Word of the Week

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Word of the Week: Sgraffito

June 11, 2014 in Pottery & Porcelain, Word of the Week by hdavis

A Conrad Mumbauer, attributed (1761 to 1845), Haycock Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, glazed sgraffito redware plate dated "1810"Sgraffito derives from graffiare (Italian for “to scratch”) and graphein (Greek for “to write”) and is yet another example of a term that has been slowly adapted (or corrupted, some might say) for use in the American marketplace. Technically and historically speaking, sgraffito is used to describe a method of fresco used on walls (amazing examples still survive on even the exteriors of old buildings throughout Europe) and a means for decorating ceramics. In terms of both fresco wall decoration and ceramics, it means applying multiple layers – plaster for walls, slip for ceramics – and then scratching the upper layer away to reveal the contrasting color.

Perhaps it is the multicolor nature of sgraffito as traditionally performed or simply the incising, scraping away an upper layer of, say, cream to reveal the layer, perhaps red, beneath, that allowed it to become tangled up with the decoration of redware pieces. Redware objects – plates, bowls, chargers, even hollow ware pieces like jars, were frequently decorated with multiple colors of slip and glaze, most commonly cream, yellow, red, and green. The technique in American redware is most frequently associated with the Germanic populations known as Pennsylvania Dutch (more appropriately Pennsylvania Germans and more accurately of the general mid-Atlantic region) and the Moravians who settled in Pennsylvania and the southeastern United States. Both populations used traditional Germanic decorative motifs: birds, tulips, hearts and animals. In this version of sgraffito, designs are incised into “leather-hard” clay, clay that has hardened but can still be worked in limited ways, and then the pieces are fired. While there is an element of “scratching” and the surface often has multiple colors, one layer of color is not removed to expose another, but rather the slip is scratched away to reveal the clay body.

American sgraffito-decorated redware has great appeal among collectors, interesting pottery collectors as well as folk art buyers and is exponentially more popular than European redware. As with all pottery, desirability has to do with form and condition, but sgraffito is, in and of itself, very rare. While sales of large collections like the Shelley collection can skew the perception of availability, in reality, very few pieces appear on the market each year. Meanwhile, however, folks like Lester Breininger offer incredible reproduction pieces!

Word of the Week: Dovetail

May 19, 2014 in Furniture, Word of the Week by hdavis

Furniture: A Chippendale blanket chest, Pennsylvania, late 18th century, walnut, pine, and poplar. Dovetailed case, two drawers, and bracket feet.Examining a piece of furniture is like examining a crime scene – forensics play a role in unraveling puzzles about the who, what, where, when, how of each object. One of the “fingerprints” commonly found in pieces of furniture is the dovetail joint (also known just as dovetail or, in Europe, often called a swallowtail or fantail joint). The photograph here shows the front corner of a drawer in a chest. The chest itself is also dovetailed. While no one really knows how old the dovetail joint is, some of the earliest examples are from pieces found in ancient tombs, both in China and in Egypt.

Dovetails are used in the construction of furniture as well as buildings as joining techniques in a way that offers impressive tensile strength. A dovetailed joint is like interlaced, interlocking fingers. (They’re technically referred to as “pins” and “tails.”) These fingers have a wedge or trapezoidal form and are glued together when finished, meaning an entire piece of furniture – or even an entire log cabin – can be assembled without so much as a single nail!

While most catalogers rarely make the distinction, dovetails can be accomplished in several ways – through, half-blind, secret mitered, sliding and full blind. In specific instances with a large enough body of work to compare, they can link objects to a particular cultural group, a specific shop or even identify the hand of a particular maker. (For instance, English dovetails are often perceived to be finer and more delicate, while Germanic ones tend to be seen as wider and more robust, but even this changes over time and in communities where both populations worked together or other factors influenced the practices of a local shop.)

In the early days of more industrial furniture production, dovetails were still handcut, banged out from templates in the kind of repetitive work that fell to apprentices and journeymen, but by the early 20th century, factories had figured out how to cut dovetail pin and tail wedges with machines. Around this same time, machine-cut joints, fashioned with rectangular pins and tails versus the traditional wedges, began to appear. While occasionally misidentified, these are technically not dovetails, as dovetails draw their very name from their wedge-like resemblance to a bird’s tail, but finger joints.

Word of the Week: Mora

May 6, 2014 in Clocks, Word of the Week by hdavis

A Swedish polychromed tall case clock, mid 19th century, the circular face enameled and marked "A.A.L. Mora", the center section lyriform and raised on a shaped and paneled base to bracket feet.

The Mora clock originated in the town of Mora, a small village in Sweden that is just on the southern edge of the Scandinavian Mountains. The clocks are a style of tall-case clock with an eight-day movement and often with a bombe midsection. (The cases share a great deal stylistically with French clocks of the period.) They were produced for roughly a century, from the late 1700s to the late 1800s, as part of a cottage industry in the town of Mora, where families worked together to manufacture and assemble them with each household assuming responsibility for a particular part. The families actually just made the clock movements this way, with buyers commissioning cases from locals on an individual basis, which explains the consistency among movements yet the diversity among cases. It is estimated that the citizens of Mora and the surrounding area made more than 50,000 movements, as many as 1,000 per year during the heyday of manufacturing, but the glut of inexpensive clocks from manufacturing centers in Germany as well as in America killed production of clocks in Mora before the close of the 19th century.

Krang Anders Andersson (1727 to 1799) is considered the first clockmaker in the region with a 1792 dated clock movement bearing his initials and many Mora clocks are marked with those initials – A.A.S. Mora.

Word of the Week: Morse

April 14, 2014 in Silver, Word of the Week by hdavis

Gorham gem and micromosaic set gold-washed sterling silver morse, Providence, Rhode Island, 1899We live in a rather disposable era just now, with plastic buttons popping off in the laundry and pants with broken zippers being discarded, but in the past, the medieval past, luxury goods like fabric and closure accessories like buttons and clasps were difficult to come by. Their expensive nature meant they needed to be easily salvageable and clothing was designed with this in mind. Take for instance a cope, which is a long liturgical garment that is open in the front and originally had a cloth rectangular panel across the front that joined with hook and eye closures to keep the cope from slipping. These panels, known as morses, highly visible as they were on the breast of the wearer, came to be highly decorated, initially with elaborate embroidery and then later with gemstones sewn into the decorations. Naturally, as the wealth of the Church grew and as ceremonies and cathedrals became increasingly ornamented throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the morse became a metalwork piece, a wrought clasp.

They are quite rare, or perhaps it is simply rare to recognize them for what they are or for them to be identified as such at auction, as medieval examples are well documented, both in museums and in the documents of European churches. This example, which sold recently at Skinner, Inc., is identified by its inscription and was likely a gift in memory of a church member. The central portrait is a micromosaic, a image composed like a mosaic, but with near-microscopic pieces.

Word of the Week: Burl

March 19, 2014 in Crafts & Folk Art, Native American, Word of the Week by hdavis

An exceptional large ash burl covered bowl, North America, circa 1780.Burl wood is highly prized in the antiques world, used for veneer on a variety of case pieces and smaller decorative objects as well as being shaped into more utilitarian wares like bowls and utensils, but it starts life as one of those knobby, rounded growths often seen on trees. Most burl objects from an identified wood are ash, but burl can occur on just about any type of tree and objects are also made from maple, elm, and walnut burl, among others.

Burl is actually most typically a tree’s response to an injury of some sort – either a direct injury like a cut or a blow or an indirect one caused by the introduction of a virus or a fungus, and a great many of them are actually found in root systems in enormous connected networks when trees fall over. The knots within the burl themselves are dormant, malformed buds.

Extracting wood from a burl or using one to create an object is quite difficult, making burl not only prized for its rarity but for the difficulty in working with it. It is almost like a tumor – a dense cluster of cells and while the winding, convoluted grain makes it prone to cracking if worked with too much mechanical force, the same thickness of grain makes objects wrought from it unlikely to crack or split. Burl was often worked by hand, especially by Native Americans who created many utensils from it. On the other hand, if a bowl has parallel lines or rings on the exterior, a raised foot or a particularly consistent rim around the top, these are indications that it was turned on a lathe rather than carved by hand.

It should be noted that birdseye maple, while similar to burl in appearance, is not the same thing. The dark, hard knots found in burl are not present in birdseye maple and while many theories have been put forth, scientists do not yet have an explanation for what causes the birdseye effect.

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