Collection: Everything Else

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.

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 horizontally 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.

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.

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.

Monumental in scale, probably unique in form, and dramatic in presense, this scallop-topped work explores the abstraction of the human figure in a way that no other artist did.
Scheier, often influenced by Picasso, drew figures with shared limbs and faces and demonstrated often changes in perspective and viewpoint. However, here the artist draws human figures with two dimentional abstract features and also projects facial profiles into the spaces between the four pictorial repeats in the design, employing a three-dimensional or sculptural technique. The scrafitto-drawn figures can be viewed as fitted within the eye sockets of the sculptural profiles.
It is possible that the narrative being told here is a personal version of King Solomon's Tale. A single child seems to hold the hand of two possible mothers. The profile faces and crown-like top edge may represent Solomon. This story is told on other of Scheier's chalice forms also from the 1960's.
The glaze is volcanic and done in brown and bronze colors. Drawn figures are of blue and turquoise. 22 1/4 inches high and 13 1/2 inches wide at center. Signed Scheier 66 (1966).

A small flat dish with a flange-style rim, glazed in colors that range from tan to gray-green with a reddish edge and decorated with abstract drawing of fish, whimsical in nature. Circa 1950, New Hampshire. 5 1/4" wide x 1" high.

A Gift to his Mother

This box with floral decoration painted on its sliding lid top is made entirely of highly figured tiger maple and is lined with bright blue paper.

In 1819 Henry, then 22 or 23 years old and the ninth child of Amos and Helen Whittemore, gave this gift to his mother, and its presentation is recorded in pencil on the inside surface of the lid.

The box is finely dovetailed, as would be expected of urban work, and the family lived in the Arlington/Cambridge area outside of Boston. The blue interior was seen on drawer interiors in the Boston area at this time, and the box shape was often used there. 8 x 5 inch top and 1 1/2 inch height. The piece retains its original thin shellac surface.

First half of the 19th century. Woven of ash splints, with a wrapped edge opening and still in excellent condition. 32 1/2 inches tall, 23 3/4 inches across the top and tapers to the bottom which is made to have a 13" square base.

Embellished with a portrait  and the name of Admiral Sydney Smith (1764-1840) painted  in oil on its lid. Smith was the rival of Horatio Nelson in the British pantheon of naval heroes during the Napoleonic Wars  and is most famous for his defense of Acre, which thwarted Napoleon's ambitions in the Middle East.  Napoleon Bonaparte, later in his life reminisced "that man made me miss my destiny." Smith served with distinction in the Royal Navy during the American and French Revolutionary Wars, rising to the rank  of full admiral during the Napoleonic Wars. 

American circa 1780.  Mounted and in a period frame.  Found in Enfield, CT.  Vibrantly colored flower and vine decoration in very good condition.  Minor thread loss. 16 " x 10 3/4 " plus frame.

8.5" x 9.25" image area.

Felted cloth, silk-stiched decoration and pink/rose cloth border decoration. In period frame, excellent condition.

The piece is dated 1826 and inscribed as from Providence, Rhode Island.
Portrayed is a school girl in classical garb, standing beneath a domed temple, and holding a liberty pole and a cornucopia, from which she spills the fruits of knowledge. A flag-draped eagle with outstretched wings surmounts the dome. Similar symbols appear in schoolgirl samplers and embroideries of the period in RI, particularly the pillars and arches of the temple drawn here.
Gladdiing was Boston trained, and from 1824-1858 he was listed in the Providence city directories as a landscape, sign, or ornamental painter, as well as a grocer and a jeweler.

View of Ithaca, Tompkins County, N.Y. Taken from the West Hill, 1839, 16 x 27: Printed by Daniel S. Jenkins, 136 Nassau Street, Beckman, N.Y. Drawn from Nature and on Stone by Henry Walton, Ithaca, N.Y.
Walton’s view of Ithaca is centered on the current Route 96, then the Geneva Turnpike. The lithograph shows a saw-milling operation in the foreground, across the road from the Old Stone Heap, a building that in its time was a tavern and is now a private residence. The village of Ithaca is seen in the back ground on South Hill. The steamboat Dewitt Clinton is docked on Cayuga Lake behind the tavern.
This is the rarest of the Ithaca Lithographs. It completes the trilogy of lithographic views of Ithaca and is a magnificent record of the developing village.

In 1840 thirteen year old Zilpha Shepard from Canton, Massachusetts created a copy book containing twelve painted illustrations and dozens of highly romanticized poems that are fairly typical of the work of her generation's female students, but also prophetic of the talent that would later allow her to become a professional artist. Its frontispiece, a complex floral still life, is followed by a brief poem that refers to the joy she finds in the natural world and in portraying it in her art.

Four years later she made another book. This not only has her name and the year but specifically states, "Painted by Zilpha Shepard 1844". It contains twelve remarkable watercolors and numerous unfinished pencil and pen and ink drawings.

In the early nineteenth century artists in Canton, China made books of paintings on pith paper for export. Sets of these, each in brilliant color and minutely detailed, and each with a particular subject category- flowers, court ladies, fish and vegetables, landscapes- could be ordered. Zilpha's watercolors in her 1844 book are clearly based on those found in a set of these books.

Zilpha never married and lived with her parents and then her widowed mother. Zilpha, the prodigiously talented girl who made these beautiful watercolors almost four decades earlier, chose art as her life's work. She is listed in the 1880 United States Federal Census, still living in Canton, Massachusetts, as an "Oil, Water (Color) and Crayon Painter".