Clementine Hunter (pronounced Clementeen) was born to Creole parents, Antoinette Adams and Janvier Reuben, in late December of 1886 or early January of 1887 at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Hunter would never learn to read or write, later saying she only had about ten days of schooling, and was put to work in the fields when she was very young. At 15, she left Hidden Hill, which is considered to have been the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is today known as Little Eva Plantation, for Melrose Plantation, where she would change her name from Clemence to Clementine.

At Melrose, she would pick cotton and give birth to her first two children. After their father died in 1914, she married Emmanuel Hunter in 1924 and the couple remained at Melrose, where they both worked. She would give birth to another five children, two of whom were stillborn, picking cotton until the day before she gave birth and returning to the fields shortly thereafter. By her mid-30s, Clementine would begin to work as a cook and housekeeper. She would never travel more than 100 miles from home.

By the 1930s, Melrose Plantation had begun to be something of an artist colony, and when New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left behind brushes and tubes of paint, Hunter painted her first picture – on a window shade. Her work would come to the attention of the plantation’s curator, Francois Mignon, and in addition to supplying her with materials, Mignon would help Hunter get her work displayed locally. They would later collaborate on a Melrose Plantation cookbook.

A color photograph of artist Clementine Hunter (Louisiana), in a blue smock holding a rooster. (p4A item # D9957218)

Hunter continued to paint, often producing artwork on any scraps she could find, from paper bags to window shades to jugs, hanging a sign outside her cabin that charged “25 cents to Look.” Her works illustrated the daily life of the early 20th-century plantation – picking cotton or pecans, doing chores, commemorating baptisms or weddings – and as such make valuable socioeconomic and cultural contributions as well as artistic ones. She was a prolific painter, creating an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 works between the late 1930s and her death on January 1, 1988, but her work is also considered uneven, likely because so many pieces were created in haste and because she continued to live in poverty most of her life, so values for her work can vary widely. Works from the 1940s and 50s are typically considered her best works.

Clementine Hunter (American/Louisiana, 1886-1988) oil on canvas board painting, “Pecan Pickin’”, circa 1955. (p4A item # E8882656)

In the 1940s, Hunter sold work for as little as a single quarter and by the late 1970s, she was selling pieces for several hundred dollars. By the time of her death in 1988, dealers were selling her works for thousands of dollars. Fame did find her late in life, with Hunter landing a solo exhibition, the first African-American artist to do so, at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). She received an invitation to the White House from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and would receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986.

Hunter’s work is naive and simplistic enough in nature that there have been instances of forgery. This is complicated by the fact that she painted on a wide variety of materials, rarely titled her works, and because they were originally sold from her front door for pocket change, there is rarely anything resembling a firm provenance. Her work also tends to sell in a price range that makes forgeries easy enough to pass off – they can sell cheaply enough without drawing suspicion and they tend to sell in a price point where buyers are often less likely to do or demand research and are unlikely to spend the funds for a full authentication.
Reference Note by p4A editorial staff, 2011.

Artist Note Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019:

The descendant of enslaved people, Clementine Hunter was born in the Cane River region of central Louisiana at Hidden Hill, the infamous plantation said to have inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She worked for most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation. A self-taught artist and one of the field’s best-known, she didn’t start painting until she was in her 50s. After work, Hunter recorded everyday plantation life from memory, whether picking cotton in the fields or baptisms and funerals. Her palette is bright, her faces usually dark in tone and without expression. She disregards perspective and scale. Her earlier work was on found material; she graduated to canvas and board when patrons gave her art supplies and orders for specific images which she often repeated on request. Her signature changed over the years from “Clemence” to “C H” to “CH” to a backward “C” superimposed over the letter “H”. This is considered a fairly reliable method by which to date her paintings. Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her work. Even with success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until it was (ironically) sold at auction in 1970. She lived out her days in a small trailer a few miles away. The sale stripped Melrose of many Hunter murals that adorned its buildings. Her African House Murals, painted in 1955, were preserved, and can be seen at the African House at Melrose Plantation, now a named National Historical Landmark.

The decorative arts world has many “squishy” and vague vocabulary words, but few are “squishier” and vaguer than cartouche. Originally, the term comes from Egyptology and is used to describe a oval enclosing hieroglyphics and having a horizontal line at one end. (The line denotes royalty.) The oval had significance not unlike that of a closed circle, in that it was believed that an oval around a person’s name provided protection to that person. The strong association with the god-like royalty of ancient Egypt and the “good luck charm” nature of the symbol meant that it was eventually co-opted by the rest of the population and, as a result, it appears on all manner of structures and objects from the era.

Centuries later, when Egypt was a land divided constantly by conflicts, soldiers, seeing these ovals everywhere, are said to have found them to resemble the paper cartridges used in muskets. The French word for cartridge is cartouche and thus it became, in its original use, the term applied to this particular hieroglyphic element.

A Civil War-era example of a paper cartridge. (p4A item # D9865000)

Sterling silver vase with blank cartouche. (p4A item # E8906323)

Joseph Marie Charles (1752-1834) never really bore the surname that has been applied to his loom. Rather Jacquard was a nickname of sorts given to his family’s particular branch of all the Charleses in Lyon during the 18th century. Despite the family’s prosperity (his father was a master weaver), Joseph had very little education and did not learn to read until he was a teenager. Joseph’s father died when Joseph was 20, but it is unknown how he spent much of his early adult life.

Historians are fairly confident that he married in 1778, had a son in 1779, fled the spreading rebellion in Lyon in 1793, and joined the revolutionary army, where his son would die in battle. By 1800, Joseph had returned to the family tradition and was experimenting with innovative new ideas – including the Jacquard loom, which could be “programmed” to weave pattern. Although there was opposition from weavers who felt they would lose their work and there were technical glitches that would not be resolved until 1815, the potential of his loom was immediately recognized and the French government awarded Jacquard a pension and royalties on machines.

Washington jacquard coverlet woven by James Cunningham, New Hartford, Oneida County, New York, 1840, wool and cotton. (p4A item # E8857281)

Jacquard coverlets in America are occasionally seen from the 1820s, but 1830s dates are much more common. The production of Jacquard pieces in the United States would hit its peak in the 1840s and 50s, but would taper off fairly rapidly with the equally dramatic rise of New England textile mills. As with all textiles, condition is important. While there were looms large enough to accommodate the full width of a coverlet, most were woven on smaller looms, necessitating the weaving of two separate panels that were then stitched together along the center – the same center line along which they were often folded. As a result, coverlets are often found with split or fraying areas down the middle. Weavers would frequently sign and/or date the corner blocks and these coverlets tend to be more desirable, as are the rarer patterns with railroad or steamboat imagery (as opposed to the much more common flower or bird motifs).

Values for coverlets have softened over the past decade. Textiles always require a different kind of commitment than many antiques, as they cannot be used, and coverlets in particular are difficult because they are woven, meaning they pick easily, and they are wool, so they collect dust and pet hair. Coverlets in rough condition can bring as little as $10-$25, while most fetch between $300-$700 at auction, although ones with rare designs or from areas with few documented examples can still get to $1,000-$3,000 or so on the auction block.

Discerning collectors, dealers, and museum curators of Asian art regularly made pilgrimages to a charming 18th century saltbox home in Wilton, Connecticut: Vallin Galleries. Owned and operated by Peter L. Rosenberg for nearly thirty years until his sudden death in December of 2013, Vallin Galleries was widely regarded as an outstanding source for the best of Asian art and antiques. Skinner is proud to offer Peter’s estate, a testimony to the nearly 75 years of the family business of selling Asian art, in a two-day auction April 26-27, 2014 in Boston.

The story begins with Peter’s mother, Josephine, who opened a lampshade and lamp store on 10th Street in Greenwich Village in 1940. Making lamps from Chinese porcelain vases was very much in vogue at the time and Josephine produced many for the finest homes. As the business grew so did her passion for Chinese porcelains and Asian art. In 1951, she moved to Wilton and established Vallin Galleries. Twenty-five of the lamps, made by Josephine and offered in the sale, were found in one of the large hearths. Buying from families whose forebears were missionaries, diplomats, or businessmen in the Far East and from the 1944 government sale of the Yamanaka Company’s inventory, the gallery was a well-established purveyor of fine Asian art when Peter joined the family business.

Under the direction of Peter and his wife Louise, who pre-deceased him, Vallin Galleries acquired and sold works of art to museums, dealers and private collectors, including the eminent art dealer, author, and scholar, Robert H. Ellsworth, who purchased an extremely rare 15th century altar coffer which is published in his book on Chinese furniture, as well as an 11th century Song period fresco, originally in the C.T. Loo collection, now at the Chicago Art Institute. A Chinese marriage collar, in this sale, was purchased from Vallin in 1986. Objects offered in auction houses frequently have a Vallin Gallery provenance. Like any dealer or private collector, Peter was proud to have sold to the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn, and Los Angeles County museums, among others.

Peter belonged to several professional and educational organizations including: The Art and Antique Dealers League of America, serving as a board member; The Oriental Ceramic Society of London; The Asia Society; and the China Institute. He encouraged and mentored many young collectors and dealers with a generous spirit and a passion for Asian art. He felt that part of the pleasure of the profession came from finding and presenting exceptional material, but, he also felt that the greater pleasure came from welcoming to the gallery people who were serious collectors as well as those who were beginners.

It is with pleasure that Skinner offers what remained in the gallery upon Peter’s death. Since Peter bought aggressively right up to his death, the more than 700 lots in the April 26-27, 2014 Asian Works of Art auction represent treasures still to be had. We [Skinner, Inc.] would like to extend special thanks to Richard Kenworthy and Yuanfei Bellido for their research and cataloging.

Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., April, 2014, Judith Dowling.

Baleen comes from a suborder of whales, Mysticeti, which includes, among others, humpback whales, gray whales, right whales and blue whales. What sets these whales apart is baleen. These whales do not have teeth, but have upper jaws filled with two rows of baleen plates fringed with fine baleen hair. These plates are so closely aligned that they act like a comb or a sieve; whales pull water across them, catching the small plankton they feed on in the baleen ‘hairs’. Baleen varies widely in size, as the sizes of the whales it comes from vary. The individual plates can be as small as 2 feet, but as large as 12 feet long! A single plate can weigh 200 pounds. Baleen is often called whalebone, which is a bit of a misnomer. Baleen is not bone, but rather keratin, the same protein that forms hair and fingernails in humans as well as horns and claws in animals.
Archaeology suggests that hunting whales was crucial to the Inuit way of life as early as 1000 A.D. In a landscape that offers so few materials, every part of a whale was used, including baleen. Because of the lack of wood for fires for boiling water, baleen was softened by soaking it in urine. Baleen had another property that made it valuable in the Arctic environment: it doesn’t not frost. As a result, it was deemed useful for all sorts of utilitarian purposes, such as fishing lines and sled runners.

A baleen sled with hide ties. (p4A item # D9763560)

Baleen’s price was closely linked to the fashion trends of England and Europe, being used for busks, pieces of a rigid material slipped into pockets in the front of a corset to keep it straight and upright. As small decorative objects that could be carved and were placed in a hidden place near the heart, busks were common sweetheart gifts, often beautifully decorated with delicate carvings. Baleen’s flexibility and durability also made it perfect for forming the hoops in hoop skirts. Baleen’s price was roughly at its highest when hoop skirts were at their widest.

Detail of the end of a scrimshaw baleen busk with delicately carved details. (p4A item # D9981258)
D9981258

A baleen basket with ivory finial carved in the shape of a diving whale’s tail. (p4A item # D9777078)

While traveling in 1875, Charles E. Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist, first tasted root beer. Root beer, traditionally made with sassafras, was a popular “small beer” or low-alcoholic drink in the colonial era, and was becoming popular in an alcohol-free format. While root beer has a long history, it has a wide range of recipes that call for everything from birch bark to vanilla, molasses to juniper berries, so Hires set out to create his own version, which he initially sold as packets of powder. Soda fountain owners or housewives would buy the packets for a quarter, and by adding water, yeast and sugar, they would have five gallons of root beer or root tea, as it was occasionally called.

With the encouragement of a friend, Hires took his product to the Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876. He gave away free glasses of root beer, which were surely appreciated during the hot Philadelphia summer, and he also made the smart marketing move of advertising it as a “temperance drink” while the temperance movement was picking up steam.

Hires marketed his root beer with slogans like “The Temperance Drink” or “The Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World,” but he did draw fire with the word “beer.” On the one hand, it was believed that calling the mixture root beer would give the product a boost from the popularity of beer at the time, but on the other, Hires had to work to convince the temperance folks that his drink was alcohol-free.

In the years following the Exposition, Hires continued to market his drink to the temperance crowd, and he also developed a liquid extract or syrup for use in soda shops. He began to ship root beer in kegs, and he even patented a dispenser called the “Hires Automatic Munimaker” that he sold to the soda fountains that were popping up everywhere. By 1890, Hires had formed a corporation, and the company began bottling root beer.

One of the Hires Automatic Munimakers. (p4A item # D9798307)

Today Hires Root Beer advertising material is very popular with collectors, from tin trays to dispensers to mugs. Especially popular are items from the 1910s depicting what collectors refer to as “the googly-eyed man.” This young man was an actual person, Josh Slinger, and a soda jerk!

A Hires advertising tray featuring Josh Slinger, the Googly-Eyed Man. (p4A item # C244349)

Scandal & the Story of Bakelite

Bakelite hit the market in 1907, heralding the arrival of the modern plastics industry. Bakelite was the first completely man made plastic, as until then, plastics such as celluloid, casein, and Gutta-Percha all had as a base a natural material. It was developed by Belgian-born chemist Dr. Leo Hendrick Baekeland who started his firm General Bakelite Company to produce the phenolic resin type plastic. Bakelite was inexpensive to manufacture and extremely durable, and made its inventor a wealthy man. In subsequent generations, however, the Baekeland’s family story was one of tragedy rather than triumph. In 1972 the schizophrenic great grandson of Dr. Baekeland stabbed his mother to death. Savage Grace, by Natalie Robbins and Steven M.L. Aronson, a book about the family and the murder, was a best seller when it was published in 1985.

Bakelite for Appliances & Jewelry

Early Bakelite was used almost exclusively in the manufacture of radios, appliances and electrical components because it was lightweight, inexpensive, durable, moisture-resistant and non-flammable. The limited color range of black, brown, and the occasional burgundy and dark green was appropriate for use as radio cabinets, vacuum cleaner parts, and electrical elements, but eventually, formulas were developed to produce the plastic in a range of appealing colors. Its ability to be carved and molded made it ideal for inexpensive jewelry. Early jewelry attempts to mimic more expensive materials like ivory amber, onyx, and jade, but by the 1930s, consumers began to appreciate the plastic for own qualities and Bakelite jewelry made its appearance everywhere from Sears Roebuck to Sacks 5th Avenue.

Colorful Art Deco Bakelite Gems

Artists and designers discovered the beauty and workability of Bakelite (and Catalin, a competitor who also produced a phenolic resin plastic). New technology created additional colors, and the plastic became available in scarlet, green, amber, brown burgundy, red-orange, and Kelly green and black and marbled. By 1934, yet another plastics company had produced a formula for Bakelite in pastel colors including willow green, light blue, pink and yellow. Due to the unstable nature of the chemicals used in the pastel colors formula, these pieces are hard to find, and as such, are among the most costly of Bakelite jewelry.

Bakelite Jewelry & Values

Bakelite could be molded, carved, or laminated, and designers and turned to the material for brightly colored, inexpensive flights of fancy to adorn everything from wrists to waists. Necklaces featured beads in a variety of sizes and colors, sometimes terminating in carved or laminated pendants. A popular choker style necklace consisted of pairs of bright red cherries on celluloid stems and leaves dangling from a celluloid chain (today $150-300.)

Bakelite Bracelets

Bracelets were stretchy, cuff, charm, wrap or tank-track styles. Stretchy bracelets consisted of beads or lozenges strung on elastic. Cuff styles could be wide and deeply carved, or narrower bands intended to be stacked together. The band could be smooth, molded (usually in a geometric pattern), carved, or pierced. Wrap bracelets were beads strung on wire, and tank-track bracelets featured overlapping semi-circular links. A quick check on eBay turned up bracelets on offer in prices ranging from $50-300. Deeply carved, wide red cuffs seem to fetch the highest prices, followed by amber, then green.

Bakelite Pins

A variety of pins were produced, either whimsical figurals or geometrics. The Art Deco love affair with the Scottie Dog was evident in the jewelry on offer. Horses also had a strong presence, but pins of elephants, penguins, marlins, and cherries are also available. Pins range in price from $118 for a lovely carved leaf, $130 for a carrot, $102 for a red horse head, and an almost shockingly low $18 for a classic Scottie in red.

Bakelite Jewelry Affordable (Again)!

Prices reached almost ludicrous levels in the early 1990s, and the jewelry became so popular that other Bakelite pieces such as poker chips, Tootsie Toys and Mah Jong tiles were frequently fashioned into jewelry. The market seems to have cooled, meaning that it’s once again possible to buy a fine Bakelite cuff bracelet for less than a gold one.

Reference note by p4A Contributing Editor Susan Cramer, August, 2011

Bakelite

Bakelite is named after its inventor, Belgian-born chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863-1944). After emigrating to the United States in 1889, Baekeland dabbled in photography. In the late nineteenth century, photographic paper was so insensitive to light that prints had to be exposed outdoors in sunlight. Baekeland invented a more sensitive paper that he called Velox. He sold the rights to George Eastman in 1899 for a million dollars.

Now independently wealthy, Baekeland bought a farm near Yonkers, New York and set up a laboratory in the barn. He wanted to develop an insulating coating for copper wire, the kind of wire used to wind solenoids and motors. In those days wire was coated with shellac, which was laboriously made from the shells of the lacca beetle that inhabited southeast Asia. Shellac was expensive and in short supply. Could Baekeland develop a synthetic substitute?

In 1907, he prepared a mixture of phenol, formaldehyde and lye which had the color and the consistency of honey. Unexpectedly, the mixture hardened in its container, producing a solid whose surface faithfully duplicated the shape and the texture of its container.

It occurred to Baekeland that his mixture could be heated in molds to create objects of any desired shape. Thus was born Bakelite, the world’s first synthetic plastic. Baekeland founded The Bakelite Corporation to manufacture his material.

Bakelite is known by several generic names. It is referred to as phenolic because phenol (C6H5OH) is the main ingredient. Phenol is the preservative that is responsible for the “mediciney” smell of preschoolers’ paste and is the “mediciney” ingredient in antiseptic mouthwash.

It is also known as thermosetting because the chemical reaction that creates the solid actually occurs while the molding compound is being heated in the mold. Once the solid object has been formed, it cannot be softened again, unlike thermoplastics such as polystyrene that can be melted and re-used. This property makes thermosets useful for objects that might become warm, such as housings for electrical devices or even handles for kitchen pots and pans.

A Manning-Bowman coffee pot with bakelite handle, base and spigot handle. (p4A item # D9810832)

Baekeland’s competitors also made thermosets, and the word “bakelite” (small b) became a generic term denoting phenolic from any manufacturer. To further complicate things, The Bakelite Corporation later became a distributor of polystyrene, which was sold under the trade name Bakelite.

The original lump of Bakelite was a transparent amber-colored solid whose appearance Baekeland described as “frozen beer”. A few products were actually molded that color, notably ladies’ combs that were meant to simulate hand-carved tortoise shell.

Most Bakelite was made with additives that altered its appearance or mechanical properties.

Flock (short cotton threads) was often mixed with molding compound so that the threads would become embedded in the finished product. The fibers improved Bakelite’s mechanical strength, much as steel reinforcing rods strengthen concrete.

The most common appearance for a Bakelite object was opaque black, which was produced by incorporating carbon black into the molding compound. The ubiquitous black rotary-dial telephone was manufactured of black Bakelite.

A Henry Dreyfuss bakelite telephone. (p4A item # B126428)

A bakelite “bow tie” pattern bangle bracelet. (p4A item # D9769092)

Bakelite’s popularity began to decline in the 1940s as thermoplastics became more readily available. The first major thermoplastic was cellulose acetate, which was made from a byproduct of the cotton gin. Intricately-shaped objects can be fabricated by injection molding. Molten plastic is forced into a mold under high pressure, where it cools and solidifies. Since cellulose acetate was derived from an agricultural product, supply could not keep pace with the growth of demand. After World War II, polystyrene (made from petroleum) quickly became the most popular thermoplastic.

The days of manufacturing collectible jewelry from Bakelite are over, but phenolics continue to be used for applications where heat resistance is required, such as electrical equipment or cookware.

Reference note by p4A Contributing Editor Joseph H. Lechner, Ph.D.