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Pig Out on Pottery: Anna Pottery Stoneware

September 25, 2013 in Pottery & Porcelain by hdavis

Salt-glazed railroad engineer presentation pig flask [bottle] by Anna Pottery [Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick, Anna, Illinois], dated 1882Perhaps one of the most iconic Midwestern objects is an Anna Pottery railroad pig flask.  Yep, just as strange and quirky as it sounds, and so were many of the things produced by the Kirkpatrick brothers, Cornwall and Wallace, from 1859 to 1896.  Both brothers apprenticed to their father, Andrew, a potter, before landing in Anna, Illinois, where they started their pottery.  While they’re mostly known today for their unusual objects like their “snake jugs” and the aforementioned pig flasks (one is pictured above), the pottery actually manufactured a great deal of utilitarian wares – crocks, jugs, flowerpots, pipes.  As early as 1860, the pottery’s eleven employees produced a total output capable of containing 800,000 gallons!

A little investigation of the brothers’ history indicates they were just as original.  Cornwall became Anna’s first mayor and supported the temperance movement, not necessarily out of any real aversion to alcohol, but because, as a business man, it was more profitable to cater to the prevailing local opinion, which was a conservative one.  Meanwhile, Wallace, who ventured to California for a time as part of the Gold Rush, was fascinated with snakes, collecting live ones and displaying them at fairs.  The pottery’s snake jugs were, obviously, one of his specialties.  Some of the brothers’ pieces are just whimsical, while others carry built-in commentary about temperance, the economy (railroad pig flask), and politics.  The story of their pottery captures the very essence of the Midwest: quirky newcomers creating prosperity for themselves in a booming economy driven by agriculture and railroads on a whole new scale!

Revolutionary Art: Objects from China’s Cultural Revolution

September 23, 2013 in Crafts & Folk Art by hdavis

A circa 1960 Chinese Cultural Revolution carved boxwood figure, depicting a Mongolian girl holding two peaches.It’s a rare thing when we say, “Wow!  I’ve never seen one of those before!”  We see nicer examples, more complete examples, more unusual examples of things we’ve seen before, but every now and then, we come across some objects with a context that’s completely new to us.  That’s how I felt when I encountered several groups of artwork from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  After the push to rapidly industrialize China during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mao began to feel as though he had lost some authority specifically to Liu Shaoqi and other rivals in the Chinese Communist Party, and more generally to a visible and burgeoning middle class populated by engineers, factory managers, and other science- or technology-minded citizens.  (Ironically, it’s the rise of a new middle class in China today, along with the weaker value of the U.S. dollar, that is driving a rapidly growing market for Asian material, much of which is being repatriated.)  Mao’s vision of communism sought an idealized classless society, and he used that vision to spark the Cultural Revolution, a movement whose sophisticated and gentle name belies the violence and turmoil it inspired throughout China.  (Estimates of those killed range from 500,000 to 20 million and will likely never be accurately known.)  The Cultural Revolution resulted in huge, sweeping changes in China to attitudes, policies, and even artwork.

As part of the Cultural Revolution, anything bourgeois was violently rejected and that included art.  All artwork was to promote the worker, the individual without promoting individualism, and to depict well-fed, cheerful Chinese citizens (like the beaming young woman pictured above) working hard but happily at daily jobs, preferably those that were seen as the cornerstones of communism – the worker and the farmer.  Carvings and sculptures of farmers plowing the fields, fishermen pulling their nets, workers surveying their accomplishments, seem to project a peacefulness and contentment, rather reminiscent actually of the American Regionalist artistic movement headed by Grant Wood a few decades earlier, that makes one feel life is simple and pleasurable for those who work hard and contribute to the world in which they live.  At the same time, when placed in the murky context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, these pieces seem to carry a darker, more sinister weight, contributing to the eternal discussion of how art changes with or without the historic, social, and artistic framework.

Op-Ed Pages of History: Political and Editorial Cartoons

September 18, 2013 in Ephemera by hdavis

A William Charles (Scottish/American, 1776 to 1820) political caricature, Johnny Bull and the AlexandriansOn the Fourth of July, we celebrate our political independence with fireworks and parades, cookouts and pool parties, but our true political independence gets celebrated every day in newspaper op-ed pages where we spout off about whatever’s bothering us and where one can find editorial or political cartoons lampooning every aspect of our political system in a daily, inexpensive, informative celebration of free speech, one of the freedoms we hold most dear.  The tradition of lampooning politics in cartoons is a rich one in Britain, and it traveled to America with the colonists.  (The detail pictured above is from an etching commenting on the farmers of Alexandria, Virginia buying their way out of occupation during the War of 1812 with rum and tobacco.)

Cartoons might seem silly or pointless decades later, but in reality, they’re very valuable resources to scholars.  As the old English proverb goes, many a true word has been spoken in jest, and as is the case with editorial cartoons today, these simple sketches and brief blurbs belie the wealth of information contained about some of the more difficult aspects of history to decipher: what our sense of humor as a culture is like, what we find funny or frustrating or just worthy of comment.  They also offer a subtle view of historical events that is sometimes otherwise lost to history.  For instance, many people who’ve just taken a history course or two have the sense that the Civil War was popular and that Abraham Lincoln was beloved by everyone north of the Mason-Dixon.  In reality, one could tell the entire history of the Civil War, including the political breakdown that preceded it and the frustrating muddle that followed it via editorial cartoons, many of which illustrate a deep disdain or hatred of Lincoln that might surprise people today.

Editorial cartoons were also, in the heightened political climate of the first century of the United States’ existence, a convenient way to convey one’s political viewpoint.  A printed, framed copy also offered plenty of opportunity for close scrutiny, something that was necessary with these cartoons that often contain complex symbolism, witty wordplay and intricate illustrations, so Currier & Ives, along with many other engravers and printers of the period, cranked out cartoons with commentary on trade acts, slavery debates, religion, American attitudes toward European conflicts and much more, all intended to be framed and hung in a library, office or study.  So the next time you find yourself chuckling or scratching your head after reading an editorial cartoon, remember that you’re participating in a long, rich history of questioning your government!

A Birdstone in the Hand: Prehistoric Artifacts at Auction

September 16, 2013 in Ancient Artifacts by hdavis

A miniature slate birdstone. Well banded with a low slung head and no evidence of drilling. Ohio. There are unsung heroes among us, people who devote their lives to collecting, cataloguing and organizing categories of things that most of us aren’t even aware exist.  Earl Townsend, Jr., who died in 2007, was such a man.  He spent much of his life compiling one of the finest collections in the United States of prehistoric stone relics of American Indians, including, at one time, more than 600 birdstones.

Townsend’s collection, which sold in December of 2011, was filled with these enigmatic objects.  Birdstones, like the one pictured above, are so called because they are all similar in their form, which resembles a bird.  Birdstones pop up occasionally, very occasionally, in the South, even less frequently west of the Mississippi, and the vast majority of them are found in the Ohio Valley and around the Great Lakes.  Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and New York have produced most of them.  Any stone could be used, but they are predominantly made from a banded slate.  The real mystery is their purpose and archaeologists have proposed a wide variety of theories from vague ceremonial usages to a function as a spear or atlatl weight to gender-related headdresses.  They clearly involved a great deal of work and effort and were a challenge to fashion, and as if this alone were not evidence of their value to the prehistoric societies in which they were made, they are/were often found in graves and burial mounds.  We may never have an answer to their larger purpose, but collections like this lay incredible foundations for the development of future work and theories.  Scholars of the future stand on the shoulders of people like Earl Townsend, Jr.

Carrying On: New Uses for Old Cutlery Trays

September 11, 2013 in Kitchen & Household by hdavis

An American painted pine knife box with "trompe l'oeil decoration" circa 1830 and with red interior and central arched divider.The best antiques are ones that you can really live with and some of the very best are cutlery trays. These trays, designed to carry flatware from kitchen to table, look deceptively simple.  In reality, they are some of the most useful antiques objects out there!  Pick one up and put it on a side table for outgoing mail, keys and phones, or just put one beside the couch and see how rarely you have trouble finding your remotes.

You can have your pick too, because almost everyone would have had one of these nifty little carriers, so there are plenty out there to choose from.  Lidded examples made from more dramatic woods like tiger maple can bring over $1,000, and beautiful paint-decorated examples, like the one pictured above, command even higher prices.  (This one brought over $4,400!)  But, if you’re not looking for fancy paint and if you don’t mind a small repair or a little less age, you can find attractive trays that you don’t have to worry about using!  It’s easy to find a pretty piece for between $100 and $300, and you have an easy way to introduce antiques into your decor in a natural and useful way.  Be on the lookout for one the next time you’re out at the local antique mall or flea market.

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