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When one hears reference to McKenney and Hall, it is easy to assume, as it often the case with lithography, that they were the publishers or printers, but in reality, Thomas Loraine McKenney (1785 to 1857) and James Hall (1793 to 1868) played a much larger role in the portraits which would form the basis of the folio History of the Indian Tribes of North America. Philadelphia: 1837-1844.

McKenney, initially Superintendent of Indian Trade and later heading up the Office of Indian Affairs, working as he did under Presidents Madison, Monroe, Adams, and Jackson, took a respectful and yet fatalistic view, it seems, of the American Indian peoples, as he seemed to feel it was necessary to preserve their tribal cultures, believing they were destined to be obliterated. Thus, as his work brought him into contact with the various tribal leaders who visited Washington over the years as members of treaty delegations, he began to commission their portraits.

Charles Bird King (1785 to 1862) did the vast majority of the portraits McKenney commissioned, although a number were also done by James Otto Lewis and George Cooke, and his sensitive, vibrant portraits are all the more remarkable when one realizes that King’s own father was scalped by Indians in 1789, when King was just four years old, after the family had traveled west to Ohio.

By the 1830s, after more than a decade of portraits, McKenney felt the collection, displayed in the War Office, needed a broader audience, but to complete such a project would require more effort and different skills than those he had to offer. As a result, he commissioned lithographs of the paintings and recruited James Hall, a frontier Renaissance man who worked as a lawyer, a judge, a newspaper editor and author, among other things, to pull together biographical sketches and appropriate text to accompany what McKenney envisioned as a three-volume set.

As was common in the era because of the associated costs, such sets were usually sold in advance on a subscription basis (this set was sold at $120), and while Hall powered through the work of sorting out very vague notes with murky references to individuals, they managed to sell enough subscriptions to begin. Timing was bad, however, and the Panic of 1837 dealt the project a near-mortal blow as many subscribers were left without the means to pay. Things became grim enough that McKenney actually abandoned the project he had begun, but Hall, who had by this time invested close to a decade in the work, persevered, recruited another publisher, and pushed on.

The final volume, by which time there were 1,250 subscribers, was not finished until 1844. In 1858, the original portraits were moved to The Castle, the Smithsonian’s first building, and they remained there until the winter of 1865, when they were to be relocated. The men charged with the work brought in a woodstove which they vented into a ventilation shaft they believed to be a flue. After several weeks, a fire started and despite fireproofing efforts in the building, the damage was extensive and the Castle’s roof collapsed. Only five of the original 300 portraits survived. (The fire also destroyed approximately 200 other paintings of Native Americans by John Mix Stanley and a great deal of important correspondence and paperwork.) It is only because of the foresight, awareness and persistence of Thomas McKenney and James Hall that these valuable images, with their detailed, colorful and accurate renderings of American Indian tribal dress and customs, survive for us today.

Complete sets can still be had for prices that can vary from $25,000 to $100,000, depending on condition and binding. (Subscription publications were bound by the individual subscribers, often coming in piecemeal over many months or years, and the quality of the bindings can vary widely from set to set.) An octavo set was published in the 1850s and it can be had for something closer to $10,000. Individual print prices are also affected by condition, of course, but the fame of the sitter and the drama of his costume are also important factors. Chief Red Jacket, for example, dressed in English-style clothes and wearing his enormous peace medal, often sells for more than $2,500, but lesser known chiefs’ images sell for $200-500.

Chamfer is derived from a French word that means exactly what it means in the current usage: a beveled edge. In terms of furniture, a chamfer is a shaped edge where two pieces of wood meet. A chamfered edge refers to what is typically a 45-degree cut on a corner, which results in a softening of the corner. When a corner is softened with a “convex” rounded edge, it’s referred to as a bullnose. Oftentimes in furniture with exterior chamfering on the corners, the cut tapers out at the ends, which is called a variety of things including lamb’s tongue or lark’s tongue. (Some distinguish a lamb’s tongue from a lark’s tongue by using lark’s tongue for a plain, smooth tapered end and lamb’s tongue for tapering that includes a bit of a step and curl at the end.) Exterior chamfers are also sometimes decorated with reeded carving, like the one pictured above. Chamfering on the interior of a piece tends to refer to rough shaping on the panels in doors to taper the panels down to fit the joint. This sort of chamfering also appears on other unseen places including drawer bottoms and case backs. Chamfering, particularly interior chamfering with a hand plane, is one of the most obvious indicators that a piece was handmade instead of mass produced.

A circa 1860 cast iron finch sewing bird inscribed A. Jerould & Co. PatentFew people sew these days and the majority of those who do use a vast area of expensive equipment and gadgetry, but “sewing notions,” as they’re often called, are nothing new. Take, for instance, the sewing bird. In the days before things like quilting hoops and dressmaker dummies (or at least affordable ones), a woman stitching would use a sewing bird to clamp her work to the edge of a table top, keeping a steady tension as she worked on a seam. A sewing bird is simply a clamp, made of everything from brass to wood, embossed tin to bone, cast iron to wrought iron, typically with a figural top in the form of a bird.  Sewing clamps dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries have been discovered, but their heyday was the 19th century, when sewing birds in particular were popular. Initially they were a screw-type clamp, but later models sometimes employed springs. They occasionally appear in other forms – frogs, dolphins – but perhaps birds were the most common because when in use it appeared as though the bird was “perched” on the table. And, since the sewing bird was just sitting right there, the form was soon embellished, often appearing with a small pincushion.

As sewing birds go at auction, value seems to be “clamped” to a couple factors, aside from the usual caveats about age and condition (the spring models in particular are often damaged): materials and form. Bird forms make up the vast majority of those that appear at auction, so rarer forms can command bigger prices and standard mass-manufactured versions from cast iron or brass have far less value than those made from rare more “individualized” handcraft materials such as wrought iron, wood and bone.

An early Parker Brothers No. 2 lifter hammer shotgun with original case and accessories. Damascus steel is yet another example of a term’s original definition becoming almost inextricably conflated with a different concept. Damascus steel, used historically in blades manufactured in Middle East, is also a bit of a mystery. The process, as best we can tell, started with wootz steel, a type of steel which appears to have originated in India approximately 300 years B.C. Beyond that, we have no idea how it was originally crafted. The origin of the name Damascus itself is a bit of a puzzle, as it is also unknown if it was first used for swords made or sold in Damascus or if it was applied based on a perceived connection between the appearance of the steel and Damask cloth, which also derives its name from Damascus.

Perhaps it is this mystery or the distinctive appearance of Damascus steel, which is said to look like flowing water or watered silk because of the banded look of the surface, but Damascus steel has a reputation filled with legends about its sharpness and durability. Many tests have been performed on original examples of Damascus steel, but because there are so many variables in the production process – raw materials, techniques, equipment – efforts to replicate the steel have failed. True Damascus steel production seems to have stopped around the middle of the 18th century for reasons lost to us now, but historians offer a number of hypotheses, including the possibility of a trade route disruption (such a lengthy route, India to the Middle East, could have quite possibly have been disturbed long enough and to such an extent that the technique was lost in the interim), a change in the manufacturing process that removed the necessary impurities, or simply an obsessive degree of secrecy regarding the tricks of production.­­­­­

Regardless of the reasons, pattern welded steel blades offer the closest replication, at least in terms of appearance. Pattern welding, which is similar to laminating steel and has been done since the Middle Ages, is accomplished by forge welding a group of different metals together and then twisting and manipulating them to create the appearance of a patterned surface. Blades and barrels formed by this technique (or from laminated or piled steel) are also often referred to as Damascus, even though the production process is completely different. Historians attributed this to bladesmith William Moran, who debuted his “Damascus knives” in 1973. Early on, there appears to have been some distinction in the use of the term “Modern Damascus,” but for the most part, weapons, historic and modern, with barrels and blades forged by pattern welding are also simply referred to as Damascus.

Meanwhile, experts in the field of experimental archaeology continue to try to unravel the secrets of Damascus steel production. As for us, true Damascus steel is rare enough that, with the additional restriction of adequate detail photographs, the picture above shows pattern welded steel, although you can see an cannon with a Damascus barrel here.

Grisaille, from the French word gris meaning grey, is a term used to describe works of art painted entirely in a monochromatic palette. Technically speaking, there are other terms that apply when the monochromatic palette used is of a different color (brunaille for brown, verdaille for green, for instance), but grisaille is often misused to cover all monochrome works, regardless of hue. There are also plenty of works that are considered grisaille that are not perfectly, strictly speaking, in just one color, but the palette is severely curtailed.

Works “en grisaille” as they are usually referred to can be done as finished works, but they are also used to mimic the three-dimensional effect of sculpture in a tromp l’oeil style, to provide a basis for adaptation by engravers or illustrators, or to “rough in” an oil painting’s structure.

In the world of antiques, grisaille is often seen in connection with the decoration on Chinese export porcelain (sometimes the entire work is decorated en grisaille, sometimes only a portion), and the value there is derived from age and condition, but works executed completely en grisaille do frequently see a bump in value. In terms of fine art, the highest prices are reserved for early artists like Van Dyck who were known for their use of the technique, but grisaille works are, in general, popular and appealing because it’s generally conceded that working with a full palette can hide some weakness in skill and execution, whereas such a limited palette requires a more skillful hand.

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