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Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...
When more than 250 items from Jonathan and Karin Fielding arrived at The Huntington in the summer of 2016, those of us who were involved in the installation of Becoming America knew that the American galleries would never be the same again. I had seen many objects in person and, while planning the display, pored over photographs like a greedy online...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.25-31
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280.002
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The Old, Forever-New Things: An Introduction to Becoming America
JAMES GLISSON
Every-day objects, house-chairs, carpet, bed, counterpane of the bed, him or her sleeping at night, wind blowing, indefinite noises, [. . .]
City and country, fire-place, candle, gas-light, heater, aqueduct
—Walt Whitman, “Chants Democratic and Native American,” Leaves of Grass (1860)
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Description: Lift-Top Blanket Chest by Morse, Elisha
ELISHA MORSE
Lift-Top Blanket Chest, ca. 1830
New Portland, Maine
Pine and paint
38 × 17½ × 41½ in.
L2015.41.99
When more than 250 items from Jonathan and Karin Fielding arrived at The Huntington in the summer of 2016, those of us who were involved in the installation of Becoming America knew that the American galleries would never be the same again. I had seen many objects in person and, while planning the display, pored over photographs like a greedy online shopper. But it was not until the museum preparators actually unpacked the quilts, chairs, candlesticks, hats, barber pole, and baskets that the collection’s quality, diversity, and breadth came home.
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Description: Barber Pole by Unknown
Barber Pole
Wood and paint
49¾ × 5 × 5 in.
2016.25.1
Before the Fielding Wing opened, the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art primarily featured artworks made for the elite by artists and craftspeople who were trained or active in such trade centers as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and London. Rather than the latest fashions for urban elites, the Fielding Wing mostly displays objects from the homes of the emerging middle class of rural New England. The stories of how these Americans lived can now be told. Using objects to learn about everyday life, whether cooking, leisure, sleeping, or rearing children, is known as material culture studies. With the opening of the Fielding Wing, the Huntington overnight became a West Coast center for this type of research.
The collection’s range and its ability to excite the imagination calls to mind Walt Whitman’s “Chants Democratic.” In this poem, he tried to capture the unruly diversity and energy of the antebellum United States and approached this impossible task by compiling lists. In stanza after stanza, he piles up nouns to describe weather conditions, tools, modes of transport, cities, ships, emotions, types of people, and times of day. Common objects such as chairs, carpets, and beds play a role, too. Whitman understood the power of everyday things to stir memories and emotions. The poem manages the feat of evoking something as big as the nation and as diverse as the American people through objects. With its breadth and variety, the Fielding Collection does the same. In fact, its focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries coincides with the material world that Whitman, who was born in 1819, knew.
The story of lighting implements is one of the many narratives about American material life that can now be told. On the following pages, candle stands, candleholders, and oil lamps document the ingenuity used to ward off darkness and make good use of precious fuel. In fact, as Marshall B. Davidson in “Early American Lighting” noted, candles were prohibitively expensive, out of the question for everyone except the wealthy. In May 1743, Rev. Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard, recorded that his household made seventy-eight pounds of candles from tallow, or animal fat. To make these candles, Holyoke’s household must have owned or borrowed a candle mold, in which liquid tallow was poured and left to harden. These were used up in less than six months, which meant that the household went through about four candles per night, even in the summer months. In 1761, Holyoke figured that it would cost him forty pounds a year—as much as a schoolmaster’s annual salary—to supply his home with tallow candles. By contrast, in the 1780s, George Washington, who used more expensive but much longer-lasting and brighter-burning spermaceti for illumination, calculated an annual expense of only eight pounds. (Spermaceti is the liquid wax harvested from the head cavities of sperm whales.) He was one of the wealthiest men in the United States, and yet even he kept an eye on lighting expenditures. Tallow, whale oil, and wax were slowly displaced starting in the early nineteenth century with camphine, a turpentine product mixed with alcohol and camphor. Camphine, sold as “burning fluid” during the period, had a tendency to explode. By the 1860s, kerosene from the oil wells of western Pennsylvania began edging out this liquid. The light bulb, patented by Thomas A. Edison in 1880, would eventually supersede them all.
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Description: Thirty-Candle Mold by Unknown
Thirty-Candle Mold, ca. 1800
Tin
10¾ × 11¾ × 8⅝ in.
2016.25.141
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Description: Rush Holder by Unknown
Rush Holder
Eighteenth century
Wood and wrought iron
10¾ × 4¼ × 3¼ in.
2016.25.85
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Description: Candlestick by Unknown
Candlestick
Probably Continental Europe, 1710
Brass
5¾ × 4½ in.
2016.25.91
The lighting implements in the collection show how Americans in the late colonial and early Republican eras managed costly and limited lighting choices. A thin, stork-like candleholder with a penny-foot, tripod base had an adjustable height. Its extended arm with four rivet joints brought a single precious candle within inches of a book, piece of sewing, or letter. Other lighting stands are simpler, with only a spring-like curl to gently lock the candle in place along a wrought-iron pole. An iron Betty lamp, again with an adjustable height, has a small reservoir for oil or wax. These were cheaper to operate and filled with tallow, fish oil, or whatever could be found. Their flames were smoky and stinky. Try to imagine the stench of burnt fish oil and the layer of greasy soot that settled on everything.
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Description: Candle Stand by Unknown
Candle Stand, ca. 1740–1800
Probably England
Wrought iron, brass, paint, and wood
Fully extended: 43 × 28¾ × 14 in.
2016.25.80
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Description: Betty Lamp by Unknown
Betty Lamp, ca. 1820–40
Tin
30⅜ × 7¾ × 5½ in.
2016.25.84
~
Description: Lighting Stand by Unknown
Lighting Stand
Early nineteenth century
Wrought iron and tin
26¼ × 9 × 6 in.
2016.25.92.1
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Description: Lighting Stand by Unknown
Lighting Stand
Early nineteenth century
Wrought iron and tin
27¾ × 9¼ × 6 in.
2016.25.92.2
In the essays that follow, aspects of the collection are illuminated with the casual reader in mind, one who will dip in and jump around rather than read from cover to cover. The Fieldings talk about their development as collectors and some of their favorite pieces. Their longtime advisor, David Wheatcroft, in a rollicking interview, shares some insights taken from his forty-plus years in the folk art trade and the difficulties of assembling a collection of such quality. Next, John Demos revivifies the furniture workshops of rural Connecticut and Massachusetts during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. As he shows, craftsmen also farmed, trained apprentices, selected wood, and knew something of the styles produced by high-style, expensive furniture makers in Boston and New York. Textile historian Elizabeth V. Warren lays out the techniques of stitching, piecing, dyeing, and rug making used to make these dazzling quilts, needlework, and rugs.
The remaining essays use the collection to explore Americans’ understanding of the natural environment, decoration, and family life. Stacy Hollander writes on the landscapes and still lifes in theorem paintings, watercolors, rugs, and firebacks as a way to examine Americans’ changing perceptions of the natural world. Sumpter Priddy delves into the intellectual origins of the exuberant Fancy style of painted furniture and its connections to religion and philosophy. Robin Jaffee Frank turns to portraits of married couples as ways to understand the mores of early nineteenth-century American family life and, especially, the role of women and children in the domestic sphere. She analyzes a pair of John Brewster Jr. portraits as allegorizing pregnancy and motherhood, a portrait of a deceased child playing in a garden, and a New Hampshire couple relaxing at home with their young child.
This catalogue is designed to embody Whitman’s idea of “the old, forever- new things.” The essays have markedly different writerly voices and perspectives. These objects should act as a stimulus for twenty-first-century people to reimagine the past and keep the Fielding Collection “forever new.”
 
James Glisson, PhD, is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at The Huntington.
 
NOTE TO READER
Throughout this volume, items are identified by unique Huntington loan and accession numbers. Unless otherwise specified, objects are either gifts of Jonathan and Karin Fielding or loans from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection. Loan numbers are preceded by an "L".
The Old, Forever-New Things: An Introduction to Becoming America
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