Vernacular art at Winterthur - Winterthur - folk art collection at Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Betty Fiske, Anne A. Verplanck

Some objects known to be fakes were deliberately acquired so that future generations might examine, analyze, and compare them to their authentic counterparts. Through recent research one such acquisition, a fraktur pocket (Pl. I), has proved to be probably genuine and possibly rare. It is made of several layers of paper and pasteboard. A matboard is crudely sewn with heavy black linen thread onto the back of the pocket to reinforce it. Examination under ultraviolet light demonstrated that the matboard was made in the twentieth century which was the initial reason that the pocket was thought to be a later fabrication, or a fraktur cut up and reworked to make a three-dimensional pocket. However, closer examination of the structure of the pocket, particularly the fibers used to make the paper and pasteboard, suggests early nineteenth-century manufacture. Polarized light microscopy revealed that these fibers are linen and cotton. Linen from rags was the predominant Western paper fiber from the thirteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth. Cotton rags were used occasionally in paper after cotton was imported from India in the seventeenth century, but they were more common after 1800. The construction of the pocket suggests that, except for the matboard, the piece has not been altered. Besides the needle holes containing the black thread used to attach the modem matboard, there is a second set of holes that has no corresponding holes in the matboard. This second set contains fragments of colored linen thread, probably remaining from the original sewing of the pocket. At the top center of the pocket are two holes that suggest the pocket might have been hung by string or ribbon on a wall or at a worktable.

In short, the style and materials of the support suggest a nineteenth-century date of manufacture. The fraktur painting is on laid paper typical of the nineteenth century and its design perfectly fits the unusual shape of the pocket. The outlined shape of the design is not characteristic of fraktur, which could suggest it was made specifically for use on the pocket rather than cut out of a whole fraktur: The pigments, except for one, are representative of the palette found in the fraktur collection at Winterthur as analyzed by Winterthur conservation scientists using nondestructive energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy The representative pigments are iron gall ink, vermilion red, and verdigris copper green. The exception is chrome yellow, a color notused before 1818. (14) Inside the pocket is an inscription "Dieses Gehort/Anna Junkin/Geschrieben den ..." (This belongs to Anna Junkin written the...) (see Pl. III). Tantalizingly, the date is there but too far into the gutter of the pocket to be read.

The fraktur compares favorably with the one by Isaac Gross shown in Plate VI. The birds, flowers, and distinctive vine motif are all almost identically shaped and rendered. The design runs close to and connects with the border it does on the fraktur pocket--a singularity that might have convinced earlier cataloguers of the pocket that it had been cut from a larger fraktur. Gross was a schoolmaster at the Deep Run school in Bedminster Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania His dates dovetail with the usage dates of cotton fiber and the chrome yellow found in the analysis of the pocket.