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.

Word of the Week: Canterbury

February 24, 2014 in Decorative Accessories, Furniture, Word of the Week by hdavis

Furniture: Wine Stand; Chippendale, Mahogany, Shell Carved, Shaped Handle, Cabriole Legs, Trifid Feet, 25 inch. Canterbury is one of those terms that, when the piece to which it originally applied fell out of fashion, was simply picked up and applied a second time to another form that was at least in some ways similar to the original. A canterbury in the 18th century was a low wooden stand, typically on casters, with a divided top, the purpose of which was to be set near the dining table and hold plates and cutlery. The form’s name is said to be a nod to the Archbishop of Canterbury who was an early adopter.

At some point, someone took the idea of the divided tray, deepened the wells, and, in some cases, added more compartments to create another portable piece of furniture, this one with slatted spaces for most typically sheet music or magazines and newspapers. These pieces are the forebearers of the modern magazine rack and in typical Victorian fashion, the form gets more elaborate as the 19th century wears on. By the latter part of the century, canterburies have end panels with music-inspired shapes (treble clefs or lyres/harps) and an upper shelf or tray top has been added.

Canterburies still have solid value with collectors, as they remain very useful for holding the exact things they were originally designed to hold and because they were used for the better part of two centuries at the very least, they’re available in a variety of styles and conditions.

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.

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