Category Archives: History

Mending: Check

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Clothing, History, Living History, Reenacting

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My poor old apron. It’s almost– but not quite– the firstarticle of historical clothing I made. (The first was a shift. Infrastructure and fundamentals, people.) It acquired some new wear (actual holes!) in New Jersey, and required mending.

First, it needed to be washed. I hadn’t taken a objective look at my apron in a while, but after we got home from Salem, I knew I had to mend it, which meant washing.

Reader, it smelled.

You get used to smells, and even enjoy them: wet wool, gunpowder, wood smoke. And then there’s tallow. I’ve never gotten used to the smell of tallow, and I don’t remember when this apron encountered hard fat, but the odor is unmistakable.

So is the water.

This past weekend, I had a chance to mend this favorite apron while I peddled luxury goods at Fort Dobbs’ War for Empire event.

Although I have a sturdy plain linen apron, I’m fond of checks, and of the hand this apron has achieved after much wearing and some washing.

It will never be really clean again, but for now, the apron is mended and back in rotation.

Sandby in Salem (New Jersey)

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, Reenacting

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The Kitchen at Sandpit Gate (detail). Watercolor on paper by Paul Sandby 1754. Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 914331

The best times are always those when we are the least self-conscious– not that we can necessarily choose those times. Often they simply happen to us, but if we are lucky enough, we will notice, or someone else will record those moments for us. Last weekend, without even meaning to, we came as close as I may ever hope to get to recreating Sandby images of the Sandpit Gate kitchen.

Mistress F commanded the kitchen: I served as her reasonably able scullion, and, with assistance from Drunk Tailor and the company of the B’s, we managed to produce enough food for several dozen people.

 

(I baked the pound cake at home, but the egg and onion pies were made on site. I lack historically correct baking apparatus aside from one pie plate.) Cooking in the cabin at Hancock House reminded me of good times long ago— and not so long ago–and how much I enjoyed throwing refuse out a window, and using a soapstone sink. The weekend also brought to mind “show, don’t tell” as it applies to interpretation, and made me think again about how to create more immersive educational experiences for visitors, without becoming ritualistic.

There’s not much time to think those esoteric, grad-school-seminar thoughts when you’re in the midst of cooking, and that can actually be a relief. Instead, better to think of the light, and the landscape, and the time remaining until a pie is cooked through.

At Sandpit Gate circa 1752. Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 914328


The landscape and the light: redemptive, all that space, the blue sky and the grasses. I thought of The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which I haven’t read in decades, for in some ways, the coast of New Jersey resembles the coast of Connecticut. It’s one of the first historical novels I remember reading– it is probably one reason I have ended up doing the work I do, and spending as much time as I did in New England. (You can read it here.) It’s not brilliant literature, and it was nearly two decades old when I read it, but it was certainly memorable.

Photos courtesy of HM 17th Regiment, Al Pochek, and Cape May Wren Photography.

Making an Impression

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in History, Living History, Reenacting, Research

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Trade card for Dorothy Mercier, Printseller and Stationer; Etching with engraved lettering below. Print by Jean Baptiste Chatelain after Gravelot. 1745-1770. British Museum, D,2.3396

Dorothy Mercier: widow of an artist (and a painter herself), Mercier went into business after the death of her husband, Philip, first as a printseller and stationer, and later as a purveyor of artists’ supplies. Some of what she sold is listed below the vignette of a shop, and includes ‘all Sorts of Papers for Drawing, &c./ The best Black Lead Pencils, Black, Red & White Chalk./ Variety of Water-Colours, and Camels Hair Pencils./…English, Dutch, & French Drawing Paper, Abortive Vellum for Drawing,/ Writing Vellum, the Silk Paper for Drawing.’ She also sold “Continental prints” and “paintings of flowers in her own hand,” a pursuit considered suitable for ladies in the mid-18th century.

Evidence of widows taking over a husband’s print shop in the American colonies in the 18th century is harder to come by–there seems to be less specialization of retail sales in the colonies, certainly compared to London, which is one factor–though printers’ widows did assume their trade in Newport and Williamsburg, among other places. If we imagine a print shop in the colonies, what would we find for sale?

Nicholas Brooks’ ad from the Pennsylvania Packet of June 21, 1773 provides an answer:

Mrs. Yates in the character of Electra; Venus blinding Cupid by Strange (that’s a print by Robert Strange after Titian, no matter what glorious oddity you may imagine), and portraits of George Whitefield, John Wesley, and other religious luminaries. Whitefield and Wesley were popular Methodist ministers: Whitefield, the peripatetic evangelist, was the primary force behind the Great Awakening, and Wesley, despite his loyalty to King and Church, was an inspiration to the Revolutionary movement in America.

John Wesley after Nathaniel Hone
mezzotint, published 1770
© National Portrait Gallery, London NPG D4740

This print of Wesley is one I have seen in person, in a period frame, with a period backboard inscribed “Capt. Wm Noyes 1st Conts” and to be fair, it is one I have spent some time researching, so the titles in that Nicholas Brooks ad– which I was reading for another purpose altogether– were exciting to find. When I think about visual or print culture in the Revolutionary era, I try to imagine the ways in which people encountered imagery, and how they understood it. Wesley– and print shops– are one way I begin to fill in a picture of the past.

The Work of Women

08 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in History, Research

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International Women’s Day: I may have missed it online but I have spent this day– this entire week, in fact– working with a woman I greatly admire and like. I’ve written about her before, my 96-year-old friend who was in the OSS and married a man who had fought for Chiang Kai-shek in World War II and against the Communists after the war.

It has been a week of learning about my friend, her mother, her aunts and great aunts and grandmothers; of learning about her daughters (and son), and her friends and the work she did.

Tuesday night, we had dinner with one of her friends who lives in a little red house not far from where I lived before I left Rhode Island. The Little Red House, as we always call it, was cozy and warm, built in 1793 when the East Side of Providene was rural, and the north end of it occupied by the Dexters, Morrises, Sessions and Coles on their farms.

The parlor was small, and the five of us filled it (along with a silver standard poodle who shook hands with us all). We ate in what had been the kitchen of the house, with a fire in the fireplace that had been used for cooking (and was still set up for cooking, though that was not where our meal was cooked). We ate from antique transferware, drank wine poured from antique decanters, and sat on antique chairs at an antique table in a room lit by candles. I would be lying if I tried to deny the warm magic of the setting, the scene, and the storytelling.

But the point is not that I had a wonderful time: the point is that I learned that night, and this week, about the ways that women look out for each other (when they’re not competing with each other), and the ways that women shepherd the history of families and places as they maintain collections of furniture, textiles, paintings, and prints.

As I held my friend’s hand and lit her way with my phone flashlight down a stone path to a waiting Subaru, I might as well have been holding a lantern and guiding her down a path to a waiting carriage, where wooden and tin footwarmers would replace a heater and blower motor. Some things are timeless and placeless: friendship, love, and caring. The need (the aspiration) to always care for the people around you, to be gentle and giving when you can, and to take and ask for help when you must: Those “feminine” values are what makes the world go ‘round, and keeps it steady.

Cakes and Honey

03 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by in History, Living History, material culture, Research

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Watercolor cakes: first invented by William Reeves in 1766 and sold in an improved form in 1780, watercolor cakes made painting easier then before. Colors still had to be ground in water to be used (that’s what the rectangular depression is for in the ceramic palette), but that was a step ahead of grinding the pigments with gum arabic yourself. Each pigment (usually a mineral, sometimes not) requires a specific amount of gum arabic, and in the 18th and early 19th century, both gum arabic and gum tragacanth were both used. In this era of experimentation, even gum hedera (from Hedera helix, or English ivy) was used, both as a diluent for animal glue size and in egg white varnish. The variation in gum types and amounts found in watercolor cakes and cake remains gives us an idea of how much experimentation and variation happened in the pre-industrial era of color production.

The Art of Drawing and Painting in Water-Colors, London: 1735.

Recipes (or receipts) were published beginning at least as early as 1730, with the promise of better, richer, and cheaper colors (qualities that did not always coexist easily). It’s not clear whether the watercolors sold in the American colonies were made locally or imported from Great Britain, but my best guess is that prepared watercolors (sold in shells and out of shells) were probably imported, if only because the sellers so often list many other goods.

Nicholas Brooks Ad, June 21, 1773 Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia).

How watercolors are sold evolves over time and varies by place: In 1771 Boston, John Gore, who specializes in artist’s materials at the Sign of the Painters Arms, offers “Water Colours ready prepar’d in Shells” in addition to a variety of artists’ pigments probably ground with different media to each artist’s specifications.

John Gore, Boston Evening Post, March 25, 1771.

Ten years later, Valentine Nutter, Stationer, offers “water colours in drops, shells, or galley pots,” suggesting that some cakes were prepared in ceramic pots or dishes (gallipots) and available in the United States by 1781. What the “drops, shells, or galley pots” looked like exactly is slightly conjectural: drop are probably corked bladders or bottles; shells are probably cockle shells (watercolor being concentrated means one wouldn’t need a cherrystone clam shell, let alone a quahog) but “galley pots” seem more elusive until you consider the Wedgwood paint chest.

blue and white jasper ware paint chest or box for moist watercolours: English, Staffordshire, Etruria, by Wedgwood, c. 1787. National Museum of Scotland, A.1893.84 A

The tiny pots that drop into the oval tray fall within the gallipot definition, and give us an idea of what Mr Nutter might have offered in his New York shop, filled with ground pigment, gum arabic, and a portion of honey to make the cakes re-wettable. Not every artist working in watercolor used honey, as recorded in a 1775 letter from John Singleton Copley to his mother, recording that “Mr. Humphrey tells me he uses no Shugar Candy in his colours.”