Devotion to Craft

C.F.A. Voysey Wallpaper
1893

A founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, architect and designer Charles Francis Annesley Voysey created wallpaper patterns of whimsical simplicity incorporating stylized depictions of the natural world. This unused ca. 1893 sample in the Historic New England collection is a good example of Voysey’s stylization, with a large-scale flower surrounded by leaves and flower buds. Printed in olive, two greens and gold on a crimson flocked background.

A response in part to the Industrial Age, the Arts and Crafts movement began in late nineteenth century Great Britain and spread to America. The Arts and Crafts movement had varied modes of expression unified by the characteristics of devotion to craftsmanship, marriage of beauty and utility, and inspiration from the natural world.

Heritage of Honor

A member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah, Massachusetts), Elizabeth James-Perry used wampum-beads made from shells of quahog clams native to the southeastern New England coast-to create her Alliance collar. For James-Perry, jewelry is the way we choose to honor each other, Mother Earth, and the rest of creation.

A 2023 NEA Heritage award recipient, Perry engages with Northeastern Woodlands Native cultural expressions, primarily in sculptural forms of wampum shell-carving and bead-making with its connection to identity and sovereignty, maritime traditions, and restorative Native gardening.

In Indigenous tradition, Alliance collars, woven from wampum beads, are used to communicate significant messages and have a history intertwined with Indigenous diplomacy

Fantastical Landscape

1735-1745
Eastern white pine, red oak, red maple

A gold and dark brown landscape of birds, Chinese architecture, bridges, human figures, large fantastical animals, and an abundance of flowering plants plays across the drawer surfaces on the façade of this Boston high chest. The decoration is known as “japanning” and was done in imitation of Asian lacquer furniture. The craftsperson, or japanner first decorated the surface with vermillion streaked with lampblack to imitate the appearance of tortoiseshell. The craftsperson then created raised figures with gesso and coated them with gold and black paint.

The japan work is thought to be that of Robert Davis, an English-born japanner who worked in Boston until his death in 1739.

Josiah Quincy (1710-1784), a wealthy merchant originally owned the piece. It was rescued from house fires, not once, but twice, before 1770. In 1769, after the second fire, Quincy wrote in his account book "the greatest part of my furniture [was] by the timely assistance of our friends and neighbors, secured from the devouring flames."

Decades later, Josiah's great-granddaughter, family historian Eliza Susan Quincy, wrote the story of this high chest's survival on a small paper label which she pasted inside a drawer. Today the chest is valued not only for its rare japanning decoration, but for its well-documented history. It is on display at the Quincy House in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Tree of Life

Briggs, Florence [1922-2007]
The Tree of Life Hooked Rug
Amesbury, Massachusetts, 2005
Wool on linen mounted on a wooden stretcher with an oak frame
Gift of Jeffrey Briggs

Florence Briggs worked on this spectacular hooked rug for over a decade. Measuring over six feet tall, the Tree of Life design was inspired by French post-impressionist artist Henri Rousseau and features colorful birds, bees, flowers, fruit, butterflies, and animals around a large tree.

Raised on a dairy farm in St. Albans, Maine, Briggs was the first member of her family to attend college. She became interested in hooked rugs while raising her family in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. What began as a hobby became a passion and Briggs hooked rugs for family and friends throughout her adult life.

Briggs started this rug while in her sixties, living in Amesbury, Massachusetts. She enlisted her son, sculptor Jeffrey Briggs, to help her develop a design that expressed her love of nature. She adapted her work equipment to accommodate her large-scale ambitions and spent years making progress on the piece, devoted to its completion even as the pressures of life intervened.

Hooked rugs are a nineteenth-century craft tradition revived in the early twentieth century. Historic New England’s collections features many examples of hooked rugs, both handmade and machine-made. This addition demonstrates the potential of rug hooking as a medium of artistic expression in the hands of a skilled maker.

Tranquil Beauty

Edward Mitchell Bannister
Woman Reading Under a Tree
1880-1885,
Oil on canvas

Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and after the early death of both his parents he moved to Boston and worked as a barber, one of the few careers open to African Americans at that time. He also found work tinting photographs. Eventually he studied painting with Dr. William Rimmer at the Lowell Institute and went on to become one of the most successful Black artists of the nineteenth century. A founder of the Providence Art Club, he spent most of his artistic career in Rhode Island. Bannister taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and painted local scenery using techniques of the French Barbizon School, which prioritized nature’s ordinary beauties over iconic views. Here, a woman reads while breezes flutter the leaves and grasses.

Arriving to accept a prize at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Edward Bannister was refused entry, but finally received the medal after fellow exhibitors protested.

World Traveler

This teddy bear belonged to Susan Norton (1902-1989), who at the age of four, brought it along on a trip to Rome. This particular bear is a very early specimen (teddy bears were first manufactured in 1902). It is remarkable that is survives in such good conditions, especially considering its world travels.

The iconic Teddy Bear was so named after President Roosevelt, who refused to shoot a bear cub during a hunting party in 1902. The event was memorialized in a Washington Star cartoon that inspired Brooklyn store owner Morris Michtom to make a stuffed toy bear cub for a store window display. The bear’s popularity prompted Michtom to found the Ideal Toy Company, later one of the nation’s leading toy producers.

Touch of the Poet

Poet, writer, and artist Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) achieved widespread popularity in her work during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Nicknamed the Island Poet and by close friends, Sandpiper, Celia Thaxter grew up a lighthouse keeper’s daughter on Appledore Island, off the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire. Her work reflects a deep connection to nature, particularly birds and wildlife, and flowers. Her flower gardens on Appledore were legendary and became the source of her most enduring work, An Island Garden.

Unlike her more fortunate contemporaries, Thaxter wrote “in between,” as many women writers and artists have for centuries, caring for an invalid husband, one troubled child and two others, a mother who was ill, and on top of it all, running a hotel on Appledore Island to pay the bills.

Thaxter held salons at the Appledore Hotel, attracting luminaries of literature, art, and music, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields, and Childe Hassam.

Although in her day better known for her writing, Thaxter also designed greeting cards and decorated ceramics. This vase, thought to have been a gift to her friend, author Sarah Orne Jewett, shows one of Thaxter's favorite subjects, the olive branch. The Greek inscription is from Sophocles, and describes olive trees, watched by the eye of olive-guarding Jove and by gray-eyed Athena.