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Rare Embroidered Naval Shirt Sets Sail at Auction

February 12, 2014 in Crafts & Folk Art, Textiles/Clothing/Accessories by hdavis

A fabulous early American silk embroidered sailor's jumperWinter passes slowly. We count the days, watch the shifting sea of snow outside the windows, and try to occupy our time, but whenever I start to be really weary, I try to remind myself that it could be worse: I could be on an 18th-century whaler. Whaling voyages lasted years and the only thing that could possibly be more unchanging than a snowy Ohio cornfield would be an endless vista of water. So it’s no surprise that sailors found a number of small, intricate projects to occupy their time.

As we highlighted a few weeks ago, sailors often worked on scrimshaw pieces, carving scenes in teeth or pieces of baleen, and fashioned small objects like pie crimpers or jagging wheels. (At one time, it was thought that sailors made these “sailor’s valentines,” but research in more recent decades indicates that they were likely made in the Caribbean, Barbados specifically, and sold to sailors as keepsakes.) While modern depictions of sailors in centuries past are often of rough, pirate-esque men, the objects they left behind frequently reveal finer, more delicate skills, but perhaps few more so than this recent offering at auction, a sailor’s shirt or jumper with intricate embroidery, work that would far more likely be attributed to a woman in any other setting. In reality however, sailors did a great deal of sewing (a great deal of all manner of domestic work, in fact), spending their hours repairing sails and ropes, as well as their own clothing. So it’s not difficult to imagine the detailed embroidery on this piece being the work of a sailor as well, a sailor who, the American flag and eagle would seem imply, served in the United States Navy. Few such pieces are known to exist aside from objects in the collection of the Winterthur Museum and the Smithsonian, although there are a few extant images, including this one which has collar and cuffs tinted blue, showing sailors in shirts of similar style.

John Dee Wareham Rookwood Pottery at Auction

February 10, 2014 in Uncategorized by hdavis

Rookwood Pottery; Wareham (John D), Vase, Iris (Thistle), 12 inch.Rookwood Pottery, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, began as a small pottery shop in 1880, and grew to a company acclaimed internationally for the beauty and quality of its ceramics. Rookwood artist John Dee Wareham joined the Rookwood decorating department in 1893, became the director of the art department, and ultimately, the president of Rookwood Pottery, a job he held from 1934 until his retirement.

Wareham’s technical skills and artistic ability are evident in a rare grouping of his work from the Lillian C. Hoffman Collection of American and European Ceramics, on sale at Rago Auctions on March 1, 2014. The collection is notable for both Rookwood Pottery and Martin Brothers, and comes to market for the first time in nearly four decades.

The online catalog can be browsed in its entirety as of February 13 at ragoarts.com, and the exhibition opens on February 22. For more information, please call 609.397.9374 or email info@ragoarts.com.

Word of the Week: Chinoiserie

February 3, 2014 in Word of the Week by hdavis

A rare Queen Anne japanned maple and pine [highboy or] high chest of drawers, signed "Rob Davis" in script, Boston, Massachusetts, 1735-1739.Chinoiserie (pronounced shin-wah-zah-REE) is like so many French words – it makes the very ordinary, in this case “Chinese-esque,” sound lyrical. Chinoiserie entered European decorative arts in the 17th century, as fascination with the region grew despite the fact that trade with much of the East, particularly China and Japan, was often historically heavily regulated and very restricted. Artists and craftsmen did their best to mimic the examples of Chinese style they encountered.

Chinoiserie reflects the fantastical element in the Western imagination of China and as a result often contains rather fanciful versions of the country. It also mimics traditional Chinese art in terms of the attitude towards scale and perspective and in the use of stereotypical design motifs (pagodas, dragons, cranes, etc.). The mimicry also extends to attempting to replicate materials as well across a variety of media. Artisans attempted to create Chinese-esque porcelain, decorated wallpaper sheets with Chinese scenes, and used lacquer-like materials to finish furniture and also tinwares in a style known as “japanning.” The term chinoiserie is also occasionally, although less accurately, used in describing the form or shape of a piece.

The fascination with the East would shift in and out of fashion over the years, but chinoiserie decoration is most commonly associated with the Rococo period, particularly in France and with the court of Louis XV, during the third quarter of the 18th century, but it also experienced a resurgence roughly 100 years later as one aspect of the Aesthetic Movement, sparked in part by the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 and peaking in popularity in the 1870s and 1880s. Aesthetic Movement decorative arts feature ebonized wood with gilt decoration, draw heavily on the Eastern natural world (flowers and peacocks, for example), and revisit the classic blue-and-white style of porcelain. While the Aesthetic Movement was mostly driven by the opening of trade with Japan and a style that is more “Japonesque,” chinoiserie is still periodically used to describe items of the period with a generic “Asian style” of decoration.

18th-century japanning happened in such a small region of America, at least in regards to furniture, and was confined primarily to major urban centers so when pieces that early appear on the marketplace, their age alone often confers value, but particularly if they retain any original decoration. 19th-century objects with chinoserie decoration are more common and, coming from a more industrialized age, they appear all along the range of quality and condition, so Aesthetic Movement chinoserie is available at almost any price point.

Remember the Maine: Battleship Memorabilia

January 27, 2014 in Ephemera, Holiday & Patriotic by hdavis

An early 20th century painted sheet iron frame made from remnants of the battleship Maine with photographConstruction of the U.S.S. Maine was authorized in August of 1886, and she was launched in 1889 and commissioned in 1895.  After several years spent patrolling the East Coast and Caribbean, orders sent the Maine and her crew to Cuba in response to continued civil unrest on the island.

Three weeks later, on the morning of February 15, 1898, the battleship Maine lay in Havana harbor. Just after the playing of Taps, Captain Charles Sigsbee recalls, “I laid down my pen and listened to the notes of the bugle, which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night. . . . I was enclosing my letter in its envelope when the explosion came. It was a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume, largely metallic in character. It was followed by heavy, ominous metallic sounds. There was a trembling and lurching motion of the vessel, a list to port. The electric lights went out. Then there was intense blackness and smoke.”

Later investigations determined that the ship’s powder stores detonated, ripping off the forward third of the ship.  Such a significant breach caused the ship to sink rapidly, but tragedy occurred almost instantly for the many enlisted men sleeping in the forward section of the Maine.  Most of the Maine‘s crew died instantly, with 266 men killed in the explosion and another 8 men dying later from injuries.  Officers, who were quartered in the rear of the ship, fared better, with 18 officers among the Maine‘s 89 survivors. Most of the dead were recovered from Havana’s harbor and were buried in Havana, but almost two years later, in December of 1899, the bodies were disinterred and reburied in Arlington National Cemetery.

The explosion brought about the “Remember the Maine!” battle cry and helped precipitate the start of the Spanish-American War in April of 1898, but numerous investigations, both in the period and years later, have attributed the cause to one of two accidental causes.  One theory is that a external mine in the harbor detonated, most likely accidentally, while the other generally accepted theory attributes the explosion to spontaneous combustion of the Maine‘s own coal supplies.  In either case, the explosion was likely unintentionally and triggered a second, larger explosion by detonating the ship’s powder stores.

Maine-related memorabilia is rare, but appreciated by collectors of historic material when it finds its way to auction. In the aftermath, several companies attempted to capitalize by the patriotic surge the event created, so Maine-related advertising has collectors, but the real money is typically reserved for items related to the Maine in the months before the explosion or pieces created by survivors.

Word of the Week: Hobnail

January 13, 2014 in Glass, Word of the Week by hdavis

A Fenton glass cruet and stopper, French Opalescent, Hobnail pattern. Hobnail glass is glass with a knobby surface, with an organized pattern of evenly spaced raised bumps. It takes its name from hobnail boots, work boots that were made more durable by the addition of hobnails in a regular pattern on the soles. (As mass production became more involved in the production of footware, the quality deteriorated and a rough sole of hobnails gave shoes a much-needed boost in terms of durability.)

Production of hobnail glass involves either pressing or blowing glass into a mold and while others produced hobnail glass during the late Victorian era, it was the West Virginia-based Fenton Art Glass Company that would ultimately become synonymous with hobnail.

Fenton, founded in 1905, got a solid start with their innovative production of carnival glass, but by the 1930s, the Depression was threatening to “shatter” the glass industry. Glass had long offered smaller profit margins and the Depression-necessitated production of “Depression glass,” thin, inferior glass in washed out colors, left most glass companies struggling. Fenton had begun manufacturing some hobnail glass in 1935 and the company offered a hobnail design to the Wrisley Perfume Company in 1937. Wrisley, also desperately in need of a boost, felt the unique appearance of hobnail glass would boost sales, and when production started in 1938, no one was disappointed. The bottles manufactured for Wrisley sold with such success that Fenton opened up other lines of hobnail products, ultimately offering not just perfume bottles but ashtrays, candlesticks, lamps, vases, pitchers, jars and much more, all of which they would eventually offer in their iconic hobnail milk glass line, introduced in 1950.

In general, the ubiquity of hobnail glass keeps prices for pieces fairly affordable. Hobnail glass, Fenton’s pieces included, crowds the shelves at antique malls across the country. There are however some rarities, most notably Victorian-era pieces from the early years of production, typically hanging lamps, which can fetch several thousand dollars at auction. Rarer colors also confer the value of their association on hobnail designs, so colors like plum, which are seen less frequently than milk glass or cranberry, appeal to collectors and their pocketbooks.

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