According to Barbara Israel, this statue, one of two original sculptures standing at Cliveden, the Chew family home in Philadelphia, is "perhaps the only extant garden ornament in American to have been [a] silent witness to a battle of the American Revolution.

Antique Garden Ornament

Two Centuries of American Taste

By Liza Montgomery

Gardening has come to be the favorite form of creative expression in America. Armed with a palette of limitless color, texture and design and a canvas of suburban soil, more and more of us are setting out each spring to make the landscapes in our minds a reality.

The most intriguing aspect of this pastime is that the gardener’s personality, like any artist’s, is most revealed in the decorative choices he makes. Over the last decade, these choices have increasingly included some type of ornament. Our appetite for urns, statues, fountains and benches has skyrocketed, along with the popularity of shows and auctions offering this genre.

Now amidst the consumer feeding frenzy, however, a scholarly voice has emerged which is bound to have great impact in the field. Barbara Israel’s Antique Garden Ornament: Two Centuries of American Taste is the first serious look at US garden history and design as they relate to their manmade decorations.

While many books have examined European ornament and American artistry, Israel, a respected 15-year garden ornament dealer and consultant, takes a classificatory look at this side of the Atlantic – with wonderful results.

Inspiration

Frustrated in her own investigations, the author took her cue from John Davis’ 1991 Antique Garden Ornament.

"From the very beginning I was interested in the historical significance of pieces and I had no luck at all researching – no secondary sources," she recalls. "In 1991 I came across Davis’ book and was so excited to find it. I thought, ‘He did the English version and I’ll do the American version.’"

One could say Israel was destined to do it. Her love of gardens, although inherited from a family of avid gardeners, became a passion in the 1950s while – of all things – trespassing as a child on a neighboring Peapack, N.J. property, St Joseph’s Villa. The Catholic retreat was none other than C. Ledyard Blair’s former Louis XIII-style estate, Blairsden, famous for its innovative, formal design.

"One day my sister and I climbed over a gate, walked up a long driveway, turned a corner and stared up at this huge house on a hill. We decided to look around a bit and found a long reflecting pool lined by busts of 12 Roman emperors," she says. That awe-inspiring view is included in the book, beautifully photographed by Mick Hales.

Israel was later encouraged to forge a career as a garden ornament dealer by beloved auctioneer William Doyle, who built an empire catering to New York City’s Park Avenue elite. "He initially sent me in the direction of a statue for my garden, and I found 40 statues that I ended up buying," she said. "William Doyle taught me how to be a dealer."

The author confines her subject to traditional ornaments produced between 1740 and 1940, defining traditional as not including avant garde creations – Twentieth Century kitsch or works by Henry Moore or David Smith. Before 1740, says the author, there is little preserved for research, while after 1940 there are a great many reproductions.

Antique Garden Ornament’s first 100 pages, divided into seven chapters, serve as a historical overview of America’s choice in fountains, statues, urns, furniture, sundials and armillary spheres, gates, fencing, finials, and other objects such as obelisks, plant stands and wellheads. Most often mentioned are examples found in large, well-known estates.

"Collecting garden ornament, historically, has been a luxury for the rich, a passion of the elite," writes Israel in her introduction. "Wherever possible I have attempted to discuss smaller properties, although, in general, it is the larger gardens that have been preserved."

Chapter progression from fountains to miscellaneous items is based on the "importance of the objects in terms of prestige and aesthetics," says the author. "Fountains are the most exciting of garden ornaments, for example, in the way they interact with nature."

Presented in this seven-theme section are images of exemplary pieces found in, among other sites, Longwood Gardens; The Breakers; The Elms; Canyon Ranch, or Bellefontaine; Melrose; The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens; Hearst Castle; Naumkeag; Rosedown Plantation and Gardens; Mount Vernon; Vizcaya Museum and Gardens; and, of course, Blairsden.

More to the point here, however, is information pertaining to American garden and ornament history in terms of European influence, dynamic import/export climates, international relations, inventive designers, and the tastes of an increasingly wealthy and powerful upper class. Sources used range from obscure primary materials found at historic sites, such as letters and diaries, to magazines and well-known gardening texts.

There are enough juicy tidbits strewn throughout the book to keep the reader more than interested. The art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, for example, whose career has undergone a great deal of scrutiny recently, may have taken advantage of the 1890 McKinley tariff. This 50 percent import duty on newly worked marble was in effect when Duveen purchased four magnificent Istrian stone urns in Europe to flank the Apollo fountain at Georgian Court College in Lakewood, N.J. The urns were presented as Renaissance examples, in Israel’s opinion, to escape the tariff. The author refers to them as examples of "the finest Nineteenth Century Italian stone carving."

"They’re too crisp to be Renaissance," she told us, "although the original papers and invoice say so." Israel does not believe this practice was widespread at the time, however, and reports the Georgian Court urns were "the only instance of [false dating due to the McKinley tariff] that we found."

Following these chapters is an illustrated, black and white catalogue of 300 ornament examples, including 72 images of furniture, 61 urns, 41 statues, 37 fountains, 21 sundials, 29 gates and finials, and 34 "other" objects.

"The most complete category in terms of patterns is furniture," says Israel. pointing out a section featuring cast iron curtain benches as an example. "I tried to get every single pattern or type here; I can think of [only] one that’s missing."

Israel steered clear of public gardens in the catalogue, as it presented too big a subject. "And I wanted to know what the private gardener was thinking," she said. "The real difficulty is that you cannot get a picture of everything. Either things were missing, or I couldn’t find them, or there was simply no room. It was a challenge to stick to 250 pages."

Perhaps most exciting for dealers and serious collectors will be the descriptive appendix of 130 manufacturers – the majority of them American, with the inclusion European firms that exported to the US – and their photographed marks. Presented is information gleaned from the objects themselves, trade catalogues, city directories, and the R.G. Dun and Company (eventually known as Dun & Bradstreet) Collection housed in Harvard Business School’s Baker Library. An entire year was spent accumulating material for this appendix, constituting most of the investigative hours for Israel and her assistants, who followed a twisted path of changed addresses and company names.

"The one advantage [of inconsistent company histories] is that you can figure out the date of an object by the name and address on it," the author explains.

Israel is quick to name those who helped her in her efforts; leading the pack was Jeni Sandburg at Boscobel, who made many invaluable resource suggestions for this appendix.

Additional appendices of selected historic US gardens and maintenance and care of garden ornament are also offered, followed by — yes! — the most complete bibliography ever compiled on the subject. The only disappointment in the publication is a technical one supplied by Abrams: an incomplete index, which makes for frustrating reader searches on key words.

In short, the overwhelming amount of research and exhaustive attention to detail represented in Antique Garden Ornament makes it a bombshell of a book — the American garden ornament reference, if you will. The trade may absorb Israel’s findings sooner than her predicted two years, for the book includes more than a few surprises.

The most compelling discovery for the author involved the statues at Cliveden, the Philadelphia home of the Chew family. The estate had been victim to the Battle of Germantown in 1777, and a 1780 medal memorializing the event for the British victors depicts the Cliveden statues knocked off their pedestals. It has been assumed that the statues now standing on the grounds were early reproductions, for Cliveden in 1779 had been sold outside the family, only to be resold to its original owner, Judge Benjamin Chew, by that purchaser 18 years later.

A 1791 letter, written by Mrs Chew’s sister, has served as the proof of this assumption, for it briefly mentions, "The things of that sort [decayed statues & pieces of marble] given … to Mr and Mrs Chew went to the purchaser of their house near Germantown."

Israel interprets the letter as proof that the statues could well be the originals, as everything was resold to the Chews six years after the letter was written. An examination of the statues themselves, and the state of their decay, leads the author to describe two of the four statue fragments currently standing as "Eighteenth Century interpretations of the antique," while describing the remaining examples as "perhaps the only extant garden ornament in America to have been silent witnesses to a battle of the American Revolution."

The author also clears up some confusion surrounding the dating assigned to sets of cast iron lyre-back armchairs by Robert Wood, similar to those in the collection of The Highlands in Fort Washington, Pa. William J. Hornor, Jr’s Blue Book of Philadelphia Furniture gives the accepted date of The Highlands’ armchair as 1804, since the chair is marked "Robert Wood." But Israel writes, "Wood’s business on Ridge Road in Philadelphia did not begin production until 1839," and further that the 1804 date "may have been… a simple reversal of digits – turning 1840 into 1804," a kind of cast iron typo.

Regarding the misattribution and reattribution of works by Fiske and Mott (Israel is currently working on an article about Fiske for The Magazine Antiques), the author strongly states there is "no attributing garden ornament unless you absolutely know the provenance, or you can attribute it on the basis of a design shown in [one of the maker’s] catalogues."

"These designs were not made by one maker," she continues. "Fiske and Mott and Robert Wood all made them. If it is not stamped, there is no way to tell [a piece’s origin]. Cast iron is a manufactured product, and I feel that it is important to understand what you can and cannot know about it. And Fiske was not an iron founder, he was a manufacturer. He only made his own weathervanes."

These and other discoveries presented in Antique Garden Ornament, too numerous and complex to be discussed here, could set dealers and collectors on their ears. But they will certainly serve to eliminate what some perceive as an overabundance of smoke and mirrors surrounding the garden ornament business.

The author’s favorite story, one she found too endearing to pass up for publication despite its superfluity, involves one of the oldest sundial plates in the US. It is a 1630 brass example made for Governor John Endecott by William Bowyer, the English maker, who calibrated it for Salem, Mass.’s latitude —Endecott’s future residence. Shortly before Endecott received the sundial, he also imported from England a rare pear tree. One hundred and sixty years later, a layman historian and pastor, the Reverend William Bentley of Salem, checked on the condition of both the sundial and the tree, still owned by descendants of Endecott, the tree still bearing fruit. Bentley seems to have become enamored with both and concerned for their welfare, eventually purchasing the sundial from an heir for $3 in 1810.

Bentley then sent propagation twigs from the tree to a friend, former President John Adams, and in 1867 the dial was donated to the Peabody-Essex Institute in Salem (then the Essex Institute).

"I love the sundial story," says Israel. "But I want to know what happened to the pear tree!" She hopes someone involved with the Adams archives can tell her.

A demand for garden ornament has been felt by everyone involved in its trade. For Israel, clients are more knowledgeable. "I could sell a Medieval wellhead today more easily than I could ten years ago," she says. She also notes, "The same passion for armillary spheres continues – people can’t seem get enough of them."

Israel predicts an upcoming trend in the United States will be an increased interest in terra cotta, and refers to the June auction of the garden ornament collection of Lindy and Tim Seago, a British dealer couple, as a future influence in America.

"It was one of the finest dealer collections you can imagine. The Seagos, very knowledgeable people, decided to go out of business. Pieces brought staggering amounts of money, and set a new market. Coade stone and artificial stone achieved the highest prices that I saw.

"I went over and bought a few things, although there was a lot of private buying, and dealers just can’t compete in that atmosphere. It was an academic collection and people appreciated that. The impact was felt much more profoundly in England than America, but the news is going to get here."

Just in time, it seems, as the author has also witnessed a renaissance of large, complex gardens. "We are being sent plans of gardens being installed across the country that are just enormous. This constitutes a revival, but one with a kind of elitism attached to it still."

Antique Garden Ornament: Two Centuries of American Taste has no exhibition plans accompanying it yet ("Moving garden ornament that belongs to other people is not high on my list," laughs Israel), but the author will be involved with an early Twentieth Century estate garden exhibition at PaineWebber Gallery scheduled for the year 2000.

Antique Garden Ornament: Two Centuries of American Taste was published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 100 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011, last month. It is available in hardcover for $49.50.