The Kaleidoscope and the Fancy Style of the Early Republic, 1790–1840

Priddy, Sumpter

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The Kaleidoscope and the Fancy Style of the Early Republic, 1790–1840

Sumpter Priddy

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

~Few realms within American art history have attracted greater attention than the broad range of artifacts in the category of “folk art.” Scholars periodically observe that these objects have an engaging character or an immediacy that reflects the spontaneity of...

Author

Sumpter Priddy

PublisherYale University Press

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

Related print edition pages: pp.85-107

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22045

Chapter subject tags:Folk artDecorative arts, Early AmericanQuiltsShaker boxes

The Kaleidoscope and the Fancy Style of the Early Republic, 1790–1840

SUMPTER PRIDDY

Few realms within American art history have attracted greater attention than the broad range of artifacts in the category of “folk art.” Scholars periodically observe that these objects have an engaging character or an immediacy that reflects the spontaneity of makers from centuries past and resonates today with American collectors, such as the Fieldings, and museum visitors. Many consider folk art to embody the inherent virtue and untutored genius that emerged among everyday Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They view these attributes as refreshing contrasts to the formal styles and lofty aspirations that often dominate academic taste—whether expressed in the emotion-laden sentiments and detailed morality of Victorian design or the understated restraint of streamlined modernism.1A number of American museums have sponsored exhibitions and published catalogues pertinent to folk art ever since the term surfaced in the early twentieth century. But there is another perspective that conveys the character of American taste, particularly for the transitional era that followed the American Revolution, when the nation’s identity coalesced to reflect emotional outlooks and aesthetic standards that were quite different from anything known in Europe. That new outlook, encapsulated by the term Fancy, began to emerge shortly after the Declaration of Independence, and it had a growing influence among Americans during the three-quarters of a century that followed—and in some instances, far beyond.

The terms Fancy-style and Fancy were once regularly used by Americans to describe colorful and exuberantly patterned objects of the kind seen in the Fielding Collection. As I explain, the style flourished outside of art academies and far from the workshops of urban craftsmen who imitated the latest French and English imports. Rather than following the strictures of European arts tradition and borrowing classical Greco-Roman motifs, these Fancy artists gave their imaginations free rein. In what follows, I sketch out the rich but nearly forgotten intellectual context that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries surrounded these Fancy-style objects.

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Six-Board Chest
Early nineteenth century
Probably New York State
Pine and paint
25 × 42½ × 18 in.
Inscriptions: “E. M. S.” on lid exterior; “Cyrus Sherwood 1825” on the underside of the top
L2015.41.86

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Description: Grain-Painted "Matteson" Blanket Chest

Grain-Painted “Matteson” Blanket
Chest, ca. 1820–25
New Shaftsbury, Vermont
Pine, paint, and glass
36 × 40¾ × 18 in.
L2015.41.114

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Description: Federal Lift-Top Chest of Drawers

Federal Lift-Top Chest of Drawers, ca. 1830
Probably New York State or Connecticut
Poplar and paint with metal pulls
47 1/4 × 43 × 19¾ in.
L2015.41.104

I stumbled upon the intriguing term Fancy during my graduate courses at Winterthur, and it guided me toward the intellectual concepts and emotional dimensions that define the boundaries of the strikingly patterned objects within the Fielding Collection. Yet rather than invoking the modern concept of folk art, the objects led me down a different path for exploring and experiencing the past. They compelled me to see the world through the cultural lenses of the individuals who made and used them. These lively objects embodied not only the subjectivity and emotionalism of the Romantic Era but also a reflection of the United States’ youthful optimism.

At the time, I was researching an 1836 farmhouse, Snow Hill, near the headwaters of Blackwater River, in Surry County, Virginia. Though not a large structure, it stood tall on high brick piers—five bays wide, one room deep, with a staircase that spiraled upward through the center passage.2The Tidewater planter Samuel Booth (1795–1876) and his wife, Sarah Ellis, began the house for their family in 1836; they named it “Snow Hill” for the bitter winter that delayed its completion until spring the following year; see “090-0040 Snow Hill,” Virginia Department of Historic Resources website, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/090-0040/. I had admired the house since childhood and had watched it fall into decay in a cornfield. Residents had long since departed, the paint had cleaved from the wood siding, glass had fallen from the windows, and its sole inhabitants were the swallows beneath the rafters and the breeze that claimed the passages. It was a taunting symbol of the tattered economy and depressed mood of the rural South for decades following the Civil War.

Though the house was in derelict condition, its parlor contained surprising, wildly painted woodwork. The mantel had carved and gilded sunbursts with moldings of green and orange, and the wainscot adjoining it sported bright yellow panels with lively red frames. A closer look revealed the woodwork’s surface to emulate beautifully striped mahogany and birds-eye maple—yet entirely in paint on inexpensive yellow pine. On the stairway, the riser beneath each approaching tread sported a swirl of black and white and gray paint replicating marble.

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Description: Parlor mantelpiece from Snow Hill, Surry County, Virginia (detail)

Parlor mantelpiece from Snow Hill, Surry County, Virginia, ca. 1836 (detail)

When I entered graduate school in 1975, I was determined to learn more about these practices of marbling and graining. In early American and British painter’s manuals, I learned that the practice of painting woodwork to emulate eye-catching woods and marbles was popular from about 1680 until the mid-nineteenth century. Artisans and consumers sometimes referred to marbling and graining as “fancy painting”—particularly in the early nineteenth century. The term seemed logical enough, for the painted surfaces were sufficiently decorative to merit the name.

About that time, I visited an early New England home in which the owner proudly displayed her collection of historical furnishings and textiles, including a wildly patterned Jacquard coverlet in an array of colors. It had a six-inch square in each of the lower corners, where the early weaver had left telling messages for potential customers. My mind began to whirl when I noticed that the maker had included his name, “Archibald Davidson,” followed by “Fancy Weaver.”

The use of the word Fancy triggered memories of the painted interiors of the Surry farmhouse. And on the square to the left he had woven the words “Fancy Coverlet,” followed by “1836”—the year of the farmhouse. It dawned on me that Davidson was not a decorative weaver but an imaginative weaver and that Fancy painting might also mean imaginative painting.

The meaning of Fancy had apparently changed dramatically in a century and a half. It had originally emphasized the positive influence of emotions on human creativity, particularly in the making of objects. This positive outlook evolved, however, to reflect the modern view of the “ornamental” or “decorative”—often with a negative connotation. When I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, I found two full pages allotted to its definitions, with a variety of meanings that seemed to shift, expand, and then contract again through the decades. They reflected changing moral perspectives, as they moved from negative to positive—and then back again to negative.

The primary definition of fancy through the generations was “imagination,” and Americans understood it in that way between 1750 and 1850, a period that encompasses much of the Fielding Collection. When used as an adjective, fanciful, it had a parallel significance: “rather guided by imagination than reason.”3Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, 1755), s.vv. “FANCY” and “FANCIFUL.” The term decorative was absent.

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Description: Sailor's Trinket Box (view of top from above)

Sailor’s Trinket Box (view from above), ca. 1830
Pine with wax inlay
4 × 11½ × 6½ in.
Inscription (top): “G M”
L2015.41.28

In Victorian-era dictionaries, not a single lexicographer linked the concept to ornamentation until 1860. Joseph Worcester assigned fancy a moral value: “Ornamental, rather than useful.”4The earliest dictionary in which the word fancy appears as an adjective is Joseph E. Worcester, A Dictionary of the English Language (Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1860), s.v. “fancy,” 537. The connection of fancy with the ornamental, and the ornamental with excesses, augured the end of Fancy style. But up until that time, artisans spoke of ornament as essential. Its liveliness sparked creativity, caught the viewer’s eye, heightened emotional awareness, elevated one’s spirit, and filled the storehouse of memory with vivid images that were easily recalled. For instance, the swirling patterns of Fancy chests of drawers, such as these blanket and six-board chests (see above), entrance the viewer with their striking color contrasts and animation.

I set out to define the spectrum of objects that would have been considered “Fancy” between 1790 and 1840, the era in which this concept played a vital role within American culture. Above all, the style defined imaginative things that Americans aspired to make, to learn from, and to own during a crucial period of transition. The agrarian world that dominated American life from shortly after the Revolution changed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when traditional artisans who were under tremendous pressure from inexpensive, factory-made goods pursued creative solutions for making household goods to compete in the market.

The philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the Fancy style had emerged in Britain during the early eighteenth century, when educators and philosophers discussed the merits of the imagination—and the feelings that accompanied it—as keys to learning. As the eighteenth century progressed, educators weighed the capacity of rich experience to fuel the storehouse of memory with images that elicited delightful emotions. The experience of immersing oneself in the world, and of savoring the objects that filled it, complemented such rational endeavors as mathematics, science, and physics. Middle-class Americans gravitated toward this engaging new style of Fancy as a metaphor for garnering wisdom from practical experience, as opposed to formal education.

LIGHT, COLOR, MOTION

Two visual stimulants—light and color—had long been recognized for their role in conveying images to the eye and mind. The seventeenth-century British engraver Alexander Browne found them key to the visual experience of fancy: “Light . . . is the cause . . . whereby coloured things are seen, whose Shapes and Images pass to the phantasie.”5Alexander Browne, Ars Pictoria: or an academy treating of drawing, painting, limning, and etching, 2nd ed. (London: Arthur Tooker, 1675), 40; quoted in OED Online, s.v. “fantasy | phantasy, n.,” March 2019, Oxford University Press. In the early eighteenth century, the English philosopher Joseph Addison further explored the power of color to “paint” images into the storehouse of memory and experience: “Among these several kinds of Beauty the Eye takes most Delight in Colours,” Addison wrote. “Colors paint themselves on the Fancy.”6Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 412 (June 23, 1712): 69; no. 411 (June 21, 1712): 64.

The appeal of light and color found a further complement in the power of motion. Addison described its appeal: “We are quickly tired of looking . . . where every thing continues fixt and settled in the same Place and Posture, but find our Thoughts a little . . . relieved at the Sight of such Objects as are ever in Motion.”7Addison, The Spectator, no. 412 (June 23, 1712): 67.

The growing acknowledgment of fancy’s role was reflected in the process of teaching young students—especially female students—to make theorems or theorem paintings. Theorem was the word for stencil, and the process of using paper cutouts to construct a “painting” was more mechanical than creative. To produce a still-life painting using theorems, a student followed the teacher’s instruction for cutting paper stencils that provided the outlines for the table, the bowl, each piece of fruit that separately filled it, and ultimately—in more ambitious designs—a colorful parrot that usually completed the composition. For students, the process of carefully arranging fruit in a bowl offered a compelling parallel to filling the memory’s storehouse with vivid experiences.8For more on theorem painting, see the discussion by Stacy Hollander in this volume, pp. 149–51.

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Description: Still Life with Fruit Theorem Painting

Still Life with Fruit Theorem Painting, ca. 1830
Stenciled watercolor on paper
14 × 18 in.
Stamped: “De La Rue & Co Extra London,” a London-based paper maker
2016.25.100

Americans also had a penchant for motion, as reflected in the popularity of the rocking chair—a form that was largely unknown in Europe, where it was reserved for the aged and infirm, or for mothers with infants. Chair maker Lambert Hitchcock of western Connecticut produced beautifully contoured “Boston rocking chairs” with scrolled arms, decorative crest rails, and lean spindles that were carefully contoured to the human form. Working between 1818 and 1843, Hitchcock painted these chairs in brilliant colors or emulated rosewood, then stenciled designs of fruit baskets or flowers on the most visible surfaces. He could produce them so efficiently that he sold the chairs for as little as a dollar apiece.9For more on the Boston rocking chair, see Nancy Goyne Evans, “The Genesis of the Boston Rocking Chair,” The Magazine Antiques 123, no. 1 (January 1983): 252.

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Description: Stenciled Box, view of top from above

Stenciled Box (view from above), ca. 1835
Connecticut or New York
Wood, metal, and paint
5 × 12 × 8 in.
Inscription (top): “L. L. E.”
2016.25.44

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One-Drawer Stand, ca. 1830
Near Paris, Maine
Basswood, paint, and brass
28½ × 17⅛ × 18⅞ in.
L2015.41.111

During the 1820s and 1830s, almost every American householder had one in the parlor. When British writer Harriet Martineau encountered painted rocking chairs in an American hostelry during an 1838 visit, she was appalled by the conduct they encouraged, especially among the ladies: “In these small inns the disagreeable practice of rocking in the chair is seen in its excess. In the inn parlors are three or four rocking chairs in which sit ladies who are vibrating in different directions at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger. . . . How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine.”10Quoted in Ellen Denker and Bert Denker, The Rocking Chair Book (New York: Mayflower, 1979), 38. Conversely, when the New England educator Heman Humphrey visited England in 1835, he found that rocking chairs were hardly known among the “staid and upright” British, who considered the energetic seesawing back and forth a vulgar “Americanism.”11Denker and Denker, The Rocking Chair Book, 37.

Visual motion—or more specifically, a plethora of surface ornamentation—characterized the furniture of the period, and there was scarcely a plain surface in sight. A close inspection of even simple surfaces often reveals that the artist scumbled the ornament—that is, used a nearly dry brush to apply a thin and irregular overcoat of paint, or a lightly tinted varnish, to add depth or variety. This is particularly evident in a tall case clock from the Fielding Collection in which the artist carefully applied paint and varnish to a simple pine case to add visual interest and suggest expensive bird’s-eye maple. Lively patterns created by scumbling can also be observed in the Dome-Top Trunk, Blue Box with Oyster-Shell Graining, and most extravagantly on the Painted Schrank.

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Description: Tall Case Clock by Whiting, Riley

Tall Case Clock, ca. 1820
RILEY WHITING (1785–1835), CLOCK MOVEMENT
Winchester, Connecticut
UNKNOWN, PAINTED CASE
Probably Maine 1820s
Pine, glass, wood, and paint
88 × 18½ × 11 in.
Inscription: “R. Whiting Winchester”
L2015.41.23

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Dome-Top Trunk, ca. 1850
Maine
Wood, iron, and paint
12¾ × 28¼ × 15 in.
2016.25.69

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Description: Blue Box with Oyster Shell Graining and Ivory Keyhole

Blue Box with Oyster-Shell Graining and Ivory Keyhole, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, ivory, and iron
6½ × 11⅞ × 7 in.
2016.25.29

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Painted Schrank
Late eighteenth century
Berks County, Pennsylvania
Poplar and paint
81 × 60 × 21¾ in.
Inscription: “17 Philip Detük 75”
2018.10

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

Few objects have played a greater role in underscoring the combined power of light, color, and motion than the kaleidoscope. It was invented in 1816, quite by accident, during experiments with the polarization and refraction of light by the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster (1781–1868). In an early phase of his research, he placed several long mirrors in a narrow brass cylinder to reflect an image as it traveled from its source to the viewer’s eye.12For more on the original concept and publication, see David Brewster, A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1819); and Brewster, The Kaleidoscope; Its History, Theory, and Construction, with Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts (London: John Murray, 1858). When Brewster peered into the tube, he found that it transformed reality in unimaginable ways. He called his invention the “kaleidoscope,” from the Greek words for “beautiful image viewer.” Before Brewster could patent his design, competitors had purloined the concept and were selling inexpensive versions of cardboard and mirror plate to passersby on the street.13Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 7. The invention was an instant success, for it provided the perfect tool for understanding the powers of fancy and for demonstrating how light, color, and motion caught the eye and imprinted stunning images in the mind, where they could fuel the creative process.

British academics were intrigued by the charming images, but the colorful scenes provoked a much stronger response in America. There, the kaleidoscope seemed an ideal tool to whet one’s appetite for learning. This ingenious device would help Americans understand the power of the imagination in ways that were far removed from the literary sources that had long dominated British understanding of the subject.

In 1819 Brewster published A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, in which he presented diagrams of distinct kaleidoscopes—those having two, three, or four mirrors grouped together in the tube—to show how a varied arrangement of mirrors would alter the image. He discussed the device’s ability to produce patterns for household decoration in record time: “It will create, in a single hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year.”14Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 116. It could be used for a variety of objects, from stained-glass windows for cathedrals to household carpets and floorcloths. It was no longer necessary to devote significant time to drawing an entire design on paper. Rather, one could sketch a segment of the pattern and rely on the kaleidoscope to quickly expand the design into a variety of options.

Several of the diagrams that Brewster included had such a strong geometric character that they spurred public interest in an entirely new range of orderly design. The kaleidoscope had its greatest impact on American quilts (below). Whereas quilt makers on both sides of the Atlantic had traditionally focused on classical subjects or elegant foliage derived from nature, once the device was invented, they created a variety of innovative geometric designs that either emulated a kaleidoscopic view or looked to Brewster’s published diagrams for inspiration. Kaleidoscopes with two mirrors created a pattern that exploded outward from the center toward the edges in a large starburst. This was particularly obvious in the visual lines that radiated outward from the center of the quilt. In quilts of this type, the seams of adjoining wedges replicate where the image abuts a mirror—to create the star. Kaleidoscopes with a three-mirror system, joined together in a 30-60-90-degree triangle, likewise replicated the design, yet with subtle variety. Brewster depicted the pattern within an octagonal format—a diagram to which quilt makers often looked for octagonal piecework.

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Description: On combinations of four mirrors forming a square

“On combinations of four mirrors forming a square” in David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (London, 1858), figure 45
COURTESY, THE WINTERTHUR LIBRARY: PRINTED BOOK AND PERIODICAL COLLECTION

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Drunkard’s Path Quilt, ca. 1880–90
Cotton, pieced
87 × 87½ in.
2016.25.55

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Description: Lone Star Quilt--Red, White, and Blue

Lone Star Quilt—Red, White, and Blue, ca. 1850
Glazed cotton, pieced
96½ × 94 in.
2016.25.58

Influenced by the kaleidoscope, women moved away from relying on large pieces of fabric and toward the use of tiny, multicolored pieces, carefully stitched together, to emulate the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope—and they expanded the quilts to completely cover a bedstead. It was only a matter of time before house painters transferred the patterns to canvas fabric to produce eye-catching floorcloths and table covers, expanding Fancy’s influence on American homes from wall to wall.15For more on the quilts in the Fielding Collection, see the essay by Elizabeth V. Warren in this volume, pp. 109–19.

In addition to producing kaleidoscopes with two mirrors that created stunning explosions with colored glass, makers created examples with three and four mirrors, each of which produced a distinct design. Kaleidoscopes with a three-mirror system, joined together in a 60-60-60-degree triangle, repeated the image at the end of the tunnel time and again in a diagonal grid—thereby assuring that multiple replications of the image were firmly imprinted in the storehouse of memory. Indeed, kaleidoscopes with four mirrors facing inward in a square replicated the image in the center as an eight-pointed star. This produced even further options, not only for quilt makers but also for decorative painters. For example, a box from the Fielding Collection with a pink, green, red, and black palette evokes kaleidoscopic patterns.

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Description: Box with Painted Geometric Design, view of top from above

Box with Painted Geometric Design, ca. 1840
New England
Pine and paint
6½ × 14⅛ × 9 in.
2016.25.43

In this way, the kaleidoscope shaped Americans’ expectations for non-representational design and transformed middle-class homesteads. Although British kaleidoscopes were expensive devices made with hollow brass cylinders and highly polished mirrors, Americans were so infatuated by the device that they produced inexpensive examples of pasteboard or tinned sheet iron, and they relied on simple mirror plate rather than polished lenses. Foreign visitors to America were astounded to find that middle- class Americans were inspired by this “philosophical instrument.”16Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 6.

Although kaleidoscopes of two, three, and four mirrors produced their respective designs according to the dictates of geometry, their patterns were open to nearly endless interpretations by the viewer. Equally important, the range of ornament produced by the kaleidoscope embodied a new type of creativity that Addison had envisioned more than a century before when he observed the human capacity to “fancy to it self Things more Great, Strange, or Beautiful, than the Eye ever saw.”17Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 418 (June 30, 1712): 92; see also E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979), 151. The kaleidoscope’s broad appeal in America helped its middle classes embrace abstract ornament.

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Description: Scrimshaw Oval Box with Inlaid Five-Point Star, view of top from above

Scrimshaw Oval Box with Inlaid Five-Point Star (view from above), ca. 1840
Whalebone ivory and hardwoods
3 × 6½ × 4½ in.
2016.25.47

DEMISE

Whereas light, color, and motion typified the Fancy aesthetic in the 1820s and 1830s, with the Panic of 1837 and the economic crash that followed, the ebullient style seemed oddly out of place. Just three years later, Edgar Allen Poe summed up society’s disdain for the outmoded concept of Fancy. Although he singled out floorcloths as particularly onerous, he was equally critical of other household furnishings that embodied the precepts of Fancy, particularly those that reflected the kaleidoscope’s influence:

Those antique floor-cloths which are still seen occasionally in the dwellings of the rabble—cloths of huge, sprawling and radiating devices, stripe-interspersed, and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible—are but the wicked invention of a race of time servers and money lovers. . . worshippers of Mammon. . . who, . . . to save trouble of thought and exercise of fancy, . . . cruelly invented the Kaleidoscope.18Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Monthly American Review 6 (May 1840): 244.

The Fancy style that had dominated popular taste since the 1790s fell rapidly from favor after 1840, as tastes shifted toward darker, more introspective colors and eventually to greatly simplified furniture forms and minimal ornament. The renowned designer Gustav Stickley (1858–1942)—a dominant figure of the Arts and Crafts movement—denigrated the style to advance the understated aesthetic that became his hallmark. “‘Fancywork’ was a cruelly right name for the old time decoration so labeled,” he noted with disdain. “It was fancy, superfluous, and very hard work, and the burden fell alike upon those who made it and those who beheld it.”19Gustav Stickley, quoted in Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working Class Homes, 1885–1915,” in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 189.

The emotions associated with Fancy had run full cycle, from a period of awakening into—and through—an era of widespread popularity, before slowly retreating as middle-class attitudes toward animated behavior and expectations for learning shifted yet again. Americans would abandon the vestiges of the expressive emotions and vibrant styles of the nineteenth century and embrace the sleek new styles and restraint that defined the twentieth.

Sumpter Priddy is an antiquarian and consultant in Alexandria, Virginia.

1 A number of American museums have sponsored exhibitions and published catalogues pertinent to folk art ever since the term surfaced in the early twentieth century. »

2 The Tidewater planter Samuel Booth (1795–1876) and his wife, Sarah Ellis, began the house for their family in 1836; they named it “Snow Hill” for the bitter winter that delayed its completion until spring the following year; see “090-0040 Snow Hill,” Virginia Department of Historic Resources website, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/090-0040/. »

3 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, 1755), s.vv. “FANCY” and “FANCIFUL.” »

4 The earliest dictionary in which the word fancy appears as an adjective is Joseph E. Worcester, A Dictionary of the English Language (Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1860), s.v. “fancy,” 537. »

5 Alexander Browne, Ars Pictoria: or an academy treating of drawing, painting, limning, and etching, 2nd ed. (London: Arthur Tooker, 1675), 40; quoted in OED Online, s.v. “fantasy | phantasy, n.,” March 2019, Oxford University Press. »

6 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 412 (June 23, 1712): 69; no. 411 (June 21, 1712): 64. »

7 Addison, The Spectator, no. 412 (June 23, 1712): 67. »

8 For more on theorem painting, see the discussion by Stacy Hollander in this volume, pp. 149–51. »

9 For more on the Boston rocking chair, see Nancy Goyne Evans, “The Genesis of the Boston Rocking Chair,” The Magazine Antiques 123, no. 1 (January 1983): 252. »

10 Quoted in Ellen Denker and Bert Denker, The Rocking Chair Book (New York: Mayflower, 1979), 38. »

11 Denker and Denker, The Rocking Chair Book, 37. »

12 For more on the original concept and publication, see David Brewster, A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1819); and Brewster, The Kaleidoscope; Its History, Theory, and Construction, with Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts (London: John Murray, 1858). »

13 Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 7. »

14 Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 116. »

15 For more on the quilts in the Fielding Collection, see the essay by Elizabeth V. Warren in this volume, pp. 109–19. »

16 Brewster, Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, 6. »

17 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 418 (June 30, 1712): 92; see also E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979), 151. »

18 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Monthly American Review 6 (May 1840): 244. »

19 Gustav Stickley, quoted in Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working Class Homes, 1885–1915,” in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 189. »

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