Leopard Rug, 1855-60, Vermont, yarn-sewn and hooked woolen yarn on a woven linen and jute ground, 34.25" long by 67" wide. (Main page photo: "Diantha Atwood Gordon," circa 1832, attributed to A. Ellis, Fairfield, Maine, oil on panel with gilding.)

A Passion For The Past

The Little Collection At Cogswell's Grant

By Ruth Wolfe

An extraordinary exhibition of American folk art drawn from one of the finest collections in the United States will be shown at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute to April 20.

"A Passion for the Past: The Collection of Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little at Cogswell's Grant" comprises about 70 works, including paintings, furniture, ceramics and wood carvings, that are traveling for the first and only time. The exhibition is organized by The American Federation of Arts and the Boston-based Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.

Beginning in 1925 and continuing for more than 60 years, Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little formed an unparalleled collection of antique furnishings and folk art drawn primarily from their native New England.

The Littles were among the first American collectors to appreciate what they called "country arts," the simplified, sometimes idiosyncratic works of rural artisans who supplied the utilitarian and decorative needs of the inhabitants of New England's farms and small towns. Their collection encompassed paintings, furniture, carvings, and the entire range of domestic accessories used in the early American home.

In 1937, the Littles acquired a summer retreat north of their home outside Boston. An early Eighteenth Century house, Cogswell's Grant is located on a tidewater farm in Essex, Mass., that was part of a 1636 grant to Jonathan Cogswell, the original settler in whose honor the property was named. The Littles' enormous collection eventually filled both their homes. At Cogswell's Grant, the concentrated on furnishings and decorative objects in a country style, looking especially for items made locally.

The portraits of Cogswell's Grant represent a variety of styles, from John Durand's simplified versions of aristocratic English portraiture, to the flat, decorative effect of Diantha Atwood Gordon's portrait. Most of the portraits date from the first half of the Nineteenth Century, the heyday of the itinerant New England "face painter," when young men -- and a few women -- with native talent but little or no training traveled from town to town seeking commissions among networks of related families and their friends.

What these itinerants knew of art they taught themselves, and the most original compensated for their lack of artistic training by developing highly personal styles. It was difficult to make a living by painting alone: even a masterful portraitist like Winthrop Chandler had to supplement his income with decorative wall painting, carving, and gilding. Only a few, like Zedekiah Belknap or Ammi Phillips, were able to sustain lifelong careers or to meet the challenge of the daguerreotype camera, which put many portrait painters out of business after its introduction to America in 1839.

Phillips, probably the most prolific of all the New England itinerants, painted a succession of distinctive styles for more than half a century; the portraits of Colonel and Mrs Joseph Dorr exemplify this artist's early, most primitive style.

The earliest artists represented in the Littles' collection left compelling visual documentation of the way New England people and places looked before they could be recorded by the camera.

Sometimes artists illustrated actual events, as in the case of 16-year-old John S. Blunt, who captured the moment on October 1, 1814, when the U.S. frigate Washington was launched from the famous shiphouse in the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Blunt went on to become a successful painter of portraits, landscapes, and harbor views in Portsmouth and Boston.

The same urge to record for posterity that motivated portrait painters is found in a type of early American landscape that might more properly be called a "place portrait." Alfred J. Wiggin, who worked in the vicinity of Cogswell's Grant in the mid-Nineteenth Century, advertised in local newspapers offering "portraits from life or copied from daguerreotypes," as well as "views of residences painted when desired." The country estate of Ezekiel Hersey Derby, son of a wealthy Salem merchant, was captured on canvas around the year 1800 by Michele Felice Corne, a versatile Neapolitan who enjoyed great success as a painter-decorator after emigrating to New England.

Following European landscape conventions, Corne placed himself at work in a corner of the painting. The man at his side, holding what appears to be a roll of plans, may represent Salem's leading early Nineteenth Century architect and carver, Samuel McIntire. There is a stylistic similarity between McIntire's carvings and drawings and some of the decorative details on the buildings in the painting. A photograph of the farm, made roughly a century later, proves that Corne's depiction was an accurate one.

The New England landscape and seascape are themes that run throughout the Littles' collection, found in numerous charming variations on signboards, interior paneling, rugs, and furnishings. A view of characteristic New England houses enlivens an otherwise ordinary storage box, and the dial of a Massachusetts clock is surmounted by a miniature harbor scene.

In Eighteenth Century houses, the overmantel (an architectural paneling over the fireplace) was often painted with a landscape. Few of these overmantel scenes are identifiable; rather, they present aspects of the familiar New England countryside, often combined with elements drawn from printed sources such as drawing manuals, book illustrations, or imported European engravings.

Paintings by amateurs as well as professionals decorated the walls of the early New England home. Watercolor painting became a popular pastime for both men and women when kits with pigments compressed into ready-to-use cakes were introduced in the late Eighteenth Century. In the schools that sprang up all over New England after the Revolution, drawing and painting were part of the curriculum. Well-to-do young ladies were taught to execute needlework samplers, as well as watercolor still lifes, mourning pictures memorializing departed relatives, and family registers (genealogical records in pictorial form).

Folk art collecting is an offspring of both the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued handcrafted objects over standardized machine-made products, and Modernism, which raised the found object to the status of art. Utilitarian objects made by early craftsmen were redefined as decorative objects and admired for their simplified, functional forms and surfaces marked by age, weather, and wear.

The Littles collected numerous weathervanes, decoys, and other carvings both for their decorative appeal and for what they revealed about the working methods of early artisans. A miniature gravestone carved by Noah Pratt is believed to have been used to show prospective customers a sample of his work. A member of a Massachusetts family of gravestone carvers, Pratt worked in Maine, where stones carved with his distinctive portrait heads (men in wigs, women in caps) can still be found in cemeteries in Freeport and Brunswick.

The grain-painted paneling at Cogswell's Grant inspired the Littles' interest in unrestored, highly colored, and boldly patterned surfaces. For years the "early American" look had been synonymous with a shiny, natural wood finish, leading to the unfortunate practice of stripping antiques of their paint. The Littles helped collectors and dealers appreciate the painted surface as integral to the history of a piece.

For instance, a Queen Anne dressing table with grain painting added almost a century later was left with the later finish intact. The furniture chosen for Cogswell Grant displays the entire range of early furniture decoration, from floral designs resembling early needlework, to stylized landscapes, to the flamboyant grain-painting that transforms a maple high chest into an illusion of burled walnut veneer.

Boxes for every conceivable type of storage constitute a collection within a collection at Cogswell's Grant. There are utilitarian Shaker pantry boxes, elegant in their simplicity; boxes ornamented with chip carving; and boxes with the same variety of painted decoration found on furniture. Early painter-decorators would as willingly paint a portrait as a house, walls, floors, or anything else the customer desired.

Proof that these artisans provided a range of decorative services is demonstrated by two related artifacts in the Little collection: a dome-top box and a fragment of wall paneling, both painted by the same unknown itinerant whose work can be identified by distinctive birds, flowers, and scrolls.

One of the oldest and rarest objects at Cogswell's Grant is a richly carved, late Seventeenth Century tape loom, a tool used to weave narrow tapes for edging fabrics. It is attributed to Thomas Dennis, a joiner who immigrated to Essex County from England. The tape loom has carved motifs that provide a direct link to the mannerist design tradition of northern Europe, which traveled with Protestant refugee craftsmen to England and from there was transmitted to New England.

At Cogswell's Grant there are numerous examples of redware, one of the earliest crafts of New England. Small potteries were set up wherever there was a good supply of clay and ample wood for firing the kilns. Although they had but a limited number of pigments to work with -- manganese and oxides of iron, copper, and brass -- early potters achieved a remarkable range of subtle color variations in the glazes on utilitarian mugs, bowls, and storage vessels. Slip decoration, applied by trailing liquid white clay (slip) through one or more quills, was used by potters in Pennsylvania as well as New England for presentation pieces inscribed to order with the name of the recipient or an appropriate motto.

Like patchwork quilts, early American rugs were a salvage art made by homemakers from scraps of worn-out garments in designs ranging from geometric to floral to pictorial. For years collectors mistakenly assumed that all early handmade rugs were "hooked." Actually, hooked rugs, which originated around 1850 and were made in quantity through the 1930s, were preceded by yarn-sewn and shirred rugs.

The Little collection includes excellent, well-preserved examples of all three types, as well as rugs that combine more than one construction technique, like the yarn-sewn and hooked rug depicting a leopard surrounded by exuberant floral designs.

The Littles documented their collection with the thoroughness of museum professionals. Their original contributions to the study of early architecture and interiors, decorative wall painting, and little-known artists brought them recognition as serious scholars. Nina Fletcher Little published approximately 150 articles, books, and exhibition catalogues, prompting Wendell Garrett of The Magazine Antiques to write that she "contributed more to American decorative arts scholarship -- in both quantity and quality -- during the Twentieth Century than any single person."

The Littles' shared passion for the past produced not only an extraordinary collection but an important body of information on the lives, customs, and material culture of early New Englanders.

The exhibition, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support provided by Sotheby's, is accompanied by an illustrated brochure. Jane Nylander, president of the SPNEA, will participate in a symposium at the Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, on Saturday, March 8, from 9:30 am to 5 pm. Other speakers will include Abbott Lowell Cummings of Yale University; Charlotte Emans Moore of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Philip Zea of Historic Deerfield; and Catherine Zusy of Cambridge Mass. For Information, 413/458-9545.

Other venues for "A Passion for the Past" will include the Museum of American Folk Art, New York City (May 3 to July 6); Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pa. (July 25 to October 19); The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minn. (November 16 to January 25, 1998); and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Okla. (February 13 to May 3, 1998).