Nuts about Antiques: Tagua Nuts in Material Culture

June 3, 2013 in Miscellaneous Antiques, Uncategorized by hdavis

Ferrotype photograph images of Civil War Union Generals Meade, Rosecrans, and Sherman set in tagua nut braceletOne of the things I love about this job is that I never know what it will involve next.  Sure, much of the time I tend to putter along in my own little world, dealing with historical ephemera and documents, 19th-century photography, and American stoneware, but smack in the middle of a group of photographs, I find myself unexpectedly staring a botany lesson in the eye.  Even the simplest of questions can drift off into uncharted waters.  You never know where what seems like a small voyage will take you.  (Of course, I had my share of questions that were akin to the Minnow‘s “three-hour tour,” too, but those are other stories….)

This happened last month when I was working on a sale of photographic material.  In the midst of fairly normal albumens and daguerreotypes was the odd little bracelet pictured above – a bracelet with three tintype images of Civil War generals (all Union – Meade, Rosecrans, and Sherman) strung with blue glass beads and set “in tagua nut.”  Because I can never just leave well enough alone, I went off to find out just what tagua nuts are.  Turns out, tagua nuts are the endosperm of a genus of South American palm trees, and for small little things that grow thousands of miles away, they actually appear fairly often in American material culture, for the simple fact that they resemble elephant ivory, both in appearance and in their ability to be carved into durable useful objects.  Elephant ivory has been long been fashionably ambiguous, either because it’s difficult or expensive to procure or just ethically distasteful.  Tagua nuts solved that problem and show up in a number of places that one would also find ivory, including cane handles and clothing buttons.  “Nutty,” but true!

Piecing Together the Past: Friendship & Album Quilts

May 30, 2013 in Crafts & Folk Art by hdavis

A Baltimore applique album quilt, dated 1855Quilts are some of the most ubiquitous antiques – made for generations, still made, sometimes in the same ways, and still being sold or handed down in families. And perhaps more than many objects, they’re often completely detached from their history – no provenance, no history of a maker – and thus are reduced just to condition and whatever details can be drawn out from the age of the fabric, the pattern, and the technique.

For this reason, history can make a great difference in prices. A quilt like this one, which descended in an early Virginia/West Virginia family with family provenance, fetched easily three times what it likely would have as just an “old quilt” with no specific origins. Friendship quilts were also popular and help researchers make genealogical and historical connections. Friendship quilts are typically quilts with a traditional pieced structure, but they are often signed (and the pieced pattern often incorporates a “clear” white space for a signature and/or an embroidered inscription). Tradition indicates that friends would each make a pieced section to contribute.

A better documented, if more isolated tradition is that of the Baltimore album quilt. Album quilts (like the one pictured above) appeared in the 1840s in the Baltimore area (eventually spreading to other regions, including documented examples in the Miami River Valley area of Ohio), and unlike more traditional quilts which are made up of pieces of the same composition stitched together to create a pattern, album quilts are typically comprised of larger individual blocks, all with a separate design, style, or motif. While they were later often sold in kit form, early ones were individually designed, and while they occasionally appear to have been made by one person, the majority – and the most desirable – album quilts were, instead, often made by a group of women with each contributing a block that was either designed by the future owner or that was designed by the individual contributor. Oftentimes, the blocks are also signed by the makers, either in indelible ink or embroidery. The genealogical gift of more than one name (and, frequently, a date) is a great one to researchers.

Both friendship and album quilts were periodically also made for very specific occasions or causes, to commemorate weddings, birthdays, or other milestone events. While it appears to have been done all in one hand, this quilt, for example, marks Ohio’s contribution to the Civil War, being presented in 1884 to the mother of a soldier and listing the names, companies, and regiments of around 300 Ohio soldiers. So many quilts probably carry great stories, and the marketplace definitely appreciates those still in a position to “speak up”!

Portrait of a Nation: Currier & Ives Prints

May 20, 2013 in Ephemera by hdavis

We take the availability of art all around us for granted. That’s part of post-modernism, the fact that there’s no real original now, but just a stream of copies. There are sites all over the Internet offering inexpensive poster copies of great works of art, but until roughly the mid-19th century, artwork in homes was limited, both in quantity and quality. Wealth made it possible to commission portraits and landscapes from a variety of artists, from itinerants with varying levels of talent and training to professional, established painters, but the average home had limited options for decoration.

Until Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives came along. Technically, they didn’t actually come along at the same time. Currier started doing lithographs in 1834, set up his own shop in 1836, and worked under his name alone until 1857, when Currier invited Ives, his bookkeeper/accountant (and husband of his brother’s sister-in-law – nepotism never goes out of fashion), to join him as a partner, after he recognized not only Ives’ business abilities, but his artistic sensibilities and awareness of what had mass appeal. And the presses began to roll even more quickly….

The firm, which advertised “cheap and popular prints,” back when “cheap” was a good thing, produced at least 7,500 lithograph images (and hundreds of thousands of copies of those) over the full 72 years of Currier operations, lithographic images that captured every single aspect of American life – from politics, travel, disasters, and sports to the bucolic and pastoral scenes of the American countryside and home life (I’m partial to the “Homestead” series – fall is pictured above) for five cents to three dollars, depending on size and subject matter. Currier and Ives were not artists, but rather commissioned or bought the work of artists that they then had converted to prints and (depending on the image) hand-colored. (The firm employed some of the greatest artists of the era, including names like George Inness, Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast.) While Currier & Ives images are often dismissed out of hand for their sentimental view of American life, they actually tell the tale of America’s democratic nature, of the individual, and leave an incredible record of the images we found most appealing and enduring of ourselves. They are, in a sense, the illustrations for the story Americans, both today and in the past, told themselves about themselves, the depictions of our own mythology in progress.

Thanks to Frederic Conningham, a man who must have had the soul of a librarian, Currier & Ives prints are very well organized for today’s collector. Conningham assigned each print a number, tracked the various sizes in which the image was produced, and generally laid an organized foundation for the future study and appreciation of the images, but even today, new discoveries of obscure images turn up. Value is based primarily on size, subject matter, rarity, and, as with all things paper and mass-produced, also heavily dependent upon condition. Definitely worth taking note the next time you see one, if for no other reason than the fact that they sort of are America’s self-portrait!

Unearthing Great Finds: Studying the Fossil Record(s)

May 13, 2013 in Uncategorized by hdavis | No comments

When I’m out digging around in the dirt in the spring, I always think of all the searching I used to do for fossils when I was small. Of course, most of what I found were just fragments of seashells and fern fronds, but there are some really interesting things lying around in muddy creek beds and freshly plowed fields – and in our database!

Check out our natural history category, and you’ll find a number of “basic” fossils like sections of petrified wood and clamshell fossils. One of my favorite things (also very affordable) is the fossil of the little frog pictured above – he’s over 20 million years old! You’ll also find fossil fish, creatures in amber, and dinosaur toes. Of course if you have a little more room for a collection (or a little more money), you might think about a mastodon skull – this one is only 42 feet long. The sabre-toothed cat skeleton is a more compact 43 inches, if you’re looking to save space….

Object Lessons: Material Culture and History

May 8, 2013 in Miscellaneous Antiques by hdavis | No comments

George Trager photograph of the Wounded Knee battlefieldHistory is certainly filled with magnificent events: the Emancipation Proclamation, the passage of the 19th Amendment, the discovery of penicillin, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and on and on and on. We draw upon all this when we want to be inspired, but history is also ugly, small, and mean and all too often, we draw only upon the parts which allow us to feel good about ourselves. That’s one of the things I love about the database, actually: the balanced picture can’t be erased. We can erase the stories, but we can’t erase the evidence.

While you might not learn about the events in history classes today, a search of the database will still retrieve beaded pouches designed to carry an American Indian’s ration tickets. Forever woven into the history of many pieces of silver and art are stories of bribes for shelter and aid in fleeing the Nazis. There are Civil War documents with blood stains and bullet holes and we can’t scrub our history of Charleston slave tags or real photo postcards of lynchings. You can find photographs of the dead at Gettysburg, Wounded Knee (see above), Little Bighorn, and on and on. There is an indelible record of the awful things we have done to each other and the planet: engravings of the Boston Massacre, written accounts of life in Confederate prisons, pictures of hillsides obliterated by clear-cutting and objets d’art from the horns and bones and fur of creatures nearing extinction.

That is what makes the field of material culture so interesting and important: words lie. The founding fathers were conscious of the records they left, the boys writing home from all the fronts in all the wars were trying not to scare their wives and mothers, the writings in newspapers were opinions and hyperbole just as they are today. But objects, well, objects are…objective, and by studying them, we can reach different kinds of truth about the past.

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