Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them

In April of 1853 a child was born into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation owned by George Traylor. His first name was Bill and he would take the plantation owner’s last name for himself. A sharecropper and laborer for most of his life, in the decades since his death in 1949 Bill Traylor has became known to the world as an artist. Now, a new documentary tells Bill Traylor’s story on film for the first time. Ben Miller speaks with executive producer Sam Pollard and director Jeffrey Wolf about "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts," distributed by Kino Lorber and available in virtual theaters via Kino Marquee.

The Association of Art Museum Directors killed something of a sacred cow last year when it ruled that museums will be permitted to use funds from deaccessioned artworks—previously strictly controlled—to pay for a wider array of institutional costs. On the occasion of this year’s virtual Philadelphia Show, Ben Miller speaks with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s director and CEO Timothy Rub about the AAMD’s ruling and ripple effects it might have throughout the museum world. In a wide-ranging conversation, which gets into the nitty gritty of collecting and deaccesioning habits and procedures, as well as fundraising niceties, Rub makes a strong case for continuing to keep the departments of museums—and their fundraising efforts—firmly separated.

More popular than the Bible: that’s what the richly illustrated volumes known as books of hours—which helped worshipers keep track of each day’s seven canonical prayer periods—were during the Middle Ages. A trove of these objects from the Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg collection is up for sale on April 23 at Christie’s, and in this special episode of the podcast Ben and Christie’s specialist Eugenio Donadoni zoom in on a particularly opulent example illuminated by the mysterious Master of the Paris Bartholomeus Anglicus.

Only nine times in his seventy-eight years did Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paint on anything other than canvas, paper, and panel. On one occasion, offended by the crude wooden lunchbox carried by his friend Alfred Robaut, Corot had a new one constructed, which he decorated with a plein air painting, "Fraîcheurs matinales" ("Morning Freshness"). It’s a mini-masterpiece made all the more charming by its humble setting, a breezy landscape of trees and hills awash with sunlight and enlivened by one of Corot’s favorite motifs: a flash of red, the hat of a small figure coming over a rise. Host Ben Miller gets the story from the dealer who sold it, Jill Newhouse, and the collector who bought it, Ray Vickers.

Glenn Adamson makes his second appearance on Curious Objects to discuss his new book, Craft: An American History. As his research shows, artisans from Paul Revere and Betsy Ross to Patrocino Barela and George Barris played a crucial and under-examined role in the formation of the United States’ national character. And what’s more, he tells us, the communal-slash-individual nature of craftwork could represent an antidote to the country’s current polarization.

From an early Renaissance list of statutes stipulating the amount of wine that every man, woman, and child of Bologna would receive daily, to a chunky twentieth-century cocktail ring, you’ll hear about wacky objects and the wild stories behind them from some of the Winter Show’s most irreverent dealers: Daniel Crouch (Daniel Crouch Rare Books), Carrie Imberman (Kentshire), and Keegan Goepfert (Les Enluminures).

Bright young antiques dealers Pippa Biddle and Benjamin Davidson come on the pod to talk treasure—specifically, a homely wooden box that punches above its weight, thanks to its curious Revolutionary War provenance and a Herman Melville connection. Also—certainly music to the ears during this holiday season—the pair sings the praises of untrammeled accumulation as an interior design strategy.

Around 1930, two British artists, Agnes Miller Parker and Jessica Dismorr, went to work on a pair of paintings—one a modernist Madonna and Child, the other depicting a highly symbolic portrait of a rampaging cat—that are now on view at the Fine Art Society’s galleries in London and Edinburgh. FAS principals Emily Walsh and Rowena Morgan-Cox explain to Ben how two women painters made their mark during a time when the art world was still male-dominated.

Dalva Brothers, Inc., specializes in the sort of lux 1700s French furniture—ebonized wood, gilded rococo flourishes, parti-colored marquetry—that just screams ancien régime. Some 250 of the choicest items from the firm’s inventory are being offered at Christie’s this October, and Dalva Brothers' principal David Dalva III, along with Christie’s specialist Jody Wilkie, talk with Ben about the crème de la crème: a secretary-cabinet resplendent with Florentine pietra dura figurative panels and gleaming ormolu mounts, possibly handled by noted marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre.

Dealer Adam Ambros and curator Ed Town join Ben to talk about a collection of mostly small objects made in Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of them marked with a date. During the discussion, Town and Ambros tease out the material history and forgotten figures behind six of the most quotidian of these objects—two Elizabethian shoehorns and a powderhorn by little-known craftsman Robert Mindum, and three beakers by Nathaniel Spilman—and reveal that for the emerging middle class these were not merely useful objects, but status symbols.

Scholar Torren Gatson, guest editor for the current edition of the MESDA Journal, comes on the pod to talk about an iron fireback (a metal plate protecting the back wall of a fireplace) produced at the Vesuvius Furnace in Lincoln County, North Carolina. Established by revolutionary war veteran Joseph Graham, the furnace depended on slave labor—oftentimes quite skilled—as well as that of freedmen and white women. Gatson’s research paints a compelling picture of the unique work culture this state of affairs produced.

According to some, underneath our feet is a second, inverted world, home to strange beasts, the Lost Tribes of Israel . . . maybe even Hitler. In the nineteenth century, a booster for this “hollow earth” theory was one John Cleves Symmes of Sussex County, New Jersey. Accompanied by a perforated wooden globe, between 1818 and 1827 Symmes crisscrossed the United States delivering lectures on the existence of portals to this “underworld” located at the poles, and urging an expedition be undertaken to discover them. Drexel University’s Robert McCracken Peck comes on the pod to talk about the theory and the globe in this episode of Curious Objects.

This month, Ben speaks with Tiffany Momon, visiting assistant professor at Sewanee University in Tennessee, and founder of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, a scholarly resource that explores the contributions that African Americans have made to the material culture of the United States. Tiffany and Ben focus their attention on a chair made by enslaved craftsmen at Leonidas Polk’s Leighton Plantation in Louisiana, and Tiffany offers tips on what institutions and researchers can do to ensure they’re telling the full story of the decorative arts.

In 1834 a law was passed in South Carolina that prohibited slaves from reading or writing. The punishment for transgressors? Fifty lashes. That same year, Dave Drake, an enslaved potter at work in Edgefield County inscribed his first poem on a large stoneware jug he'd made. In this episode of the podcast, Ethan Lasser, chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells Dave’s story and that of an 1857 storage jar that bears the epigrammatic lines: "I made this Jar for Cash-/ though its called lucre trash/ Dave.”

It's kinetic sculpture, it's haute couture, it’s . . . armor! This month, Ben speaks with Chassica Kirchhoff, an assistant curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, about a suite of metal suits from the 1500s that were worn and jousted in by the dukes of Saxony. Emblematic of the feisty Protestant state’s chivalric past and supreme examples of Saxon metalworking prowess, by the 1700s the suits of armor had come to represent “a fulcrum between the early modern past and the Enlightenment present,” Kirchoff says. Shortly thereafter they went on display at the famous Green Vault in Dresden, a precursor of modern museums.

Art historian Isabelle Kent regales Ben with the tale of five stained-glass roundels gracing the windows of her childhood home in London's Bedford Park, and he tells her all about his pair of telescoping Sheffield plate candelabra. Bonus tidbit: tips on how to distinguish between a bogus antique and the genuine item.

Ben and Michael, like everyone else, are stuck at home, but they aren’t a pair to shrink from silver linings. For them these include the opportunity to spend time among the beautiful things they've acquired over the years: silver candlesticks, German watercolors, maps, and portrait miniatures. And they’ve got a fate-tempting prediction for the future: “A lot of people are going to come out of this crisis thinking, ‘God, I wish my walls weren’t so white . . . or bare.’”

Having spent his entire life in and around the antiques trade, dealer David Schorsch has seen it all. In this special episode, he talks with Michael about how the likes of Albert and Harold Sack, Florene Maine, and Ben and Cora Ginsburg weathered the Great Depression, and how this time around, “the Internet could very well be the thing that saves the antiques business.”

This month, Ben and Michael speak with Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of prints and drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum. The focus is an odd bronze bust of a crying child—once believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo—but the trio’s conversation quickly branches out, touching on subjects as diverse as the collector/connoisseur divide in the 19th century; the role of “creative restorers” in the history of antique fakery; and the intercontinental flow of fine and dec arts treasures from Europe to the collections of tycoons like Morgan, and from there into the public domain.

We’re pushing out a series of new episodes that will examine the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the antiques world. First up, Tim Martin of S. J. Shrubsole. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories told by plague-stricken raconteurs in fourteenth-century Italy, Martin decided to publish anecdotes from the curious lore of precious silver, keyed to objects that have passed through his shop, online. In this episode, Martin reads one of those stories, “The Customer is Always Right . . . Eventually.”