Collection: Everything Else

The subject of this dageurreotype, a charming and pensive child, was photographed steading herself for the long exposure of the camera by resting a hand on the seat of a chair with a leaf-carved crest, which compliments the dangling red-tinted bouquet that she holds in her other hand in a seemingly casual gesture that belies the intensity of her gaze on the photographer.
She wears beautiful lace pantaloons and high-topped shoes, features which in themselves date the making of the image, probaly between 1845 and 1850, and ribbons hold her dangling curls back from her face. The lighting of the picture is subtle but finely chosen by an artist/photographer of great skill.
In her original brass mat and pressed paper case which is mounted on brown suede and in a modern carved and gilded frame fitted with museum glass. Plate tarnished to sides and resealed. Framed dimensions are 8 x 12 3/4 inches.

A beautiful sixth plate daguerreotype image of a seated, frontally placed girl, on a silvered plate that glows with an almost white light behind her. Her pose is peaceful, composed, her hands touching each other. The bow atop her head is red and a faint pink tints her cheeks. It's hard to describe the purity of the image. It has to do with the girl herself, the perfect tonality of the unblemished plate, and the pose given her. A quiet masterpiece.

With scalloped mat circa 1850 - 1852, New England. Archivally sealed and conservationed framed.

Scheier
A rare early Scheier flat plate form with raised lip, glazed in deep brown, the design in a greyish tan. The simplified design, abstratced in its flatness but with clearly representationall imagery, shows a mother suppporting a child who tries to walk. Both are surrounded by a grassy road, a house, and birds and trees, all resembling a child's drawing.
This work, dating from the mid 1940's, is a rare example of the transition Edwin's drawing style made through different stages of abstraction. His most personal mature style became more sculptural and less literal by the mid 1960's.
12 inches wide and 1 3/4 inches high.

Scheier
Large free-form-drawn shapes decorate this deep plate, glazed over its red clay base in shades of matte blue on the front and in a tan-grey on its underside. Parts of figures emerge from the drawing- hands and feet, profiles, appendages. The drawing echoes the Surrealist work of artists such as Miro and some of Pollack and Calder's works.
For work with drawn/inscribed decoration, it is unusual in this period and brings ceramic work closer to the fine arts than is usually acknowledged for this time.
10 1/4 inches wide and 1 1/4 inches high. Early 1950's. New Hampshire.

An unusual chalice from the Scheiers, probably an early interpretation of the Jonah and the Whale theme used by Edwin to decorate so many of his works. The pottery has all the grace of Mary's work: thin walls, perfect symmetry and almost indistinguishable turning marks, and a raised foot with an unarticulated lip edge.

Alternating female figures and fish form a ring around the center of the chalice. The women extend their arms so that each fish is held by two women. Both the female figures and the fish are inverted with each repeat.

The glaze varies from light blue inside to medium through a very dark blue on the exterior. The incised figues are of brown and yellow colors.

New Hampshire circa 1950. 7 inches high and 7 inches wide at the rim.

A Scheier chalice, one of the best forms they made in the 1960's and desireable for their large scale, is here seen in brown and black with off white inscribed decoration. The imagery includes male and female figures, alternating in a band around the center of the form, who each hold and fish and simultaneously merge at their heads with the fish form.
New Hampshire, 1960's, fine condition. 14 inches high and 5 3/4 inches at widest point.

Alternating inverted figures holding the undulating form of a snake form a band around this 18 1/4 inches tall chalice made by Edwin Scheier in 1962. At one point in this band the snake's tail is about to be bitten by the snake, whose jaws are open around it. The decoration is inscribed and impressed (in areas of the background), and facial features, hands and feet, and breasts, protrude from the body of the figures.
Other examples of decorated pieces by Edwin portray aspects of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, and this appears to be another variation of that theme.
The glaze is a glossy deep blue above and below this band and brown within it.
The chalice form and their figural decoration is to me the major innovation within Scheier work during the 1960's. This period also showed the production of new surface treatment variations and glazes.

Scheier
A small deep bowl with straight sides, glazed in a very flat brown grainy surface on the outside, and with a smoooth brown surface inside. On this piece, the figures used in Edwin's Jonah and the Whale inagery are placed in a band that alternates standing figures and fish but without the usual merging of the two. The deep brown color brightly contrasts with a white (not the more typical tan) inscribed design, creating a dramatic visual effect on this small work.
New Hampshire, circa 1950. 5 inches high and 5 7/8 inches wide at rim.

Superb coloration makes this bowl by Edwin and Mary Scheier a fine example of the type. The blue, with areas of yellow within, varies from a color of medium intensity to one of high intensity beyond the level usually acheived. Dark blue forms a band at the rim and on the foot ring. These features make a small tea bowl with incurvate sides and inscribed decoration figuring the imagery of Jonah and the Whale, which is often seen drawn by Edwin, into a dramatic and unusual work.
New Hampshire. Circa 1950. 4 3/4 inches high x 5 1/2 inches wide at center. Excellent condition.

Scheier
A rare early dated example of Scheier pottery that uses abstracted faces to form surface decoration. This piece from 1949 employs four vertically stacked rows of faces. A center line bisects each stack, and faces alternate their placement in relation to the line. Where a face is not used in a position against the line, hair extends out horizonally from the head, a detail that is used in Edwin's decoration through his final working years in the early 1990's.
Glazed in browns and black and with an unusually tall vertical lip to the vessel.
10 inches high and 7 1/2 inches wide at the rim.

Scheier Chalice
The great chalices of the mid 1960's fairly consistently had decoration based on Biblical stories, albeit ones abstractly represented and imaginatively told. This work is unusual and possibly unique in that its decorative imagery is related to the Surrealist inspired automatic drawing that is seen a decade earlier on bowls made by Mary and with surface treatment designed and executed by Edwin. As in those earlier works, this piece, signed "Scheier" and dated 66 (1966), appears at first to be entirely abstract in drawing and then, upon careful observation, reveals facial profiles and hands.
The chalice is primarily covered in a matte brown volcanic glaze with areas of bronze and copper color. The central band which holds the decorative frieze is inscribed with off- white drawing. The different glazes transition beautifully into each other. Inside the piece is deep brown except for an area near the rim which is blue-grey in color.
20 inches high and with a maximum diameter of 7 inches.

This work, signed and dated, which in itself is rare in a theorem, also carries forward into a later decade many of the design features of the DB signed theorem from the Little collection, an earlier work on velvet and the model for a school of works with similar design elements and a mysterious background.

This work is signed "Mary Jane Cate" and dated "July 24, 1846". Its container is basket shaped and drawn in an abstract manner. It has no basket weave elements to its form or shape, other than having a rim, body and foot. The recognition of what these elements visually stand for is almost lost. Lines drawn in red and borders filled with stars and dots of blue function as a material form. A cyma curved form, also composed of lines and stars, serves as its handle. Its foot is adorned with the artist's inscription that is noted above.

Fine condition. Painted on paper and in an old frame, repainted to a dark green over red. Framed it is 15 1/4 by 17 1/4inches. Circa 1835. Gouache (opaque water color,with white added). Probably New England.

This small photographic image cannot be viewed without an awareness of its cultural roots. The 'nanny' leans backward, as if to remove herself as subject of the picture, as she holds the child forward toward the photographer. Yet she, more than the child, looks towards the camera, aware of the significance of fixing in time the moment they share.
In fine condition and encased in a brown floral-decorated thermaplastic case with an inner brass mat. Presumably from the American south, circa 1860.

A spectacular and unusual theorem, painted in watercolor on velvet (the norm for its early age ). The work is signed , "Elsie Jane Hogoboom". It is 17 1/4 x 15 in its . An example from the Little collection was signed " D.B." All works in this unusual and rare group have the basket's fruit upside down, the stems of the fruit projecting out into space, as opposed to being within the container which tries to hold them in. Also, they have a repeated compositions, or parts of a known composition, which has a diagonal pear on the left with usually two round fruit behind it. On the other side, there are grapes and berries. As said before, all or some of the fruit stems point away from the container which appears to hold them, but neither does it fully encompass them nor help to position them .

Upper left corner has what appears to have powdered pigment applied to cover a small stain. Re-sized spindle-turned frame in its original brown paint.