Wisconsin Object

Last week I spent a day with a group of volunteers at the Beyer Home Museum in the town of Oconto. Constructed in 1868, the building was one of the first in the community to be made from brick. The interiors have been restored to the period of the 1890s–the time when lumber baron George Beyer transformed the home from an Italianate mansion into a Victorian showplace.

I photographed several examples of local furniture, including a small hanging corner cupboard attributed to John Van Rens (above). It’s decorated with fine marquetry and inlay, and the shelves are lined with red velvet paper. Other artifacts I documented were some examples of porcelain hand-painted by local women, three quilts, and an unusual handmade banjo decorated with half-moons.

I also got to see another object of historical import–a five foot animatronic fiberglass pickle that once served as the mascot for Oconto’s Bond Pickle Company! Too bad it’s outside of my date range for this project. The pickle reminds me a bit of “Big Dreamers,” a documentary I saw last month at the Wisconsin Film Festival about a small town in Australia and its quest to build a giant fiberglass rain boot in hopes of attracting tourists.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

14 catalog entries for objects from Hazelwood Historic House Museum, Green Bay, are now online in the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database. The new entries include examples of furniture, hand-painted porcelain, and needlework from the collections of the Brown County Historical Society and furniture belonging to the Green Bay-De Pere Antiquarian Society.

Hazelwood is the third contributor I’ve worked with in Brown County since beginning this project. I cataloged artifacts at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County in 2006 (view 13 items from their collections here). In 2007, I photographed objects at the Wrightstown Historical Society (see 10 artifacts from the Meuller-Wright House here).

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Seven catalog entries for artifacts from the collections of the Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion are now available online. One of the most spectacular objects original to this lavish late-nineteenth-century Milwaukee home is this built-in corner cabinet (one of two) designed by the Matthews Brothers for the Pabst family’s Rococo Revival-style formal dining room. More examples of work by the Matthews Brothers, a prominent Milwaukee-based furniture manufactory and interior design firm, from the collections of Villa Louis and the Milwaukee County Historical Society as well as the Pabst, are available here.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

At least once a year, University of Wisconsin faculty members Anna Andrzejewski (Art History) and Arne Alanen (Landscape Architecture) take their students on a driving tour of the buildings and landscapes of southwest Wisconsin. I grew up in this part of the state and have driven the backroads of the driftless area many times, but every time I come along on this tour (last week marked my third time), I get a new perspective on those familiar hills and barns and silos and tiny towns.

My first version of this trip is probably the most memorable because it was one of my very first steps on my road to studying local Wisconsin history and objects.  I was a UW-Madison undergrad in a class with Prof. Andrzejewski.  One of the structures we were on the lookout for was the local cheese factory–a long building with a lower level built into a hillside. Found every few miles in this part of “Dairyland,” these small operations have long been closed and converted into homes. We’d already passed at least half a dozen of these as we approached my hometown of Mineral Point, and the class pointed out the bus window at another one coming up on the side of the road. I was surprised to see that I recognized the place–I’d even been inside.  It was the home of one of my high school friends, and I’d had no idea of its former existence until then.  This was one of my first inklings of the important stories that could be found in what were–at first glance–everyday, simple, mundane things.

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A new online collection of Wisconsin ceramic art is a featured highlight from the Wisconsin Historical Society this week. This online tour includes 175 objects in the collection of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, inluding over 100 examples of work from Pauline Pottery and other Edgerton art potteries that I photographed in Madison this past December. The feature includes a link to the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database, which includes images of Pauline Pottery at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County, Pauline and other Edgerton potteries at the Rock County Historical Society and the Kenosha Public Museum, and work by Susan Frackelton at the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Milwaukee Art Museum.  You can find examples from the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s collection of art pottery there as well.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Last week I drove northeast from Madison to Beaver Dam, where I spent an afternoon photographing objects in the collection of the Dodge County Historical Society. With the help of curator Mary Beth Jacobson, I shot an interesting assortment of local artifacts including two chairs, a hand-woven coverlet, several framed wreaths (one made of hair, one of yarn, and one of shells and grains), and a group of hand-painted porcelain.

The Dodge County Historical Museum is impressively large. Located in downtown Beaver Dam in the former Williams Free Library (built in 1891), the museum includes three floors of exhibits. A small area at the front of the main floor features a rotation of small exhibitions.

Right now this space is dedicated to a display of early furniture from McKinstry’s Home Furnishings, a family-owned furniture store that has been in operation in Beaver Dam since 1858. The Windsor chair show above is said to have been made by store founder John McKinstry in the 1860s. I know this kind of nostalgia is a bit cliched, but in this era of particle board furniture from Ikea and Target (and that includes my own bookshelves and bed frame), a locally-owned small-town furniture store is indeed a rare find.

Artifacts from the Dodge County Historical Society will be posted online in the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database later this spring.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

What is Art Pottery?
Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, American art potters approached ceramics as an art form. They experimented with a variety of new glazes and decorative techniques and focused on creating vases and other ornamental wares instead of utilitarian pieces like cups and plates. There is no single style of American art pottery, but some well-known examples include Rookwood’s elegant painted landscapes, Teco’s dramatic forms, and the Paul Revere Pottery’s charming illustrations.

The Art Pottery of Pauline Jacobus
Pauline Jacobus established the Pauline Pottery in Chicago in 1883 and relocated the company to Edgerton in 1888. In creating her art pottery wares, Jacobus incorporated the forms and decorative techniques of some of the most influential potteries and ceramic designers of her time. Pauline wares were made using molds, some of which–like the long-necked pitchers and the globular vases–were similar to forms used by the Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati, where Jacobus took classes before beginning to work in art pottery. The majority of the Pauline wares are decorated with hand-painted underglaze–paints applied with brushes after a first firing, then coated with a clear glaze and fired a second time. The most common motif–a variety of flowers in solid colors, outlined in black–is reminiscent of the work of John Bennett, a widely admired decorator for the Doulton Pottery of London who relocated to New York City in 1877. Other Pauline works show the influence of Laura Fry, a decorator for Rookwood who worked briefly with Jacobus in Chicago–including carving and gilding as well as the use of Fry’s own invention, an atomizer (airbrush), to create spattered backgrounds or smooth glaze transitions.

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The Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee is home to a major collection of work by Cyril Colnik, an Austrian-born artist who worked in Milwaukee from 1893 until his death in 1958. Colnik is best known for the intricate wrought iron gates and architectural ornaments he made to decorate the mansions of Milwaukee’s elite, but he also made smaller household goods, like candlesticks and doorknobs, in cast and wrought iron and cast brass. Last week I worked with Villa Terrace curator Laurel Turner to photograph several dozen examples of Colnik’s work, including his wrought iron “Masterpiece,” which won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World’s Columbian exposition (detail below).

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Green Bay is a city with many claims to fame. It’s the home of a certain professional football team you may have heard of. It’s the birthplace of yours truly (although my family relocated to southwest Wisconsin when I was a toddler). And as the oldest city in Wisconsin, it has a long and varied history: French explorer Jean Nicolet landed at “La Baie Verte” in 1634, and the settlement operated as a major regional fur trade post for two centuries, first in the hands of the French, then the British, and then the United States.

It was in Green Bay in 1837 that Morgan L. Martin, an influential leader in the early days of the Wisconsin Territory, built his home–a Greek Revival mansion he dubbed “Hazelwood.” Preserved as a historic house museum, Hazelwood is now operated by the Brown County Historical Society. Last week I worked with BCHS volunteer Duane Ebert to photograph artifacts at Hazelwood for the database–some of which belong to the Society, and some of which are the property of the Green Bay-DePere Antiquarian Society. Highlights included a ca. 1880s sideboard and corner cupboard refashioned from a black walnut bedroom suite belonging to the Martin family and a large array of porcelain hand-painted by Frederika Crane, a prolific china painter and a friend of the Martins. Look for these artifacts, and more, online later this spring.

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.

Last week I returned to the Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, where I worked with curator Jodi Rich-Bartz to photograph several examples of Milwaukee-made Victorian furniture–part of the original furnishings designed by the Matthews Brothers when they decorated the Pabst family’s grand new home in 1892. I set up my temporary photo studio in the first-floor hall and brought in furniture from the neighboring dining room, music room, and “ladies’ parlor.”

I also had the chance to shoot (and move) an extraordinary (and extraordinarily heavy) plant stand made by Cyril Colnik, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Milwaukee artist known for his ornate work in wrought iron. Colnik’s ornamental ironwork gates, fences, and other architectural elements can still be found on private homes and public buildings throughout Milwaukee (see Virginia Jones Maher’s 1998 article “The Wrought Iron Artistry of Cyril Colnik,” in the Wisconsin Academy Review  for images).

Posted by Emily Pfotenhauer.