Director’s Foreword

Nielsen, Christina

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Director’s Foreword

Christina Nielsen

Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art

The Fielding Collection of early American folk art brings the past to life before our eyes...

Author

Christina Nielsen

PublisherYale University Press

Copyright© 2020 The Huntington Library, Art
Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22040

Director’s Foreword

The Fielding Collection of early American folk art brings the past to life before our eyes. The objects reproduced in this book and the objects displayed in The Huntington’s Jonathan and Karin Fielding Wing of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art introduce us to people who lived hundreds of years ago, on the other coast. Some of their names have been lost in the mists of time, like the man who once hauled ice through a field somewhere in New England with a giant pair of tongs. Other names have been immortalized by the artworks they made or commissioned. A remarkable sampler stitched by Eunice Hooper, a nine-year-old from Marblehead, Massachusetts, attests to her astonishing skill at embroidery. A portrait of Albert G. Gilman, a schoolteacher from Mount Vernon, Maine, speaks volumes about his personality, greeting the viewer with a direct gaze and jaunty attire. Such objects hold the memories of the people who once crafted and made them, the people who worked or played with them, and the bystanders who simply marveled at their craftsmanship and their often ingenious or whimsical forms.

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Ice Tongs, ca. 1850
Wrought iron
37 × 5¼ × 32⅛ in.
2016.25.129

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EUNICE HOOPER (1781–1866)
Sampler, ca. 1790
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Silk on linen
Framed: 23 × 23½ in.
Inscription: “Work by Eunice Hooper in The Ninth Year of her Age”
L2015.41.65

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Description: Portrait of Albert G. Gilman by Ellis, A.

A. ELLIS (ACTIVE 1830s)
Portrait of Albert G. Gilman, 1831
Readfield-Waterville area, Maine
Oil on basswood panel
29 × 23 in.
L2015.41.173

The extraordinary collection that Jonathan and Karin Fielding have assembled is widely recognized as one of the finest of its kind. What began as a simple desire to fill a historic home in coastal Maine with appropriate furnishings soon blossomed into a passionate pursuit that has allowed them to bring together an enviable group of outstanding and rare furniture, fine needlework, painted portraits, quilts, and other decorative arts from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Over the past twenty-five years, these objects have also connected the Fieldings to an astonishing array of people: other collectors, curators, dealers, philanthropists, and scholars, a number of whom have contributed their expertise and their enthusiasm for American folk art to this volume.

The values that have guided Jonathan and Karin in other parts of their lives are equally apparent in their approach to collecting. It should come as no surprise that two people who have dedicated their careers, their time, and their talents to civic, cultural, educational, and public health–related causes should bring a similarly democratizing approach to this passion. Rather than focusing on high art produced for early American elites in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, they have championed the wondrously and lovingly crafted items owned by the burgeoning middle class of farmers, merchants, and ministers in more rural areas. The Fieldings’ natural impulse to do good in the world has also prompted their desire to share the collection with as broad a public as possible and to have it impact the greatest number of lives.

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Candle Stand, ca. 1835
Probably Vermont
Wood and red paint
28¾ × 19¾ × 15⅜ in.
2016.25.70

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Lighting Stand, ca. 1760–80
Massachusetts
Pine, chestnut, and tin
36 × 20⅞ × 19¾ in.
2016.25.86

We are enormously grateful that they have chosen The Huntington for such a transformative gift. Over 250 items are now on view in Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection, installed in the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Wing, a substantial addition to the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners, the display showcases early American paintings, furniture, and works of decorative art in dramatic, colorful installations that allow visitors to see the visual links between this material and other parts of the collection. For example, the form and attention to craft displayed in the furniture and decorative arts recall The Huntington’s superb Arts and Crafts holdings, while the organic, seemingly free-form designs on the painted wooden boxes foreshadow the turn to abstraction in twentieth- century painting, on view in adjacent galleries.

The Fielding Collection is an unparalleled cultural and educational resource that has catalyzed our ability to tell the story of American art in an unbroken narrative across several centuries, up to the present. It has similarly galvanized our American curatorial team, led by James Glisson, the editor of this catalogue; James has brought his keen eye and his indefatigable intellectual curiosity to bear on this publication. The Fieldings’ generosity and unfailing commitment to education have also allowed Elee Wood, former Curator/Educator, Fielding Collection for Early American Art, to design an object-based curriculum that is widely available online. This pedagogical initiative, as with the installation in the Fielding galleries and the presentation of the collection in this catalogue, allows each object at hand to connect the past with the present—all with an eye to the future.

Christina Nielsen

Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Museum

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

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