Something light and bright, fluffy and joyful and merely decorative for Valentine’s Day: I wanted to use the occasion to reaquaint myself with some decorative arts databases. Between my last book project and the two that I’m working on now, and teaching, and being frequently frustrated with Salem heritage and preservation issues (as you know all too well here) I don’t have much time for wandering about in digital image archives. But I gave myself permission to do so this weekend, and here are the results! If you have a universal symbol like ♥♥♥ as your keyword, you’re going to get thousands of results: I limited mine to textiles, and then just chose my favorites by purely aesthetic standards. Whether these fabrics were created for the table, or the wall, or a person, they are more about adornement than adoration.
Above: Furnishing Fabrics from Alsace, c. 1840, Metropolitan Museum of Art, A.C. Pugin, 1851, Victoria & Albert Museum, France, later 19th century, The Design Library, C.F.A. Voysey (who clearly loved hearts!), 1900-1929, Victoria & Albert Museum, and a heart handkerchief by Sylvia Chambers, 1940s, Glasgow School of Art Archives. Below: “Hearts & Flowers” from Folly Cove designer Peggy Hamilton, 1955, Cape Ann Museum.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Great sites for exploring decorative motifs (not just HEARTS) here.
In my sweetest dreams Salem is Candy Land rather than Witch City, and it certainly has the heritage to claim that title (although Candy Land was a Milton Bradley game rather than a Parker Brothers production.) There are of course the famous Gibralters and Black Jacks, still sold at the Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company on Derby Street, America’s oldest candy company. Mrs. Spencer sold her hard candy from a horse-driven carriage, and her primary competition seems to have been the stationary confectioner John Simon, whose shop was stocked with a variety of syrups and sweets, everything from anise drops to peppermint. He was always announcing his “removal” to Boston but somehow never made the move. Before the later nineteenth century, however, most confectionary item were not sold by single confectioners, but rather by grocers and apothecaries, and their lists of available sweets became longer and longer with every decade. Nourse’s Fruit Store on Washington Street sold “calves foot jelly candy, strawberry jelly candy, sherbet candy, gum jelly drops, and “East India Red Rock Candy” and all sorts of candies made with the New England’s favorite ingredient, molasses. Confections got a bit softer in the later nineteenth century, when cream candies became popular, and then comes Chocolate!
The Theodore Metcalf Company, one of Boston’s most successful apothecaries, published a beautiful pamphlet on gibralters and black jacks but these were SALEM candies; Nourse’s advertisement, Salem Observer 4 November 1865; Trade cards illustrate the softer trend in confectionary consumption.
The decline of hard candy and the rise of chocolate seems to be a major trend, but candy customers still loved variety. The most successful, and very long-running, confectionary business in twentieth-century Salem was the “Palace of Sweets” on Essex Street, from which the Moustakis Brothers sold their “mastermade” (a patented term) confections. This business was in operation from 1905 until 1968, and after the Taft Summer White House in Beverly placed a series of larger orders it received—and marketed—the presidential seal of approval.
Moustakis Brothers’ Menu from the digital archives of the Culinary Institute of Technology.
Salem is still candy central, in fact two confectionary shops opened up just this past year: Curly Girl Candy Shop on Washington Street and the Chocolate Pantry on Derby, not far from Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company further down the street. And then there is the venerable and amazing HarborSweets, the manufacturers of my very favorite candy, Sweet Sloops. I don’t even really have a sweet tooth, and if I am going to indulge I prefer jelly beans to chocolates, but bring a box of Sweet Sloops into the house and I will not rest until they are gone!
The House of the Seven Gables and Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company sponsored the ice sculpture of Mrs. Spencer’s horse and carriage for the Salem’s So Sweet festival this past weekend: its position made it difficult to photograph but it’s much bigger than it appears in this photo! My beloved Sweet Sloops, available at HarborSweets on Leavitt Street in Salem as well as lots of other retailers.
I have featured hearts in random ways for Valentine’s Day posts in the past: heart-shaped maps, the heart-in-hand motif, hearts seized by love during the Renaissance, hearts as emblems, the Queen of Hearts. This week I’m featuring one of her Wonderland associates—sort of–the knave of hearts: the title character of a beautiful book written by Louise Saunders (wife of editor extraordinaire Max Perkins), illustrated by Maxfield Parrish at the height of his powers, and published in 1925 in a large quarto encased in a black paper box with a gold printed title. This was Parrish’s last illustration commission, and he worked on the plates for three years, a labor of friendship for his (Cornish, NH) neighbor Louise. In typical Parrish fashion, the illustrations are positively luminous and their colors deeply saturated, but they also bear a sense of whimsy and the “everday,” as he supposedly featured items from his own household. The text presents a play, commencing with a raised curtain and involving tarts, of course, and not only is the title character—clad in “Parrish blue”—not a knave at all, but a chivalrous hero, whose theft is a plot designed to mask the shaky baking skills of the beautiful Lady Violetta.
The Knave: All my life I have had a craving for tarts of any kind. There is something in my nature that demands tarts—something in my constitution that cries out for them—and I obey my constitution as rigidly as does the Chancellor seek to obey his. I was in the garden reading, as is my habit, when a delicate odor floated to my nostrils, a persuasive odor, a seductive, light brown, flaky odor, an odor so enticing, so suggestive of tarts fit for the gods—- that I could stand it no longer. It was stronger than I. With one gesture I threw reputation, my chances for future happiness, to the winds, and leaped through the window. The odor led me to the oven; I seized a tart, and, eating it, experienced the one perfect moment of my existence. After having eaten that one tart, my craving for other tarts has disappeared. I shall live with the memory of that first tart before me forever, or die content, having tasted true perfection.
TheKnaveofHearts: An alternative Wonderland in a book by Louise Saunders with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
I have always focused on hearts for St. Valentine’s Day and this year will be no exception: even in the midst of my Phillips frenzy. Actually, I could showcase some Phillips materials because for some reason, among the thousands of materials in its possession, the PEM in all of its wisdom has chosen to digitize valentines, as opposed to, say, invaluable records about the trades in pepper, or opium, or slaves, or all the papers of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family. But featuring these scraps would be too easy; and I’d rather leave Salem for a while and go back to a more distant and detached time: the Renaissance. There and then we find a man literally draped with titles: René of Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Anjou, Bar and Lorraine, and (titular) King of Jerusalem and Sicily, who was associated in one way or another with all the celebrated figures of the fifteenth century: he carried on an influential correspondence with Cosimo de Medici, was comrade-in-arms with Joan of Arc, fathered a Queen of England, and commissioned Christopher Columbus. “Good King René” was in many ways the perfect Renaissance Man, not only for his associations but also for his activities: in addition to his military and political roles he was also a noted author and patron of the arts. The Angevin Duke idealized courtly life and love in several compositions, including Les Coeur d’ Amours Espris, which is alternatively translated as The Book of the Heart Possessed/Seized by Love or (my favorite), The Book of the Love–Smitten Heart(1457).
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Français 24399
I think there are six extant copies of the manuscript, to which the illuminations were added later. Above is text from the manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale; there is another in the Austrian National Library (Codex Vindobonensis 2597), with illuminations by Barthélemy d’Eyck. Both are beautiful in their variant ways, as the heart-sick Duke narrates a dream journey of the Knight-Heart (wearing a spectacular helmet festooned with winged hearts), in league with Desire and in search of his lady, Mercy. There is trouble along the way, of course, including an encounter with the truly monstrous dwarf, Jealousy. A more aesthetic moment occurs when the Knight-Heart is rescued from the River of Tears by Hope, having been deposited there by Melancholy.
The tone is sentimental throughout, but things lighten up at the end of the French manuscript, in which hearts are picked, lassoed, espaliered, caged, and in one way or another, captured, trained, and no longer allowed to run free. And here you have perfect valentines for René’s time–and ours.
He awakes, and immediately writes down his dream. …which is all here!