Category Archives: Culture

May 15, 2013

Marshes and Mountains

By daseger

Last week, I discovered yet another Salem-born artist of the mid- and later nineteenth century in the usual way–by browsing through auction archives (a relatively new pastime of mine that I’ve got to nip in the bud, as it is very time-consuming!) This particular artist, Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon (1830-1906) did not dwell in Salem in his adulthood, but I continue to be amazed at the creative environment that existed in this era, another aspect of Salem’s history that is overwhelmed by its Witch City reputation.

Hodgdon was the son of a wealthy Salem currier who had married into one of Salem’s older families, which explains the prominent Phelps in his name (although he usually signed his paintings “S.P. Hodgdon”). He appears to have moved to Boston in his early 20s, where he studied with the well-traveled Boston artist Benjamin Champney and worked for the L.H. Bradford lithography firm. For most of his life, he lived in the Dorchester section of Boston, and maintained a studio at the Tremont Studio building downtown, along with a host of prominent artists and architects. He was clearly part of the Boston art scene and community, teaching classes and exhibiting his work at the Boston Art Club in its heyday. But like so many Boston-based artists of this era, Hodgdon was drawn to northern New England for his subject matter: there are few streetscapes among his works, but rather gilded landscapes of marshes, valleys, and mountains–predominately in New Hampshire. Therefore he is generally characterized as one of the “White Mountain Painters”, along with Champney, who created one of America’s first art colonies by inviting a succession of painters, including Hodgdon, to come to his summer residence in North Conway from the 1850s on. This was clearly Hodgdon’s preferred milieu, but I did manage to find a few local scenes among his digitized works.

On the Marsh/A Salem, Massachusetts landscape,1861, Skinner Auctions Archive; Long Beach, Nahant, 1861, Carlsen Gallery Auctions Archive; Echo Lake, Franconia Notch, 1858, Collection of John J. and Joan R. Henderson. Photograph courtesy of the New Hampshire Historical Society. All the sources indicate that Hodgdon preferred to work at the “extremes” of the day, in the early morning and at dusk.

This last painting is among the most acclaimed of his White Mountains works, and as you can see, it dates from early in his career, while he was still in his 20s and working as a lithographer by day/artist by night (and summer). I was able to gather a few other images to add some context to Hodgdon’s life, including some examples of his lithography for the Bradford firm and a photograph of the Tremont Studio building in Boston: all traces of his past that are now sadly gone.

Hodgdon’s lithographs for L.H. Bradford: “Old Man on the Mountain”, Franconia Notch (whose visage crumbled to the ground in 2003) American Antiquarian Society; Tabernacle Church, Salem, 1854, Boston Athenaeum, and the Tremont Studio in Boston, New York Public Library: gone, gone & gone.

4 Comments | tags: Art, Lithography, New England, Photography | posted in Culture, History, Salem

May 11, 2013

Mother Shipton

By daseger

Rather contrarily, my offering for Mother’s Day weekend is not a warm, loving, and lovely caregiver but a prophesying crone: Mother Shipton, who most likely never existed. Supposedly born in the first years of the new Tudor dynasty in a Yorkshire cave (the product of a union between a poor wretch named Agatha and the Devil), Ursula Southeil or “Mother Shipton” rose to fame in the mid-seventeenth century, long after her supposed death. Just before the English Civil War, a time of high anxiety indeed, a series of Mother Shipton pamphlets suddenly appeared, containing predictions of things that, for the most part, had already happened, along with dire warnings of war and destruction.

The first prophecy on the second 1642 pamphlet is typical Mother Shipton: Joane Waller should live to heare of Wars within this Kingdome but not to see them. The Civil War broke out in the same year of as the tract was published, but of course Waller had died the year before. A similar assertion regarding Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, that he would see York but never get there, was one of Mother Shipton’s most famous “predictions”. Her published prophecies continued through the Civil War (closely tied to current events) and after, and she joined the ranks of such legendary magicians as Merlin.

Shipton Prophecies from 1648 & 1661

In the later seventeenth century, Mother Shipton’s biography and predictions were embellished rather vastly by a series of publications entitled The Life and Death of Mother Shipton, and her story was adapted for entertainment purposes, thus cementing her now-legendary character. The transition from ominous witch-soothsayer to stock character is emblematic of the emergence of a collective rationalist mentality in the seventeenth century, with a corresponding decline in belief in magic and “wonder”, now assuming its more modern meaning.

And that would probably be the end of Mother Shipton, consigned to a relatively minor character in the long history of sibyls and soothsayers, if she was not resurrected in the Victorian era. It’s always the Victorians! Charles Dickens first referenced her in a 1856 story, and then the entrepreneurial bookseller Charles Hindley published a new set of rhymed and timely prophecies that were supposedly based on a newly-discovered manuscript in the British Museum (he later confessed to making them up). Now Mother Shipton was predicting railroads, ships made of iron, wireless communication and all sorts of industrial innovations, as well as the ominous warning that the world then to an end shall come/ In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, which was changed to 1991 in early-twentieth-century reprints. By that time, she had evolved yet again, into a fairy-tale character and (later) a tourist attraction.

Charles Townley print of Mother Shipton and her familiar, 1800, British Museum, Linley Sanbourne and W. Heath Robinson illustrations of Mother Shipton on her broomstick for Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1888 & 1915); the entrance to Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresborough, “England’s Oldest Tourist Attraction” (shades of Salem!).

10 Comments | tags: Art, England, folklore, holidays, Illustrations, Renaissance, Witchcraft | posted in Culture, History

May 7, 2013

Period Rooms

By daseger

The “period rooms” installed in many museums are always the first place I go, but as I often find myself wandering about alone, I’m not surprised that there are efforts afoot to instill a bit more life into them. Our major museum here in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum, doesn’t even have period rooms even though I believe that its predecessor, the Essex Institute, pioneered such installations with its George Francis Dow-designed rooms from a century ago. The PEM owns entire historic houses, however, so one can certainly understand the reluctance to consign precious exhibition space to static rooms. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston retains its period rooms, and has just added a seventeenth-century English drawing room to their assemblage of suites.

I know of a several projects aimed at revitalizing period rooms from the past few years, but there must be many more. Just recently, the “All America House” exhibit at Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia opened, the result of a collaboration between the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Woodlawn’s owner, and MADE: In America, a nonprofit organization, in which teams of students from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, George Washington University and the Corcoran College of Art + Design were charged with creating a home for a modern family in the historic rooms at Woodlawn, working with the Woodlawn staff and mingling antiques from the collection with new furniture designed and manufactured in the United States. The goal was the creation of rooms which “referenced the many layers of history embodied at Woodlawn over the last 210 years”. Below are before and after pictures from the National Trust’s blog, with the pristine period parlor above and the “All-American” parlor below.

Woodlawn Plantation and its front parlor, before (National Trust for Historic Preservation photograph) and after (David Wilson).

I love the All America parlor designed by the students (and how great that students were recruited for this project rather than Big Famous Designers): it’s a similar aesthetic to my own house (or at least a style I’m striving for) but clearly it represents a historic era–say the heyday of Woodlawn as a working plantation–less than it does our own time. Nevertheless, people love the contrast of past and present, and such approaches can encourage engagement–the goal of every history educator or interpreter.

Another interesting attempt to revitalize period rooms was the Brooklyn Museum’s Playing House “activation” from a year ago, in which modern artists working in various genres (Ann Agee, Anne Chu, Mary Lucier and Betty Woodman) were invited to place site-specific artworks in eight of the Museum’s 23 period rooms. Again, the goal was the merging and juxtaposition of past and present, creating new perspectives on both.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Cane Acres Plantation period room (late 18th century) with abstract pottery “placemats” and sculptures by Betty Woodman and textile “flowers” and cloths by Anne Chu; video installation by Mary Lucier in the dining room of the seventeenth-century Jan Martense Schenk house.

I wish I had gone to the exhibition in person because the pictures seem to present the period rooms as mere backdrop for the modern art and I’m sure the real experience was much more interactive. One last attempt to inject life into a dusty period room was the recent Supper with Shakespeare collaboration between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and British food historian Ivan Day. Mr. Day created a desert display for the Institute’s c. 1600 Tudor Room which featured a sugar castle centerpiece and tarts made from period recipes, placed on a table set with period cutlery and serving ware from the Institute’s collection, so people could see how these still things–table, chairs, plates, knives–were used in their own time.

Supper with Shakespeare display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; photograph by Ariana Lindquist for the New York Times.

9 Comments | tags: great houses, Interiors, museums, Peabody Essex Museum | posted in Culture, Design, History

May 5, 2013

Modernizing the Monarchs

By daseger

Playing with history, even manipulating it, is amusing in my off-time (which includes the blog), so naturally these images captured my attention: they were commissioned by a British television channel named Yesterday for their tabloid series entitled The Secret Life Of… and are the results of “digital artists working closely with history experts to ensure the portraits gave a real sense of how historical characters would look if they were alive in the 21st Century”. I don’t know how this could be “ensured”, but interesting choices were made in the updating process. For example, Henry VIII was by all accounts a vain man, so he would have maintained his athletic figure through middle age and cloaked it in a bespoke suit–but the jewelry? I don’t think so. I also think he was a traditionalist, so he would have worn a tie, especially for an important portrait-sitting.

Henry’s daughter Elizabeth is described as “the over–the-top queen with the powdered white face, unnaturally high forehead, and a wardrobe that made her the Lady Gaga of the 16th century” . Why then such a boring pantsuit? This modern Elizabeth has been robbed of her femininity, which was an essential feature of her projected character. I would have clothed her in something much more high fashion: she looks like a Dolce & Gabbana girl to me, and the ensemble below (from their Fall 2012 collection) reads royal.

Elizabeth’s contemporary William Shakespeare fares better, I think, but then who really knows? The receding hairline that you see in some historical images (we’re not quite sure what Shakespeare actually looked like) has been “corrected” with a modern hair transplanting process, resulting in abundant curls, and his ruff is replaced by a hipster shirt and vest. The facial hair remains the same, as it does with Henry VIII. Timeless, I guess.

4 Comments | tags: Fashion, films, Popular Culture, Tudors | posted in Culture, History

May 1, 2013

May Day

By daseger

Thanks to fond childhood memories (which I wrote about in last year’s May Day post) and my own rather whimsical penchant for the past, the first of May is one of my favorite days of the year. This year it is even better than usual because it marks the end of classes (yes, professors look forward to this just as much as students, perhaps more). There is lots of age-old advice about May Day, which, combined with artistic representations of bringing in the May–feasting, dancing, and processions (all while wearing garlands)– leads me to believe that it was once a much more important holiday than the non-event it is today. This is just a small list of things that you are supposed to do or not do in May, culled from a variety of sources, most from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: take off your “flannels”, organize a parade (especially if you are a milkmaid or a chimney sweep), cut down trees and greenery and deck the halls, dance, pick a May Queen, move house (???), but do not get married (unfortunately my anniversary is in May) or sleep with a blooming Hawthorn branch in your bedroom.

For my own May Day observance, I’ve collected a few flowery images from the past–where May Day is depicted with a strong undertone of liberation on at least this first day of the merry month of May–and my own present-day Salem. I think everyone feels a bit more liberated in the springtime, and students and professors at semester’s end.

Thomas Lord Busby, Costumes of the Lower Orders of London, 1820 (New York Public Library Digital Gallery).

Here is a rather fanciful depiction of milkmaids and chimney sweeps in their May Day costumes, with the traditional Jack in the Green in the center, covered by a more masculine version of the traditional garland. Quite elaborate costume for the “lower orders”! This is one of 24 hand-colored etched plates “engraved from nature’ by Thomas Lord Busby in 1820: a rather voyeuristic, and expensive, collection that is brand new to me. Both milkmaids and chimney sweeps (but no Jack in the Green) are the central subjects of Francis Hayman’s earlier (and even more romanticized) painting, The Milkmaid‘s Garland, or Humours of May Day (1741-42), below.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

More than a century later, Walter Crane’s images of May Day are both romantic and relevant: as devoted to the cause of the “lower orders” as he was to his art, he created the iconic Garland for May Day, 1895 which grounded politics in the same traditional imagery that is evident in his later illustration for Charles Lamb’s A Masque of Days (London: Cassell & Company, 1901).

Rather than a full-floral display, there are pops of color around town this morning: it’s still early Spring in Salem. In my own garden, my perfect pulmonaria (lungwort) was in full flourish, and the boring forsythia a little past. Elsewhere in Salem, there was a lot to see on this May Day morning on my brief run around before (the last day of) classes. I particularly like the last little striped flowers in the herb garden behind the Richard Derby House at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site–some type of tulip?

8 Comments | tags: Art, Flora and Fauna, folklore, Garden, Home, illustration | posted in Culture, History, Nature, Salem

April 29, 2013

Spring Witches

By daseger

In central and northern Europe the closing days of April and commencement of Spring converge on Walpurgisnacht, a bonfire festival based on both pagan and Christian traditions. On the eve of May 1, the canonization day of Saint Walpurga, an English Christian nun and missionary based in southern Germany in the eighth century (and presumably was so named to replace a pre-Christian harvest goddess also named Walpurga), witches gather to fly off to the highest mountain (in the case of Germany, Brocken Mountain in the Harz mountain range) to pay homage to the Devil with a night-long bacchanalian celebration. Newly-empowered and inspired, they fly back to society, on broomsticks or goats, to continue their demonic service.

Fireworks over the Rhine on Walpurgisnacht, 2012, and Hermann Hendrich’s vision, 1901.

Like Halloween, exactly six months later, Walpurgisnacht is a perfect example of early medieval assimilation, in which a saint’s day is grafted onto an existing “calendar” and there is a clash of evil and good, or perhaps a last hurrah for evil before good prevails in the merry new month of May. Evil is always very, very close–but the actual ritual by which the witch enters into the pact with the devil–described and perceived as in inverse Sabbath–happens far away, in a remote place that one could only access through flight. As I wrote about in an earlier post, fears about a conspiratorial demonic force intensified in the sixteenth century along with the Reformation, resulting in over 100,000 trials for witchcraft in the early modern era. Two hundred years later, after the Devil had lost much of his power, he was revived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epic and tragic Faust (1808-1831), with its vivid scenes of Walpurgis Night.

Title page of the 1908 Hayward/Hutchinson translation of Goethe’s Faust, with illustrations of Walpurgis Night by Willy Pogany.

Goethe, along with his near-contemporaries the Brothers Grimm and a host of other authors and artists, was both reflection and inspiration for an intensifying interest in German folklore in the nineteenth century. Witches became more fanciful than fearful; even if it was with or for the devil, they still danced. Given its long association with the witches’ sabbaths, the Brocken and its adjacent Hexentanzplatz (a plateau long referred to as the “witches’ dancing floor”) became popular tourist destinations. A hilltop hotel on the Hexentanzplatz drew a steady stream of visitors from 1870 on, and the addition of an open-air theater and the Walpurgishalle, a museum dedicated to Goethe and Walpurgis Night, increased their number after the turn of the century. The Hexentanzplatz became a place where everybody could come to dance, on the eve of St. Walpurga’s Day, Beltane, May Day, or simply Spring.

The focus is clearly on the Hexentanzplatz hotel in postcards from the 1890s and 1911 (along with the now-naked witches); a century later the more generic Wulpurgisnacht is celebrated in Meissen (photo by Tobi_2008@ Flikr).

4 Comments | tags: ephemera, holidays, Literature, Photography, Popular Culture, Witch Trials, Witchcraft | posted in Culture, History

April 27, 2013

Art or Advertising?

By daseger

I’ve been fixated on this little watercolor painting below ever since I spotted it in the archives of Northeast Auctions a few months ago. Described as a “watercolor trophy with flags and banner with landscapes”, it was painted by C.C. Redmond of Salem in December of 1880. For me, this little image begs the perennial question: is it art or advertising?

I find this question difficult to answer when it concerns bespoke items, produced not for a mass market but for a single customer or client, and the amazing prices that nineteenth-century trade signs fetch at auctions seems to confirm their artistic status. I wish I had found this watercolor “sign” (?) in an auction listing rather than an archive, because I would have snapped it up: I love the combination of lettering and landscapes, and the patriotic symbolism and Salem connection make it even more appealing. Searching around for more information about Redmond, I became even more confused about the art vs. advertising question, as he seems to have presented himself as both artist and “advertiser”, whether out of voluntary inclination or economic necessity I do not know. Charles C. Redmond’s life was short (1850-1889) and busy: he was born in northern Maine, enlisted in the Civil War at age 15 and saw action, and ended up in Salem after the war. He hung his own sign in front of his Essex Street shop in the later 1870s, and the Salem Directory for 1886 includes the following advertisement: Charles C. Redmond, Sign and Ornamental Painter. Particular attention given to all kinds of Portrait and Landscape Painting. Scroll work on wagons, coaches, etc…243 1/2 Essex Street Salem. Redmond was active in the Salem G.A.R. post, and when Lieutenant-General Philip H. Sheridan visited Salem in 1888, his portrait was painted by Redmond, who was described in a souvenir pamphlet from the following year as “a local artist now deceased, who was possessed of rare genius in line of work”. According to the Smithsonian’s Catalog of American Portraits, Redmond painted at least two other portraits before he died, of Salem photographer-entrepreneur Frank Cousins and President Ulysses S. Grant (whose birthday is today!). Both portraits are in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum here in Salem, but I don’t think they’ve been on view for quite some time.

I would love to see these Redmond portraits (especially the Cousins one; I know what Grant looked like), but I would really love to see more Redmond signs. I searched and searched through all my sources, but no luck. I did find some contemporary wooden signs made in Salem by Redmond’s competitors, but I imagine his to be more “artistic”–whatever that means! (Perhaps these beautiful “spectacles” with some fancy scrollwork naming their maker).

Shoemaker’s trade sign made in Salem c. 1880 and signed “Manderbach”, Pollack Antiques; Spectacle sign by E.G. Washburn, New York City, c. 1875-1900, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.

4 Comments | tags: advertising, Antiques and Collectibles, Art, Decorative Arts, Frank Cousins, Presidents | posted in Culture, History, Salem

April 25, 2013

Flemish Renaissance Revival

By daseger

I thought I had my architectural revival styles straight–Greek, Gothic, Colonial–but somehow I never accounted for the different varieties of Renaissance revival styles until yesterday, when, in my continuous search for double-parlor inspiration, I came across a beautiful photograph of the interior of a Flemish Renaissance Revival house in a New York Times article about upcoming house and garden tours across the country. This parlor took my breath away, and also took me back, to the Flemish (Northern) Renaissance, of course.

The parlor of a 1903 Flemish Renaissance Revival House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of several houses open to the public during the upcoming Park Slope Civic Council Tour, and Rogier van der Weyden’s triptych, the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, c. 1445-50, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

I don’t know why this style is such a surprise to me: there were several Renaissances, so it only makes sense that there would be several Renaissance Revival styles. The Renaissance itself was a revival of sorts; revivals are eternal. I immediately set off on a walk around Salem to see if I could find buildings of similar inspiration here, but to no avail: this is not a Salem style, perhaps not even a New England one–though I do think there are brownstones in the Back Bay of Boston that feature the distinct roofline. A digital search will have to do for now, but I look forward to future forays. I would expect that this style would flourish in New York, but my preliminary search for more examples of the Flemish Renaissance Revival seems to indicate its particular popularity in the Midwest: surely the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, built in 1892 is an exemplar.

Flemish Renaissance Revival houses in America: the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, Vanderslice Hall in Kansas City (1895-96), built for the Meyer family and now the Kansas City Art Institute, rowhouses in the Parkside neighborhood, West Philadelphia, and at 13-15 South William Street, Manhattan.

The inspiration: the beautiful, storybook city of Bruges (Getty Images), and I’m throwing in the great 2008 film here too, just because I also think it’s converging on CLASSIC, the basis for any revival.

7 Comments | tags: Architecture, design, films, Interiors, Renaissance | posted in Culture, Design, Houses

April 23, 2013

A Few Scraps of Shakespeare

By daseger

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1594

April 23 is a big day for Anglophiles, marking the birth (and death) of William Shakespeare and the Feast of St. George, the patron saint of England. I have never really understood how St. George became the patron saint of England, so I’m going with Shakespeare. And as I’m not a literary scholar, I’m going for scraps, bit of ephemera that were quite the rage in the nineteenth century, when scrap-booking became a popular leisure activity, and scrap screens began appearing in parlors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Title Page of Shakespeare’s First Folio, 1623, British Library; Jane Carlyle’s Scrap Screen, 1849, at the Carlyle House in London, Treasure Hunt.

There’s nothing particularly novel about pasting images in a book or on a wall, but printing and paper technologies in the nineteenth century commercialized the activity, like everything else. Scraps for sale first appeared as black and white engravings at the beginning of the century, and by the latter half they were colored by chromolithography, embossed, die-cut and sold as sheets at the local stationer. Mrs. Carlyle’s screen above is made of more “found” examples, but many people seem to have preferred the more glossy materials that could be found at the shop. In the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, there are some wonderful scraps of Shakespearean characters, vividly bringing them to life for those that could not see them on the stage. Sigmund Hildesheimer & Company’s Characters from Shakespeare. A Series of Twelve Relief Scraps depicted characters played by popular actors, and were sold in packs costing one shilling in the 1890s. My favorites are below: Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and the two “princes in the tower”, Ophelia and Hamlet, and Cromwell and Wolsey from Henry VIII.

Shakespearean Scraps by Siegmund Hildesheimer & Co., c. 1890, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

3 Comments | tags: England, ephemera, printing, Victoria & Albert Museum, William Shakespeare | posted in Culture, History

April 19, 2013

Patriotic Patterns

By daseger

Given my armchair observance of Patriots’ Day, and then everything that happened on that sad day (and is still happening), I thought I’d retreat into a safe material world and examine some of the patriotic products that were produced in the decades after the American Revolution, some in the new country and some for the new country. It seems appropriate to continue exploring expressions of patriotism; after all, the real anniversary of Lexington and Concord is today. Right after the Revolution (literally) home furnishings which reflected the revolutionary spirit were produced both in this country and oddly enough, in Britain. Maybe it’s not odd: Britain was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution which was initiated by what I’ve always considered a uniquely pragmatic entrepreneurial attitude. I wish I could see the imagery more clearly in this first woodblock-printed wallpaper, but obviously it has deteriorated with time. Here is the catalog description from the Cooper Hewitt Museum: perhaps it will help you make out the Lexington Minuteman and his associates: Beside an Indian maiden, representing America, a patriot tramples British laws underfoot and extends the declarations of July 4, 1776, to Britannia, who weeps over a pedestal containing an urn, or a tomb. The whole is contained within a curtained arch. Printed in black, white and gray on a light colorless ground.

This paper was produced in America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the same time as the textiles below, which are obviously in much better condition: The Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington is a copperplate-printed toile fabric produced in several colorways in Britain between 1785-1800, right after the first big defeat of the British Empire. I love George Washington’s leopard-driven carriage!

Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington fabrics in black and red colorways, collections of the Winterthur Museum and the Society of the Cincinnati; bed valence at Dumbarton House/National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

British pottery manufacturers were also quick to take advantage of the newly-independent emerging American market. Even if you’re just a casual picker, I’m sure that you have run into some of the blue-and-white transferware of the Clews Brothers, James and Ralph, decorated with American scenes and symbols at their factory in Cobridge, England in the 1820s and 1830s. You see it everywhere, in all sorts of forms.

“American” transferware, including a “States Design” platter below, made by James and Ralph Clews in England,c. 1819-36, Skinner Auctioneers Archives.

And how many gilt mirrors emblazoned with eagles were produced in the Federal era (or reproduced afterwards)? So many, and again, produced in all shapes and sizes in both America and England. Below is a particularly nice eglomise (reverse-painted) example featuring the USS Constitution made in Providence by Peter Grinnell & Son right after the War of 1812. And from the next decade, a beautiful “patriotic overmantle painting” from a Rockport, Massachusetts home. It is tempera on plaster (I’m wondering how they took it off the wall???), and sold for $61,ooo at a Christie’s auction in 2008.

This last painting does not really qualify as a commercially-produced product or a pattern, but it is so beautiful I wanted to include it. My last item–a handmade woven wool and linen coverlet with patriotic themes and symbols–dates from the mid-nineteenth century (1851 to be precise), just before patriotism becomes divided and divisive with the coming of the Civil War. Actually, even before 1850 the Abolitionist and Temperance movements produced their own patriotic/promotional objects. This lovely coverlet expresses a more personal patriotism, but also one in keeping with the functions of these other objects: Americans wanted the symbols and imagery of their new nation on their walls, on their tables, and on their beds.