From Sharon Platt's collection, the New England painting on panel "Mother and Child” is a circa 1835–1845 work. It hangs above a painted Massachusetts pine chest from the mid-Eighteenth Century, also from Platt's collection. The coastal New Hampshire side chairs were carved with fishtail crests and date from 1740–1775. They are from the Hollis Brodrick collection.
:The enduring pleasure of a well-formed object is almost tangible. A collection of early American pine objects made, used and gathered lovingly is a testament to that pleasure.
"American Style: Russell Kettell's Pine Furniture," on view at the Concord Museum, exemplifies these pleasures as it showcases the objects of daily life and allows visitors to appreciate each and every piece. Kettell was among the first to discover and revere the idiom of pine, and the furniture and articles on view are evidence of that reverence.
This is a contemplative show, allowing the eye to meander along the lines of a box or a chest or a tool that was made to be used and was softened by that use. It is as much about the objects and about pine as about an extraordinary man.
The objects on view were made with care to please the maker and the user. Not meant for grandees or designed to create an impression, they are the articles of the ordinary household. The objects are at rest now, but each speaks of the demanding tasks of early American life and those who performed them. As Concord Museum curator David F. Wood observes, "Every one is well worth contemplation."
Collector, educator, craftsman, historian, museum designer, preservationist and author, Russell Hawes Kettell celebrated the beautiful but humble, what he termed "admirable joinery" and the merits of lowly pine. Born in Boston in 1890 and educated at the Middlesex School in Concord, from which he was graduated in 1910, he went on to Harvard where he interrupted his graduate studies in architecture to design hospitals for the US Army in World War I.
In The Pine Furniture of Early New England, Kettell writes of the weathervane, "We concluded he was originally a cod, and repainted him accordingly….If his coloring is wrong, you may blame the encyclopaedia.”
Kettle returned to Middlesex in 1921, where he taught a wide range of art and aesthetics, including the art of carving that he had learned there as a student, and served as hockey defense coach until 1956. Far more than a teacher, he was a renaissance man in the guise of "Mr Chips." Former students still remember him with affection.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Kettell single-handedly determined an aesthetic appreciation for early American vernacular furniture based on the classical principle of
dulce et utile
. As an active supporter of the Concord Museum, known then as the Concord Antiquarian Society, he was instrumental in the museum's 1930 relocation and reconstruction and the design of then-state-of-the-art first-period rooms that would help the museum establish a high profile.
