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Richard & Rosemarie Machmer Provenance
The following remembrances were publishing the Pook and Pook auction catalogue for this sale, held on October 24 and 25, 2008. For coverage of this sale, please see the account in Maine Antique Digest, published in January of 2009, available at http://www.maineantiquedigest.com/stories/index.html?id=1014.
About thirty-five years ago, I traveled around two hours to an evening country auction in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. As I walked into the auction house, facing me was [...] Click here to continue reading.
Crazy for Tea
We’ve all seen the movies depicting English life in the 19th and early 20th centuries where a charming hostess calls on Flora, the parlor maid, to lay the tea for company. Flora soon reappears with a gleaming tea service and a plate of crumbly biscuits and sandwiches, and then retreats leaving the guests sipping and chatting. This English, and later the American, infatuation with tea may be easier to understand with [...] Click here to continue reading.
Bourdaloue
Formed as a small oval, slipper shaped vessel, the bourdalou is a lady’s urinal or chamber pot designed for use in public places such as churches or while traveling. The earliest surviving examples of bourdaloue are circa 1710 European products; these vessels were usually made of porcelain or pottery, particularly delft, but are known in silver or japanned metal. They were made throughout the Continent and in England, with export examples made in [...] Click here to continue reading.
Thomas A. Gray
Tom Gray of Old Salem, North Carolina is an heir of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company family fortune. A graduate of the Winterthur program in Early American Culture, Tom curated the corporate collection of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He partnered with his mother, Anne Pepper Gray, to found the Old Salem Toy Museum. Gray has a long association with the Old Salem Inc. historic restoration, including vice president [...] Click here to continue reading.
Roswell Gleason (1799-1887)
Roswell Gleason of Dorchester, Massachusetts, began pewtering about 1830 and like the Boardmans in Hartford, Connecticut, he must have carried on the making of pewter and Britannia ware more after the manner of modern business than after that of an earlier craft. Lamps, candlesticks, communion sets (including flagons, patens, and baptismal bowls, chalices are not recorded as produced), tea-pots, coffee-pots, coffee-urns, water pitchers (with covers), mugs, syrup jugs and cuspidors, are [...] Click here to continue reading.
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