 4.
vember 26.*
Santa Ana Bowers Museum: “112th An- Tampa Tampa Museum of Art: “Travels in
- Italy: a 19th-Century Journey through Pho- MAINE
Autumn Landscape by Ko- (Oshima) Raikin, late 1700s. nual Gold Medal Exhibition”; July 9 to Sep-
Denver Art Museum, gift of Drs. John Fong and Colin tember 10. tography”; to July 9. Brunswick Bowdoin College Museum of
Johnstone; photograph © Denver Art Museum.
Art: “Masks of Memories: Art and Cere-
COLORADO GEORGIA
mony in Nineteenth Century Oceania”; to
ARKANSAS Atlanta High Museum of Art: “Ancient Nubia: July 16. • “Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inev-
Denver Denver Art Museum: “Her Brush:
Bentonville Crystal Bridges Museum of Japanese Women Artists from the Fong- Art of the 25th Dynasty”; to September 4. itable”; to September 17.* • “Re|Framing
American Art: “Diego Rivera’s America”; Johnstone Collection”; to July 16.* the Collection: New Considerations in
to July 31.* HAWAII European and American Art, 1475–1875”;
CONNECTICUT Honolulu Honolulu Museum of Art: “Ani- to December 31.
CALIFORNIA mals in Japanese Art”; to July 23.
Greenwich Greenwich Historical Society:
Laguna Beach Laguna Art Museum: “Jo- Rockland Farnsworth Art Museum: “Ed-
“Sports! More than Just a Game”; to Sep-
seph Kleitsch: Abroad and At Home in Old ILLINOIS ward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth: Rockland,
tember 3.
Laguna”; to September 24. Chicago Art Institute of Chicago: “The Maine”; to August 27.*
Hartford Wadsworth Atheneum Museum Arranged Flower: Ikebana and Flora in
Los Angeles Autry Museum of the Ameri- Japanese Prints”; to July 9. • “Ellsworth MARYLAND
of Art: “Chasing Rembrandt”; to July 23. •
can West: “China Poblana”; to July 23. “Relax! Leisure and Style”; to July 23. Kelly: Portrait Drawings”; to October Baltimore Baltimore Museum of Art: “The
23.* • “Ghosts and Demons in Japanese Matter of Bark Cloth”; to October 1.
Getty Center: “Beyond the Light: Identi- New Haven Yale University Art Gallery: Prints”; July 15 to October 15. • “Re-
ty and Place in 19th-Century Danish Art”; “Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale”; to medios Varo: Science Fictions”; July 29 Walters Art Museum: “Quiet Beauty: The
to August 20.* • “Eugène Atget: Highlights July 23. to November 27.* • “Van Gogh and the Watercolors of Léon Bonvin”; to August 13.*
124 ANTIQUES
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Don’t Miss This Top-Quality Early Brimfield Show

Be at the gates by 8:45am on Wednesday, July 12, where
“Shoppers rush in as the gates open to the Heart-O-The-Mart.”
~ USA Today
“Heart-O-The-Mart gets high marks for the quality of the merchandise there.”
~ Antiques and The Arts Weekly
“Connoisseurs of the previously-owned share their hunting grounds in Paris, Berlin

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~ Wall Street Journal
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EVENTS | exhibitions symposiums lectures
MASSACHUSETTS NEW HAMPSHIRE tember 4. Accompanying lecture: “Con- dian Textiles from the Parpia Collection”; to
versations with . . . A Curator on Berenice September 4.
Amherst Mead Art Museum, Amherst Col- Portsmouth Portsmouth Athenaeum:
Abbott’s New York Album, 1929” by Mia
lege: “God Made My Face: A Collective Por- “The Wentworth Takeover: How One Fam-
trait of James Baldwin”; to July 9. ily Dominated Portsmouth and New Hamp-
Fineman; August 15, 3 pm. • “Grounded VERMONT
in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery”; Ju-
shire 1715–1775”; to July 15. Bennington Bennington Museum: “Haunt-
ly 14 to June 4, 2024.* • “Juan de Pareja,
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Hear ed Vermont”; to December 31.
Afro-Hispanic Painter”; to July 16.* • “Karl
Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, NEW JERSEY
Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”; to July 16.*
South Carolina”; to July 9.* • “Hokusai: In- Montclair Montclair Art Museum: “Trans- VIRGINIA
• “Van Gogh’s Cypresses”; to August 27.*
spiration and Influence”; to July 16.* formed: Objects Reimagined by American Richmond Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:
Artists”; to December 3. New-York Historical Society: “Under Cover: “Eight Views of Omi: Japanese Woodblock
Cambridge Special Exhibitions Gallery,
J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculin- Prints by Ito Shinsui”; to July 9.*
Harvard Art Museums: “From the Andes to New Brunswick Zimmerli Art Museum,
the Caribbean: American Art from the Span- ity”; to August 13.*
Rutgers University: “The Incoherents and WASHINGTON
ish Empire”; to July 30. Cabaret Culture in Paris, 1880–1900”; to OHIO Goldendale Maryhill Museum of Art: “Noc-
July 16.
Deerfield Historic Deerfield: “Garden of Cincinnati Taft Museum of Art: “The Boat turnes”; to November 15.
Hearts: Madeline Yale Wynne and Deerfield’s NEW MEXICO Trip: Etchings by Charles François Daubig-
Arts and Crafts Movement”; to March 3, 2024. ny” to September 10. Seattle Seattle Art Museum: “Renegade
Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art:
Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Tou-
“Yo-kai: Ghosts and Demons of Japan”; to Cleveland Cleveland Museum of Art: “The
Gloucester Cape Ann Museum: “Ed- louse-Lautrec”; July 21 to December 3.*
September 4.* Medieval Top Seller: The Book of Hours”;
ward Hopper and Cape Ann: Illuminating
an American Landscape”; July 22 to Oc- to July 30.
New Mexico Museum of Art: “An Ameri-
tober 16.*
can in Paris: Donald Beauregard”; to Oc- OKLAHOMA
tober 22. Model O archtop guitar,
Sandwich Heritage Museums and Gardens: Tulsa Philbrook Museum of Art: “Printmak- Gibson Brands, Nashville,
“From Carriage to Classic: How Automobiles 1919. Metropolitan Museum
NEW YORK STATE ing: Art and Written Word”; to December 31.
of Art, on view at the Frist Art
Transformed America”; to October 15.
Museum, Nashville, Tennessee.
Catskill Thomas Cole National Historic Site: PENNSYLVANIA
MICHIGAN “Women Reframe American Landscape:
Chadds Ford Brandywine Museum of Art:
Susie Barstow and Her Circle/Contempo-
Flint Flint Institute of Arts: “Drawn to Col- “Andrew Wyeth: Home Places”; to July 30.
rary Practices”; to October 29.*
lect: Selections from the Farrell-Herrick
Collection of Drawings”; to August 20. Philadelphia Barnes Foundation: “William
Cooperstown Fenimore Art Museum:
Edmondson: A Monumental Vision”; to Sep-
“Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of
MINNESOTA tember 10.*
Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw”;
Minneapolis Minneapolis Institute of Art: to September 24.* • “A Tale of Star-Crossed
“Fukuda Kodo-jin: Japan’s Great Poet and Lovers: Romeo and Juliet in Opera and Art”;
Museum of the American Revolution:
Landscape Artist”; to July 23.* to September 10. “Black Founders: The Forten Family of Phil-
adelphia”; to November 26.*
MISSOURI NEW YORK CITY

Philadelphia Museum of Art: “The Art-
Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Folk Art Museum: “What That
ist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia”; to
“Crowning Glory: Millinery in Paris, 1880– Quilt Knows About Me”; to October 29.
October 29.
1905”; to December 3. • “Fierce Women:
Artemisia Gentileschi and the Women Wor- Bard Graduate Center: “Shaped by the RHODE ISLAND WISCONSIN
thies”; to July 23. Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American
Southwest”; to July 9.* • “Staging the Ta- Providence RISD Museum: “Past Made Milwaukee Milwaukee Art Museum:
ble in Europe 1500–1800”; to July 9.* Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black At- “Scandinavian Design and the United
St. Louis Pulitzer Art Foundation: “The Na- lantic”; to August 6. States, 1890–1980”; to July 23.*
ture of Things: Medieval Art and Ecology,
Brooklyn Museum: “Climate in Crisis: Envi-
1100–1550”; to August 6.
ronmental Change in the Indigenous Ameri-
TENNESSEE CANADA
Nashville Frist Art Museum: “Storied
NEBRASKA cas”; to November 19. • “Monet to Morisot: Montreal Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:
The Real and Imagined in European Art”; to Strings: The Guitar in American Art”; to Au- “Thought and Splendour of Indigenous Co-
Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art, University November 12. gust 13.* Accompanying lecture: “An After- lombia”; to October 1.
of Nebraska: “Sheldon Treasures: Edward noon with Chris Martin” by Chris Martin;
Hopper and His Contemporaries”; August Frick Collection: “The Gregory Gift”; to July 9.* July 30, 3 pm. An * indicates that a catalogue, brochure,
18 to December 21.
and/or checklist is available for this exhi-
Jewish Museum: “The Sassoons”; to Au- TEXAS bition. Information and photographs should
NEVADA gust 13.* be received three months before the opening
Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston:
Reno Nevada Museum of Art: “Ghost Ar- “Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Mas- month of an exhibition and four months be-
my: The Combat Con Artists of World War Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Berenice terpieces from the Pearlman Foundation”; fore symposiums and antiques shows that
II”; to July 23.* Abbott’s New York Album, 1929”; to Sep- to September 17.* • “Woven Wonders: In- include loan exhibitions or lectures.
126 ANTIQUES
Saturday, July 29 – Sunday, July 30
St. George’s School - Ice Rink
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TO BENEFIT THE NEWPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND THE BOYS & GIRLS CLUBS OF NEWPORT COUNTY
End notes By Eleanor H. Gustafson
Making How did they make that? It’s a question that often comes up when looking at a work of art, especially
ones that don't fit neatly into our traditional definitions. Thanks to a generous grant from the Henry
Choices Luce Foundation, the American Folk Art Museum has hired Brooke Wyatt, an assistant curator whose first
exhibition at the museum, Material Witness: Folk and Self-Taught Artists at Work, addresses that very question—and
the layered nuances it encompasses. She writes:
to connect with art and artists beyond the art for example, will recall her approach of sur-
world and its conversations. rounding a cache of everyday articles—a
After pursuing an MFA degree in painting, I doorknob, plastic tubing, even a shop-
went back to grad school for counseling psy- ping cart—with yarn and other fibers in a
chology, and worked as a therapist with chil- method of wrapping, weaving, and knotting.
dren, youth, and families and also in psychi- Between 1987 and 2005, she created nearly
atric hospitals and detention centers, often one hundred such sculptures at the Creative
using art therapy interventions. From this Growth Art Center, which has been support-
work, I began learning about how systems— ing the work of artists with developmental,
managed healthcare, criminal justice, health intellectual, and physical disabilities since
and human services, education—despite the 1974. Out of the multitude of materials she
hard work of many, too often pathologize had access to there, Scott gravitated toward
suffering and impact people’s lives in ways the yarn, fabric, and textiles that became
that limit their agency and autonomy. essential to her working process.
I brought these concerns with mental
health, self-expression, and identity with me Material Witness, with its many insights into the
when I returned to academia to pursue a PhD trials and triumphs of “outsider” artists at work,
in art history at the University of Pittsburgh. remains on view until October 29. We look for-
My study of the work of artists whose training ward to what Brooke Wyatt’s unique experiences
and life experiences defy and exceed conven- and background will bring to her next exhibition
tional fine art categories informs every aspect at AFAM.
of my work at AFAM. Material Witness is an
effort to foreground the contributions that Scrutinare by Consuelo “Chelo” González Amézcua (1903–1975),
1970. American Folk Art Museum, New York, gift of Jacqueline
self-taught artists have made at the level of Loewe Fowler.
material engagement and working process
to the past, present, and future of what we Untitled by Judith Scott (1943–2005), c. 1990s. American Folk Art
M
Museum, gift of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, California.
aterial Witness focuses on the raw understand as art.
materials artists in AFAM’s collection A work from the exhibition like Consuelo
chose to work with. The exhibition consid- “Chelo” González Amézcua’s Scrutinare epito-
ers that artists not only manipulate their mizes the idea of an artist building up a deep
materials, they also learn from them, and so it working knowledge of their chosen materi-
expands our thinking about how self-taught als. Also a poet and dancer, Chelo developed
artists hone their practices. the intricate style of linework she called
My interest in artists’ material choices and “Filigree Art” using everyday materials such
working process is grounded in the experi- as pencil and ballpoint pen. In Scrutinare,
ences that led me to art history and museum she used line after ballpoint line to create an
studies: working as an artist, art teacher, and elaborate architecture of cascading swirls
mental health therapist. From the time I punctuated by evocative imagery. Details
began working in museum and nonprofit art like an embellished sword seem to pierce
spaces, I felt keenly aware of the embedded this labyrinthine tapestry, while the image of
hierarchies between art-world “insiders” and a human eye dissolves the tension between
“outsiders.” Seeing how closely these patterns foreground and background. Looking
of marginalization and disregard echo the closely, you can follow the traces of the artist’s
structural inequalities built into our society, hand where the imprint of each pen mark has
I began to wonder how I could combine my been pressed into the paper.
passion for social justice with my knowledge Material Witness also invites study of the
of art making and art history. As an “insider” ways that artists’ processes evolve across
to the art world and its institutions, I yearned time. Observers of Judith Scott’s process,
The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2023, vol. CXC, no. 4, published bimonthly and copyright Magazine Antiques Media, LLC, 1867 66th Street, #2 Brooklyn, NY 11204. Tel: 646-221-6063. Name registered in United
States Patent Office. ISSN 0161-9284. Publication No. 511-890. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. The cover and contents of The Magazine ANTIQUES are fully protected by
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Magazine ANTIQUES, P.O. Box 37612, Boone, IA 50037-2612. ADVERTISING The Magazine ANTIQUES accepts advertisements only from advertisers of recognized reputation in the trade but cannot guarantee the
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Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in any public library. Complete copies on microfilm are available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI.
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Gorham antique japanesque parcel-gilt sterling silver water service,

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JULY/AUGUST 2023

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50 FACETS AND SETTINGS

An American Mixed-Metals “Saracenic” Coffee Pot

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