Plate, one of eight commissioned by Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar for April 19, 1875, celebrations. Worcester Porcelain Manufactory, Worcester, England, about 1875. Porcelain, stamped in red on back, "Manufactured by the Worcester Royal Porcelain Co./For/ Richard Briggs/ Boston.” Gift of the Cummings Davis Society, 2006.
:The Concord Museum has long been a magnet for antiquarians and other lovers of American history. Founded in 1886 as the Concord Antiquarian Society, it was well known to the earliest antiquers, from collector George Sheldon to the popular writers Esther Singleton and Elizabeth and Robert Shackleton.
Home to Paul Revere's lantern, Henry David Thoreau's desk and Ralph Waldo Emerson's study, the museum was among the first to show American antiques in period-room settings. Wallace Nutting photographed the furniture-rich collection in 1912, pronouncing it "very notably good."
David F. Wood, the Concord Museum's curator for the past two decades, says he still marvels at the prescience with which Cummings Davis (1816–1896), a far from wealthy or highly educated man, amassed a first-rate assortment of artifacts made and used in Concord, a small town 19 miles northwest of Boston that has loomed large in American political and cultural life. A hatching ground for patriots in the 1770s, less than a century later Concord became a gathering spot for famous writers, from Emerson and Thoreau to Louisa May Alcott.
During his tenure, Wood has made important strides in documenting Concord's cabinetmaking shops. To his knowledge, about seven were active in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. He has studied Concord clocks, an important local industry between 1795 and 1825, and investigated the career of Concord silversmith Samuel Bartlett (1752–1821).
The color blue is not limited to the loan exhibition, as the museum's mid-Eighteenth Century chamber demonstrates. The Concord Museum's period rooms, originally installed in 1907, are among the oldest in the country. This room with bright blue paneling was installed in 1930 by Russell Kettell, an early Twentieth Century collector and author of Early American Rooms, published in 1936. —Chip Fanelli photo
In his recently published book,
An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum, Wood credits Thoreau, best known for his back-to-earth paean
Walden, with taking a material-culture approach to the study of objects a century before the discipline was formally defined by historians. Thoreau, the curator believes, directly influenced the collecting habits of his friend Cummings Davis.
Davis might have been surprised by the museum's temporary exhibition, "A Splash of Blue," which seems more akin to aesthete Henry Davis Sleeper's intuitive explorations of color at Beauport, his house up the road in Gloucester, Mass.
On view through April 29, "A Splash of Blue" features 100 works of art in all media that share one common attribute: they are blue. The American Folk Art Museum in New York presented a similar show, "Blue," in 2004–2005. Both exhibitions draw on the research of the French scholar Michel Pastoureau, whose Blue: The History of A Color was published in Paris in 2000 and was reissued in English by Princeton University Press in 2001.
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