Category Archives: History

August 11, 2012

Ladies of Salem

By daseger

Looking down upon the streets of Salem this summer are 12 “Ladies of Salem”, nautical figureheads created by local artists to commemorate Salem’s maritime past and highlight its present role as a “port of culture”.  The Lady of Salem festival, spearheaded by the city’s Beautification Committee, is the most recent of a succession of positive public arts initiatives designed to draw the attention of both residents and visitors away from the tacky exploitation of Salem’s witch-trial past, or at the very least to put the events of 1692 (and their “interpretation”) in context.  These ladies, affixed to lampposts on downtown streets adjacent to their sponsoring businesses, peer down at passers-by with their characteristic open gazes.  Here’s a sampling:  as the organizers of the festival are encouraging the public to vote for their favorites, I’m starting with mine, and then proceeding in no particular order.

Figurehead by Jeanne Pare, sponsored by Treasures over Time, Washington Street.

Figureheads by Mary Ellen Halliwell for the Salem Beautification Committee, Amberlynn Narvie for Beverly Cooperative Bank, and John Devine for the Palmer’s Cove Yacht Club on Essex Street.

Two more Essex Street ladies:  figureheads by Jade Mason for Body & Soul Massage/Collins Cove Appraisors and Sheila Billings for Cabot Money Management, Inc.

Figureheads were a prominent feature of ships built from the seventeenth century to the age of steam and were often, but not exclusively, female. The general consensus seems to hold that for very superstitious seamen, real women on board were bad luck, so this was the only way to have a feminine presence on seagoing vessels, which were, of course, also characterized as feminine.  At the same time, figureheads represented the “spirit” of their ships and offered protection on long, arduous voyages. The Peabody Essex Museum has a lovely collection of figureheads, many of which are very majestically displayed in East India Marine Hall, but the largest collection of figureheads from merchant ships can be found at the newly-restored Cutty Sark in Britain, part of Royal Museums Greenwich. I love this picture of them all together.

Figureheads in the East India Marine Hall of the Peabody Essex Museum, and one attributed to Samuel McIntire in the PEM’s collection; the Cutty Sark figureheads, collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

She’s not from Salem, but as most of us rarely have the vantage point of viewing a figurehead from above, I wanted to include this interesting photograph by Alan Villiers of the bow of the Herzogin Cecilie from 1928–the very last days of figureheads.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Current Events, Design, History, Salem

August 9, 2012

Mourning in England and America

By daseger

When I found the painting below, alternatively titled The Saltonstall Family, or Members of the Saltonstall Family, and painted by David Des Granges about 1636-37, I was immediately drawn to it for several reasons.  I teach several courses on this period, so I thought it would be very useful in illustrating the importance of family in Stuart England. And then there was the Salem connection:  the Saltonstalls were one of the founding families of Massachusetts and of Salem:  Nathaniel Salstonstall (1639-1707) was one of the judges in the witch trials and Leverett Saltonstall (1783-1845) was the city’s first mayor and later a U.S. representative. We have a Saltonstall School and a Saltonstall parkway.  However, a little genealogical research (I never like to engage in too much genealogy–it’s a tangled web) has convinced me that I don’t really have a Salem story:  the man in the painting is indeed Sir Richard Saltonstall, but he is not THE Sir Richard Salstonstall (1586-1661), who sailed up the Charles River in 1630 and became the founder of the Massachusetts Saltonstalls of later fame and fortune. This Sir Richard Saltonstall (1595-1650) never left England, and in the same year that the man who shared his name was exploring the New World he was losing his first wife, who is also pictured below, along with his second, and the children he had with both women.

David Des Granges, The Saltonstall Family, 1636-37.  Tate Museum, London.

This, then, is a mourning portrait, depicting the living and the dead, together:  a truly blended family!  Sir Richard is pictured alongside his dead first wife, Elizabeth Basse, who is pointing to their two surviving children, Richard (wearing a long skirt as was customary for English boys of a certain class until age 6 or 7) and Ann, who link hands with each other and with their father, demonstrating the bonds of family.  Sir Richard’s second wife, Mary Parker, is seated with their newborn child on the right, completing the framed family.

Though some might think it a little creepy to have a dead person in the picture (though certainly far less creepy than those Victorian photographs of the dearly departed), I think that this painting is a rather tender portrayal of remembrance. Sir Richard’s outstretched hand seems to be including everyone in his family, and reminding his children not to forget their mother.  Here mourning is about remembering the dead, rather than just dwelling on loss by putting something on–a dress, a ring, a brooch, an armband.  In terms of aesthetics, I have always admired the elegant American mourning paintings from the Federal period–usually painted on silk and with the requisite weeping willow taking center stage–but this earlier English example strikes me as far more personal, and poignant.

New England mourning paintings on silk from 1810, 1811 & 1815, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a D.W. Kellogg chromolithographic print of an 1825 painting, Library of Congress.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

August 3, 2012

Samuel McIntire in Texas

By daseger

I knew that the charming 1793 summer house designed by Salem’s renown architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) had been moved (from its original location 4 miles away on Salem merchant king Elias Hasket Derby’s Peabody farm–successively the property of the Crowninshield and Osborn families), and copied (by Derby’s distant descendant Martha Codman for her Newport mansion Berkeley Villa, which you can read about here), but I had no idea until very recently that it was the inspiration for a Houston McMansion.

Here is a panorama of pictures taken yesterday of McIntire’s beautiful summer house, situated since 1901 on the Glen Magna estate in Danvers, Massachusetts.

And here, via my very favorite pinner on Pinterest, via the Cote de Texas blog, via Luxe magazine, are pictures of a house outside downtown Houston designed by John Ike of Ike Ligerman Barkley Architects of New York.

It is probably wrong of me to call this house a McMansion as it is only two rooms deep, but it does have white marble flours (versus the painted wood of the original).  I’m not sure what to think of this creation:  is imitation the sincerest form of flattery in this case?

Another view:  a Rudolf Ruzicka Christmas card for the Merrymount Press, 1940.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses

August 1, 2012

Hats Off to London

By daseger

The Anglophile in me cannot resist one more post on London, but this one will not be about sports, but rather about hats.  And I will put a little Salem in here, because I am inspired.  As part of the Olympics celebration as well as the Mayor of London’s summer-long schedule of happenings called “Surprises”, twenty of the city’s most conspicuous statues have been topped with hats designed by eminent British milliners. For the next few days, Londoners will be amused (I hope) with very clever juxtapositions of hard and soft, traditional and fanciful.  The event is called “Hatwalk“, and here are some of my favorite pairings:

Queen Victoria wearing what appears to be an Olympic-flame hat, by Justin Smith, Esq.

Another flame: Admiral Nelson in a hat by James Lock & Co., Hatters.

General Sir Henry Havelock in a Philip Treacy “spectator”.

The Poet Robert Burns (A Red, Red Rose) wearing a hat by William Chambers Millinery.

General Sir Charles James Napier wearing a Sophie Beale hat.

King George IV and his horse, resplendent in Brighton pavilion-inspired hats by Stephen Jones.

Sir Arthur Sullivan and The Lady, wearing Gina Foster and Victoria Grant hats.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on Bond Street, wearing hats by John Boyd and Herbert Johnson, respectively.

All photographs by Getty Images.

I love this installation (for lack of a better word–I’ve been struggling with what to call this happening) because it’s creative and historical at the same time–drawing attention to both design and the people, along with their eras and accomplishments, who are “modeling” the hats.  Several of these statues are in very prominent places like Trafalgar Square, but others might have been overlooked and forgotten.  Even before I became aware of Hatwalk, I had been thinking about several statues here in Salem and its environs which I pass by every day and never really look at, much less take the time to stop and read their plaques and inscriptions. If these statues had jaunty hats on their heads, perhaps I would!  One Salem statue in particular which needs more attention (or interpretation) is that of Roger Conant (1592-1679), who settled in Salem in 1626 and became its first governor, after brief stays in the Plymouth and Cape Ann colonies (he really disliked the Pilgrims).  The Conant statue was erected in 1913 after the Conant Family Association commissioned sculptor Henry H. Kitson (who had designed the famous “Minuteman Statue” and whose amazing home, Santarella, I featured in a previous post) for the design.  It is a commanding and majestic statue, but it suffers from its proximity to the dreadful Salem Witch Museum:  too many dim-witted tourists casually assume that Conant has something to do with the Witch Trials because of his seventeenth-century attire.  They never even bother to read the plaque–and the things I have heard them say as they have their pictures taken with poor Roger!  I think that Kitson did a good job with the hat, but perhaps the occasional placement of a slightly more Cavalier-esque one would help?  I hate to call on the Gunpowder Plotters for fashion advice, but I’ve always admired the depiction of their hats in the contemporary broadside below.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Current Events, Design, History, Salem

July 28, 2012

Olympic Posters

By daseger

It was nice to see and hear the traditional ringing of the bells in Britain yesterday, signalling the beginning of the London Summer Olympics. Nearly all of the British institutions that I regularly “visit” have their own take on the Olympics this summer:  the Museum of London has a general exhibit, while the British Museum focuses on medals and the British Library offers up Olympex 2012, an exhibition on collecting the Olympics. My favorite Olympic-themed presentation, thankfully very accessible on-line, is the Victoria & Albert Museum’s presentation, A Century of Olympic Posters . It’s so interesting to see how the posters reflected the times in which they were produced, while at the same time projected national images to the world which were carefully chosen by the host countries.

There was no official Olympics poster until the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but it seems appropriate to begin with the program(me) cover for the first London Olympics, held in 1908 at the newly-constructed White City Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush.  This Olympiad was originally scheduled to be held in Rome, but the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius diverted it to London. It’s a nice nostalgic image, and you can see the White City in the background.

The first official Olympics poster, printed in 16 different languages and alternative formats, was the work of Swedish artist Olle Hjörtzberg,. The original design, featuring completely naked athletes in a reference to the ancient Olympics, was replaced by this version, with its strategically-placed streamers, but this was a bit controversial too.

After a long break due to World War One, the Olympics resumed in war-devastated Belgium for the 1920 Antwerp games. Maybe it’s just my own national bias, but that looks like a very prominent American flag on the poster:  perhaps an expression of gratitude for the timely entry of the US into the war?  The poster for the 1924 Paris Olympics by Jean Droit has become iconic, and we first see the five Olympic rings representing the continents of the world on the posters for both the 1928 Olympics:  summer (Amsterdam) and winter (St. Moritz).

The poster for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, the first to be held outside of Europe, looks a bit odd to me:  apparently the artist Julio Kilenyi sculpted the figure and then photographed it, and I’m not sure how the lettering was produced.  There’s very little sense of place here; it does not read Los Angeles or America to me, but it’s interesting that “California” had to be added.  I suppose that the City of Angels was not yet the international city that it would become.

Few images are as ominous as the official poster for the 1936 Berlin Olympics with its menacing Nazi symbolism and the Four Horsemen, which can only be seen as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in historical perspective.  And then there are two very similar, one might say identical, posters from the canceled 1940 and 1952 Helsinki Olympics.  Clearly Finland–and perhaps the world–decided to pick up where they left off.

There is some semblance of place in the Helsinki posters, but I think that emphasis becomes pronounced in the post-war era, beginning with the image of the second British Olympics, the so-called “Austerity Olympics” of 1948. Jumping forward to the early 1960s, the sense of place seems to overwhelm the sheer athleticism of the earlier posters in the images from the 1960 and 1964 Olympics in Rome and Tokyo.

Of course, the images get more abstract and symbolic in the later 1960s:  the poster for the Mexico games represents the psychedelic age perfectly, as does one of the slightly-cynical images of the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

The posters for the more recent games just don’t seem as textured to me as those from the past, although I really like the official poster #1 from the 2000 Sydney games, “Peace Roo”, designed by David Lancashire. The trend seems to be for whole series of posters to be produced rather than just one, representing individual sports as opposed to the entire event. This was certainly the case for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, which was represented by over 50 posters, and the organizers of the third London games commissioned posters from 12 eminent British artists. Pictured below is “For the Unknown Runner” by Chris Ofili, who used the vase outline to reference the Greek origins of the games.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Design, History

July 26, 2012

Clapboard Castles

By daseger

I know that the great American photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) liked Greek Revival houses, factories, main streets, roadside advertising, picture postcards, and people from all walks of life, but I think he really, really liked hotels. In the vast Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are many images of hotels, large and small, and I’ve recently come into possession of a Fortune Magazine article from August 1949 in which he photographs and writes about some of the most famous New England resort hotels of the last century. In “Summer North of Boston”, Evans refers to one of these grand hotels, the Poland Springs House in South Poland, Maine, as “the nation’s uttermost dream of secular grandeur, this clapboard castle, turreted, porticoed, balustraded, oriflammed”. And when you see the photographs of this sprawling hotel (erected in 1876 and destroyed by fire in 1975), you know just what he means.

Scan from “Summer North of Boston” by Walker Evans, Fortune Magazine, August 1949 and original photograph and c. 1910 postcard of the Polar Springs House from the Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art; 1894 menu from the Polar Springs House, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

I really wish I had seen this amazing building before it burned to the ground in what all the accounts describe as a “spectacular” fire–a fate that it shared with most of the grand hotels in Evans’ article.  His “north of Boston” encompasses a triangular region between the North Shore towns surrounding Salem in the south, Bar Harbor, Maine in the north, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the west. Within this area were the New Ocean House in Swampscott (1884-1969), Oceanside in Magnolia (a village of Gloucester, Massachusetts:  1876-1958), Wentworth-by-the-Sea in New Castle, New Hampshire (built in 1874 and still standing, though some people think its recent “restoration” was more of a reconstruction), the Samoset in Rockland, Maine (1902-1972), and the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (built in 1902 and still majestically and miraculously intact).

The New Ocean House, Oceanside, Wentworth-by-the-Sea, and the Samoset by Walker Evans, and the Mount Washington Hotel at the time of the 1944 Bretton Woods International Economic Conference by Alfred Steiglitz, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Of all these American castles it is the Wentworth with which I had the closest connection:  I grew up nearby and actually attended my senior prom at what was then almost a relic.  The building experienced a conspicuous decline in the later 1980s and 1990s, becoming the focus of the national preservationist movement, before it was rescued and rebuilt after 2000.  It has lost its hyphens and become the Marriott Wentworth by the Sea.

The Wentworth in 2000 and today; the BEST book for the architecture and culture of the grand resort hotels of coastal New England:  Bryant Tolles’ Summer by the Seaside.  The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels, 1820-1950 (2008)

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

July 22, 2012

A Swarm of Bees in July

By daseger

According to the old English nursery rhyme: A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly. Even if we could muster enough bees in these days of ever-dwindling bee populations, apparently it’s too late in the season for a regenerating swarm. Nevertheless, there still seem to be bees around, in my garden, on the streets of Salem, and in my bookmark folder labeled interesting insects. So it’s a good time to showcase most of the above.

For the past few years, the city of Salem has been initiating public art projects, and this year the goal is all about transforming mundane surfaces into works of art.  All the utility boxes around town have been painted, and my favorite is the “bee box” near the intersection of Essex and Summer Streets: here we have a real swarm, or at least a utilitarian representation of one.

I think bees are on everyone’s minds now that their numbers are in decline, but in fact representations of them go way back: the royal associations, their industrious and organizational nature, and the fact that they were the source of Europe’s native sweetener made them very conspicuous insects in western culture.  Sometimes they even seem to transcend insect-hood, or at the very least represent all of insect-hood, as in God made the birds and the bees.

Some medieval bees:  pollinating, confronting a bear, and making honey:

British Library MSS Harley 3244 (after 1236), Harley 3448 (15th century) and Sloane 4016 (c. 1440).

Bees were big in the early modern era, as their role in pollination was universally known and expensive imported sugar could not fulfill the demand for sweet treats. They also became, very notably, the subjects of the first publication of empirical observations made with one of the revolutionary instruments of the era, the microscope, in Federico Cesi’s and Francesco Stelluti’s Apiarium (1625; detail below).  In England, all of the practical gardening manuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth century contain sections on bee-keeping; it seems to be a natural component of cultivation, not a specialization by any means. Sometimes women are the designated bee-keepers, sometimes men.  There were also books focused particularly on bee cultivation and bee culture, like John Levett’s classic Ordering of Bees (1634, below) as well as satirical allegories like John Day’s Parliament of Bees (perhaps 1607, but not printed until 1641). Given that bees live in a matriarchy as well as their general nature and attributes, I’ve always wondered why Elizabeth never made more iconographical use of them; perhaps it was too patently obvious.

Centuries later, Napoleon had no such subtlety: he used bee motifs to project legitimacy for his very new regime.  The bee enabled him to project royalty–as it was associated with France’s very first royal dynasty, the Merovingians, and with France’s early medieval emperor, Charlemagne–while disassociating himself with the fleur-de-lys-bearing Bourbons whom he displaced.

Bonaparte among the Bees:  portraits of Napoleon by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson  (after 1804) and Jacques-Louis David (1812; National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Bees were too universal and essential to be stigmatized by their association with Napoleon, and after his fall they became an important decorative motif in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appearing on textiles, ceramics, and jewelry, and in many illustrations and lithographs. At the same time, this very industrious era produced several key innovations in bee-keeping, most notably Langstroth’s movable frame hive, bringing about a revolution in the management of bees. Art, science, and industry were inextricably connected when it came to bees, and I haven’t even touched on advertising.

Wedgwood Sugar Caster, early 19th century, and French bonnet veil, c. 1860, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; illustration from Brockhaus Konversations-Lexicon : allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyklopädie. (Leipzig : F.A. Brockhaus, 1883-1887), New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Of course bees continue to be inspirational for artists, designers, and crafters.  Given that the bee population is declining at an alarming rate (30%!!!), I hope that their ongoing popularity is not merely a sentimental urge.  There are too many items emblazoned with bees to showcase here, but I am drawn to British ceramicist Fenella Smith‘s bee mugs and jugs, which you don’t see everywhere (yet).

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Nature

July 19, 2012

The Long Hot Summer of 1692

By daseger

Given that it is something you cannot and should not forget (or escape) in Salem, I touched on the chronology and geography of the Witch Trials and their impact pretty regularly last year, the first year of my blog.  In terms of the historical timeline, I focused particularly on the beginning of the trials in the spring of 1692 and their end in the fall, leaving the long hot summer of trials, executions, anxiety and suffering out.  But now we’re in another long hot summer, and we should remember the five women who died on this day, July 19, 320 years ago:  Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes.

A word about the weather. I am using the phrase “long hot summer” metaphorically here; I have no idea what the average temperature was in the summer of 1692. As someone who was trained in the history of early modern Europe, a time and a place that witnessed thousands of witch trials, I’ve always been surprised that American historians don’t make more of the weather as a contributing factors to the trials here in Salem because it is definitely a factor of consideration across the Atlantic.  A few years ago, an economist asserted the theory that the so-called  “Little Ice Age” (a long trend line of colder temperatures in this same early modern era, particularly noticeable as compared to the preceding “Medieval Warm Age”) might have been a background cause of the events and accusations in Salem, but the reasoning behind the assertion didn’t really fly with me:  why 1692 as opposed to 1682, 1672 or 1662?  Extreme weather (especially hail!) is better understood as a short-term catalyst for scapegoating accusations rather than a long-term, structural cause.

Nevertheless, the accusations started flying in the cold January of 1692, the first formal charges came at the beginning of March, and the special Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town in early June, overseeing the charge of more than 150 people on charges of the capital felony of witchcraft and the eventual conviction of 29, of which 19 victims were hanged on Gallows Hill over the summer.

The women who died on this particular day in 1692 were somewhat representative of their fellow victims:  they were women of a certain age (Sarah Good was the youngest at 39, Rebecca Nurse and Susanna Martin were both in their early 70s), from the fringes of this little world, either geographically or socially.  None came from present-day Salem, then Salem Town (now, sadly, “Witch City), but rather from either Salem Village (present-day Danvers) or the outlying communities of Topsfield, Ipswich and Amesbury. The two Salem Village women, Sarah Good, could not have been more different in both age and situation:  Good was a destitute vagrant with a “disorderly” reputation which made her very vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, while Nurse was elderly, pious, and from a well-established family:  her trial and conviction would ultimately cast considerable doubt on the entire proceedings.

What remains:  some pictures taken on a 99-degree day in mid-July of 1692:  the Towne field and Parson Capen House (1683) in Topsfield, and the Rebecca Nurse Homestead (c. 1678) in Danvers at dusk. Rebecca Nurse and her sisters Mary Eastey and Sarah Cloyse were the daughters of William and Joanna Towne, who emigrated from England as part of the “Great Migration” and wound up in western Salem Village/Topsfield. The field below is where their original homestead was located.  All three women were accused of witchcraft, and only Sarah escaped death. The Parson Capen house in Topsfield village has no connection to the trials beyond the fact that it was standing witness at the time.

After the women were killed on July 19 their bodies were buried in shallow graves in the crevices of Gallows Hill in Salem; the exact location is still somewhat of a mystery. When darkness fell, her family came to Salem and removed her body to the hallowed ground of the family homestead. In 1885, with all of her ancestors in attendance, a memorial monument inscribed with a passage from John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem Christian Martyr was dedicated on the site:  “O Christian Martyr/who for Truth could die/When all about thee/owned the hideous lie!/The world redeemed/from Superstition’s sway/Is breathing freer for thy sake today.”

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

July 17, 2012

Fireboards

By daseger

I’m never quite sure what to do with fireplaces in the summer time:  just leave them alone, throw a potted fern in them, or a few of those old-fashioned fireplace fans?  Books?  The television? (I’d rather put the television in the fireplace than over it; I hate that television-over-the-mantle look) It seems like a wasted space and opportunity, as the fireplace remains the focal point of the room no matter what the season. Our ancestors had the solution to what was for them not just a decorating problem:  they filled their damperless hearths with fireboards or chimney boards, decorated with flowers, street scenes, ships, or whatever caught their fancy. These boards would keep out (or hide) soot, dust, and birds and brighten up the dark and dusty cave in the room at the same time.

Here in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum has several fireboards from the early nineteenth century that I have long admired and which have inspired me to try to find my own period fireboard, but I’ve never been able to find one that was even remotely affordable and fit any of my fireplaces at the same time.  But the hunt continues because it’s always nice to have a quest!

Here are some of my favorite fireboards from the PEM, beginning with a beautiful scene of upper Washington Street and the Samuel McIntire courthouse painted by George Washington Felt about 1810-20 and a view of Beverly from the same period, by an anonymous artist.  Departing from street scenes and bird’s-eye views representing pride of place, the last two boards represent an historic gale which sank eleven Marblehead fishing boats in 1846 and the stately mansion of Chatsworth in England.

Fireboards from the Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem:  View of Court House Square by George Washington Felt, c. 1810-20; View of Beverly by an anonymous American artist, c. 1800-20 (from the Safford House); The Great Gale of 1846 by William Thompson Bartoll; A Distant View of Chatsworth, Derbyshire, England by Michel Felice Corné, c. 1800 (from the Bertram K. Little and Nina Fletcher Little Collection auction at Sotheby’s,  January 29, 1994).

Pieces such as these have fetched high prices at auction:  most recently, a mid-eighteenth century board featuring the John Hancock House in Boston (below) went for over $600,000 at a Sotheby‘s auction (against an estimate of $150,000-$250,000), but this is a very early and apparently very special piece. The trompe l’oeil louvered fireboard depicting an idyllic landscape was probably made in Philadelphia around 1810-40: it sold for $60,000 in 2005 and is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The MFA example above features two motifs that often appear on fireboards:  louvers and trompe l’oeil decoration.  In fact, it combines them:  some of the louvers are apparently real and some are fake.  I’ve seen some other louvered boards around, which has made me wonder if something could be made of all the old and abandoned exterior shutters in my basement?  A very literal trompe decoration is on the c. 1820 board below from a Skinner auction a few years ago. I wonder what the purpose was of replicating the bricks behind the board? A more charming example (to me) is the “watermelon” fireboard made in Salem, New York, about 1840, now in a private collection.

A variation on the fireboard is the dummy board or “silent companion”, which did not have to go before the hearth but certainly could and did. You could choose an iconic or period person to go before your fireplace, or you could place a pig there, like the eighteenth-century English example below. In my continuing search for a fireboard (or two), I’ve looked for new sources as well as old, and while most of the former are a bit too rustic for my taste and house, these blue and white pots by British decorative painter Lucinda Oakes look really beautiful.

Pig feeding from a Bowl Dummy Board, c. 1750-1800, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Blue and White Pots I fireboard by Lucinda Oakes.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Design, History

July 13, 2012

Whistle Belly Vengeance

By daseger

Flipping through one of a stack of old books I seem to be collecting on “ye olde” customs of New England, I found not only a recipe for a popular drink called “Flip”, but also one very much linked to my adopted city:  “A terrible drink is said to have been made popular in Salem – a drink with a terrible name – whistle-belly-vengeance. It consisted of sour household beer simmered in a kettle, sweetened with molasses, filled with brown-bread crumbs and drunk piping hot” (Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions of Old New England, 1893).  I had seen that phrase before–in Old England–where it generally seemed to convey a truly awful drink, so it is odd to see it used as a name of a popular one:  the link must be the sour (spoiled) beer.  Our colonial forebears lived in an ever-perishable world which disdained waste of all kinds, so spoiled beer was turned into something sweet and hot to cover up its taste, and I suppose that the bread crumbs even added a bit of sustenance.  Many of the drinks referenced by Earle are similar in their combination of sweet and hot–and a few have proteins mixed in as well;  sillabub (hard cider, mixed with sugar, nutmeg and cream)and the afore-mentioned flip (strong beer, mixed with sugar, nutmeg, pumpkin and molasses, a shot of rum and a beaten egg, stirred with a hot fire poker) seem to have been the most substantive.  In general, possets were drinks which featured cream or milk, and fustians contained eggs.

Staffordshire posset pot, early 18th century, courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Beverige was a lighter, non-alcoholic drink generally made of water mixed with ginger and molasses, but when served to sailors it was strengthened by the addition of rum and vinegar, and became switchel. There were countless rum drinks, served hot and cold:  beer was mixed with rum (bogus), cider was mixed with rum (stone-wall), molasses was mixed with rum (black-strap).  New England was indeed awash in rum, perhaps fueled by rum, and therein, unfortunately, lies its major connection to slavery. My own house was built by a wealthy rum distiller, so I think about this connection quite a bit.

Eighteenth-century caricature from the George Arents Collection of Tobacciana in the New York Public Library (where there is smoking there is usually drinking); the Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Massachusetts, from A Revolutionary Pilgrimage (1917) by Ernest Clifford Peixotto.

Apparently a British brewery has revived Whistle Belly Vengeance:  a “ malty reddish ale”  produced by Summerskills Brewery of Devon is clearly not based on the original recipe, but it does seem to have attained the “frothiness” that was often aspired to way back when.


5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem