Nantucket Island in New York City - antiques exhibit

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Nantucket, Massachusetts, was an enigma to those who visited and subsequently wrote about what John James Audubon called this "truly curious island." Nantucketers were perceived as curious because most of them were Quakers, and the mainstay of the economy was whaling, which left women and children at home alone for long stretches of time. Both Quakerism and whaling emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century and dominated life there until the middle of the nineteenth century. The marvelously idiosyncratic objects made on the island or by whalers during long periods at sea, variously exhibit a vitality to the point of flamboyance or restraint to the point of plainness.

Visitors to the Forty-sixth Annual Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory at Park Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street in New York City, between January 21 and 30, are sure to be delighted by a loan exhibition of selections from the Nantucket Historical Association. The exhibition is entitled Away Off Shore: From the Collections of the Nantucket Historical Association and is comprised of some forty-five pieces, including textiles, scrimshaw, ceramics, manuscripts, paintings, and furniture selected by Aimee E. Newell, the curator of collections at the historical association.

Between about 1845 and 1875, whaling ceased to be economically viable and the population of the island decreased from about ten thousand to thirty-two hundred. However, during the 1870s Nantucket was reborn as a summer destination for a part-time population that included such artists as Eastman Johnson, who spent nearly twenty years painting there. At the turn of the century Nantucketers were caught up in a national interest in the American past and more than a few became intent on preserving their history.

The Nantucket Historical Association was founded in 1894 and that year purchased its first building--the Quaker Meeting house. At the first annual meeting the following year it was recorded that the collection of artifacts and manuscript materials numbered 295, with an additional 120 objects on loan. Today the association owns operates twenty-five buildings, which range from the Jethro Coffin House, known as the Oldest House, built in 1686, to Greater Light, which was built in the eighteenth century but renovated in 1930.

In the earliest years many things on Nantucket were imported from port cities on the mainland or from Europe, but by the end of the eighteenth century, local craftsmen were thriving, and trade with more distant lands, like the Far East, brought exotic objects to the island. Seafarers made household utensils, such as sewing tools, from whalebone, and today scrimshaw is as much associated with Nantucket as the lightship baskets unique to the island. A number of these objects are included in the exhibition.

The catalogue of the antiques show contains an essay by Ms. Newell. General admission to the Winter Antiques Show is sixteen dollars and includes a copy of the catalogue.