All the Best Rubbish Read online

  The soup of uncertainty thickened when a friend sent me an ad placed in a 2001 magazine by a Hong Kong dealer, in Chinese antiques illustrating (in accurately rendered sancai colors) another fish-and-bird person and claiming it to be an original vessel dating from the Liao Dynasty (A.D. 916–1125). T’ang or Liao, I was sure that both had to be either right or wrong. In a failing Internet search for the Hong Kong dealer I came on another with the same name, but this one was in Singapore. In answer to my inquiry he promptly replied that in his opinion both are fakes, and furthermore he is considering suing his Hong Kong namesake for bringing the good name of his long-established Singapore company into disrepute. My helpful (and evidently irked) correspondent added that “The thrills and dangers of collecting antiques have both heightened exponentially since 1973,” when thermoluminescent testing was discovered, making possible the relatively accurate dating of fired clay. Unfortunately, the cost of the process is longer than its name, and appreciably more than I paid for the pot. Consequently, my oriental mer-person has been spared the indignity of scientific examination. Besides, if one likes a mermaid for who she is, it is impolite to ask her her age.

  Audrey, my beloved first wife of forty years, claimed that you should never throw anything away because sooner or later you’ll wish you hadn’t. It was a philosophy that led to a good deal of overcrowding, but now and again it paid off. On page 193 you will find the beginning of a discussion about eighteenth-century Dutch wine bottles. In 1970 or thereabouts, a couple of American adventurers looking for diamonds in Guyana came upon a ruined fort on Flag Island in the Essequibo River and, in the mud around it, an untold number of discarded bottles. After failing to make their fortunes as diamond prospectors they brought home the bottles, along with at least one cylindrical stoneware jar of unknown origin, date, or purpose. Because I had bought examples of their bottles, they gave the jar to me, sure nobody would buy it. The jar sat on a shelf, unidentified and unloved, until the summer of 2008, when I received a letter from Susan in Springfield, whose brother-in-law had been in Guyana in 1968 and had brought home several bottles and a strange cylindrical jar. She wanted to know its purpose and asked whether I thought it came from England, as it had a type-impressed inscription on one side that read “DANIEL JOHNSON No. 24 LUMBER STREET N York.” My own inquiries over the years had yielded only two suggestions: the jars were made to be inserted in the ceilings and arches of church to improve the acoustics, or they were containers for oysters. I had no documentation for either, though I had found one clue while visiting the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City (unquestionably the best museum of its kind) to view the wonderfully preserved cargo of the paddle wheeler, which sank in the Mighty Missouri in 1856. Aboard was a wooden crate labeled “Fresh Cove Oysters from Price & Littio Baltimore” containing metal cans of similar shape to the stoneware jars from the Essequibo River. I was sure that the Arabia’s clue was half a century later in date, and that if “N York” stood for New York (as I thought it did), there would be merit in Susan searching the city’s early nineteenth-century street directories for a Daniel Johnson. Barely a week later she told me she had found him. The directory for 1799 listed him as “Johnson, Daniel, oysterman, Lumber,” while that of 1800 was more precise: “Johnson, Daniel, 24 Lumber & 276 Water [Street].” In 1796 he had been at No. 1 Lumber Street; in 1804 the street’s name was changed from its oral pronunciation to Lombard Street. I was amazed by the speed at which detective Susan had gathered all this and more information and that she had gone to the trouble of traveling to New York to find it. “But I didn’t,” she told me with a laugh. “I looked him up on the Internet.”

  Susan’s oyster jar had to have been made between 1796 and 1804, and was almost certainly a product of a New York State potter, possibly the 1790–1814 factory of John Remmy or Clarkson Crolius on Pot Baker’s Hill at the edge of New York City. The only collector’s book on oyster jars mentions none of this stoneware type, nor any so early in the nineteenth century, making her jar the oldest known—and mine along with it.

  I submit that retrieving collectible treasures from the mud around an uninhabited South American island is evidence enough that they can turn up just about anywhere—including a Houston, Texas, thrift store specializing in used cowboy boots.

  In the wake of our pursuit of mermaids, Carol and I had begun broadening an already large collection of English brown stoneware of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A London dealer friend sold us a large jug decorated with farm implements, inscribed on the bottom with “A Present from John Bacon, Potter, Bradley, Nr. Bilston, Staffordshire” and dated 1842 on the neck. It was a splendidly accomplished piece of potting, yet John Bacon of Bradley was not mentioned in any books on English pottery. A month later, an even larger farm-related jug was auctioned in Boston, Massachusetts, and on its bottom, in the same hand, the message: “Made by John Bacon at Bradley Pottery 1849.” So here, out of nowhere, came two John Bacon jugs made seven years apart but drastically different from each other in shape and color—a warning to collectors that one cannot rely on those attributes to tell one potter from another. Now to Houston and the thrift shop.

  In 2006, an even larger (six-gallon capacity) English brown stoneware jug was to be auctioned in Georgia by a company specializing in relatively modern American folk art. Not surprisingly, the description was imprecise, but the auctioneers thought enough of the jug to illustrate it in the Maine Antique Digest, where Carol found it. Being odd-pot-out amid hundreds of lots devoted to paintings and wooden toys, the jug attracted little attention and was sold to us at a modest price. Unlike the Bacon jugs, with their farm tool decoration, this monster was adorned with a motley of hunting scenes, lions, the British shield of arms, and, around the neck, portraits of William IV and his wife, Queen Adelaide, who inherited their thrones in 1830. It is likely, therefore, that the jug was made to commemorate William’s coronation in 1831. Although most of the design elements are known on other smaller stoneware vessels, we have found no parallel for the jug itself. How, we asked ourselves, could this huge pitcher have found its way to Texas?

  Attempts to find out led us back from the auctioneers to the Houston collector of Americana who bought it because it was cheap, kept it a while, and then, finding it no longer relevant to his interests, sent it to auction. He, too, had wondered from whence it came and was told by the keeper of the shop where he purchased it that it had been brought in by a “bag lady” whose name he did not know. No one bothered to ask how such a person could haul around a jug that when empty weighed more than twenty-seven pounds.

  It is a tragedy that antiques, unless published by one or another of their owners, possess a traceable history no longer than their last acquisition, while even those that get into print may do so under false colors. If the first to write about them is wrong, it is likely that other writers who follow them may be perpetuating myths. An example:

  In 2006, along with other literary work, I wrote a play about Virginia colonist John Smith for production during the four hundreth anniversary year of the colony’s founding. The play was set in London in 1636 and had prompted a good deal of research into life in seventeenth-century London. In turn, the success of Smith! led to my writing another play, this time about Samuel Pepys and his famous diaries. In reading them I found the following entry for February 25, 1667:

  At my goldsmith’s did observe the King’s new Medall, where in little is Mrs. Steward’s face, as well done as ever I saw anything in my whole life I think—and a pretty thing it is that he should choose her face to represent Britannia by.

  Silver medal ordered by Charles II featuring his best ship and his paramour Frances Stewart posing as Britannia, 1666. Diam. 56 mm.

  Frances Stewart was one of Charles II’s several great loves, and it was her pose as Britannia that would grace the reverse of Britain’s copper coinage from 1672 to 1960. The medal was designed by John Roettier, a French artist working for the King’s royal mint, and is as strikingly beautiful as
Pepys said it was. In a rash moment of extravagance I prevailed on a London numismatic dealer to find me one that I could give Carol for Christmas. And he did. When listed in a catalog published in 1884, the medal was said to have been designed to commemorate the Peace of Breda that ended England’s Second Dutch War (1665–1667), during which each navy wrought havoc on the other.

  Mrs. Stewart shares the medal’s reverse with a rendering of a large man-of-war that appears to be flying the king’s royal standard. As the king had his hand in Roettier’s design, it is reasonable to deduce that this was the ship that brought him home from exile in 1660, one previously named for the Battle of Naseby (which his father lost) and tactfully rechristened the Royal Charles. The Roettier design said nothing about peace with the Dutch, since the treaty was not signed at Breda in Holland until July 21, 1667. How, then, could Pepys have seen a finished “Peace of Breda” medal almost four months earlier? And that was not the only problem. On June 10, the Dutch attacked a British fleet moored in the River Medway, burned several ships, and captured the Royal Charles, which it triumphantly towed away to Holland. One historian has called this insult the worst humiliation in English naval history. It is hardly likely, therefore, that the king would have ordered his stolen flagship to be remembered on his medal when (and if) it was adapted to recall the Breda agreement. For their part, the Dutch commemorated the peace with silver medals of their own that showed the burning English ships. King Charles’s medal, I suggest, was created to recall English naval successes earlier in the Dutch War and to impress an elusive Frances Stewart. She, however, was not persuaded, and scarcely a month later, having tired of Charles’s attentions, she dumped him and eloped with the Duke of Richmond. With the king’s goddess gone and a lot of undistributed medals still in stock, someone wisely ordered a Latin inscription added to the thick outer edge, reading in English: “Charles II, August restorer of Peace and of the Empire.” But as Carol now knows, her Christmas gift had more to do with unrequited love than with international peace.

  The moral to this Aesopian story, like the book that follows, is that we should never accept conventional wisdom as fact until it has been tested and debated. To do less is to risk further enshrining myths and making their explosion even more difficult.

  ONE

  “What’s Past Is Prologue…”

  JUST AS A PAINTING is viewed with greater respect if the canvas bears the name of a distinguished artist, and as an oft-voiced plan is suddenly adopted when heard from the mouth of a costly consultant, so authors seek stature for their paltry thoughts by quoting someone else. Not wishing to lose points so early in the game I, too, propose to begin with a quotation. The words are those of the respected French art expert and auctioneer Maurice Rheims, who, in his book The Strange Life of Objects, had this to say:

  An object’s date is of prime importance to a collector with an obsession for the past. He values it for its associations, that it belonged to and was handled by a man he can visualize as himself. The object bears witness: its possession is an introduction to history. One of a collector’s most entrancing daydreams is the imaginary joy of uncovering the past in the guise of an archaeologist. In reality most finds are a few fragments of bone, two or three bronze rings, or at most a necklace of some precious material.1

  Mr. Rheims’s reference to collectors with an obsession for the past leaves little doubt that he holds small brief for such people and their folksy approach to collecting. Nevertheless, setting the offending word aside, I must own that he has succinctly described the satisfaction of one aspect of collecting, one that I happen to find fascinating and which is to be the warp if not the weft of this book.

  Collectable objects can indeed provide an introduction to history, and it follows that if they are to do so we must know to which period they belonged. It is equally true that the use of objects as signposts to the past inescapably carries the explorer into the realms of archaeology. After all, Webster’s primary definition of the word is that archaeology involves “the scientific study of the material remains of past human life and activity.”2 Although rather a superficial definition, it does serve to support M. Rheims’s contention, for to me collecting and archaeology are two tines of the same fork; they are a means of learning about the past. With that said, we part company. M. Rheims’s vision of archaeology smacks too much of grave robbing and his disappointment at the poor quality of his imagined loot echoes the chagrin of the foiled treasure hunter. It is a venerable but outdated concept that lingers on among booksellers’ cataloguers who lump “Art and Archaeology” together, and in auction houses that still mount sales devoted to “Antiquities and Works of Art.” Archaeology had earned its place there as the means of acquiring works of art from out of the ground: marble statuary, bronzes, burial urns, gold and silver cups, and painted Grecian vases, all objects of sufficient artistic caliber to be admired, and bid for, alongside the works of medieval masters.

  When we look, say, at John Zoffany’s picture of London antiquaries swamped in a sea of classical statuary in Charles Towneley’s library (Fig. 1) it is evident that the Age of Enlightenment had fostered an appreciation for beauty rather than a burning enthusiasm for studying the past through its material remains. It was an outlook that in 1803 prompted Lord Elgin to ship home two hundred crates of marbles from the Athenian Acropolis for display in his private museum in London, and which encouraged President Lincoln’s consul to Cyprus, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, to bring back the vast collection of antiquities that in 1870 would become the pride of the new Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Nobody was much concerned with broken household pottery, ancient tools, cooking utensils, or other humble artifacts, which were shoveled back into the ground. It is an attitude that dies hard, particularly in those countries where ancient art objects of great size, beauty, and worth are still to be found. I was dramatically reminded of this in 1968 on a visit to the village of Miseno on the Bay of Naples. There a farmer flattening a tiresome and unproductive hillock was in the process of destroying the cella of a subterranean shrine dating from the first century A.D. When I got there only its end wall was still more or less intact, temporarily reprieved because a magnificent pair of life-sized statues of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus stood in niches set into it, flanking the standing altar. These, I was assured, would be saved, for they were works of art, and valuable; as for the rest of the shrine, it was already rubble, and only the fragments of painted plaster still clinging to the remaining wall testified to the quality of what had been destroyed. Awed though I was by the splendor of the figures (Fig. 2), I found myself more interested in trying to make sense out of the piles of debris. It was evident then, as it has been for years, that as far as traditional antiquarianism was concerned, I was an unrepentant radical.

  1. An antiquary, his dog, his friends, and one or two odds and ends. John Zoffany’s 1782 painting of Charles Towneley in the library of his home in Park Street, Westminster. The clutter is artist’s license; the objects had been brought together for the picture from various parts of the house.

  2. Archaeology by bulldozer. The remains of a Roman shrine at Miseno, Italy, accidentally discovered while grading in 1968. The figures are those of the Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 69–79) and his son Titus. They were claimed by the state and are preserved at Baia.

  I hasten to add that this is not to be a book about archaeology as such, though it will inevitably slip in now and again. It can hardly do otherwise, for this is to be a personal view of collecting, and I happen to have plied the trade of an archaeologist for most of my working life. If, however, we interpret archaeology in its loose, Websterian sense, using it to mean searching for, finding, and interpreting elderly objects, then indeed archaeology is the name of the game. While working on the manuscript, I have been asked repeatedly by friends and colleagues to describe it, and when I told them it was about collecting, they were prone to reply “Oh, no, not another one of those!” It was fair, if none too encouraging comment. Libraries and re
mainder bookstores are full of books on antiques by specialists for specialists, grab-bag A to Z compendia—the Complete Book of this, or the Concise Encyclopedia of that; and grand coffee-table volumes of greater size than substance. It will be evident from the present format that mine will do nothing for the nation’s coffee tables (except, perhaps, for those having one leg shorter than the others). There are some other things that the book is not: its concept of collecting does not extend to botany, gemology, lepidopterology, mineralogy, philately, or to birds’ eggs. Furthermore, I have no intention of trying to tell anyone all he needs to know about anything—even supposing I was able to do so. On the other hand, the book is about antiquities, bygones, memorabilia, books, manuscripts, a miscellany of antiques, and a dash of numismatics, which when all lumped together comprise what used to be known as curiosities. It is not a bad term at that; it identifies the objects as being out of the ordinary, exciting curiosity—and that is what collecting and the book are all about.

  The objects in any collection generally reflect their owner’s taste and interests, but in my case taste—by which I mean artistic appreciation—has little to do with it. I have collected not for aesthetic satisfaction but to bring together objects having something to say about themselves, about the people who made them, or about the times wherein they were used or enjoyed. This may sound a bit stuffy, even pompous, but I hope to be able to show that in reality there is tremendous fun and satisfaction to be derived both from finding and finding out, and that can be a far cry from collecting objects for what they may be worth or for the impression they may make on one’s peers. I am as interested in the idea of collecting as I am in the objects themselves, and with luck this will emerge not only from the text but also through the illustrations. Many of the pots, bottles, and miscellaneous odds and ends are of no great artistic merit, but they are typical or evocative of their times, and that is what makes them worthy of one’s attention.