Museums accessions - discusses the items featured at the Winter Antiques Show

Magazine Antiques, March, 1999 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Visitors to January's Winter Antiques Show in New York City will certainly recognize Beacon Lights, the extraordinary basket pictured here, from the show's loan exhibition, which focused on the collection of the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown. Together with the album quilt pictured below, the basket represents new paeans to the association's dual allegiances: the decorative arts of New York State and American Indian arts as represented in the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art.

The album quilt, a rare example with a New York State history, was made in 1857 by Anna Putney Farrington, the wife of Hiram Farrington, a shopkeeper and postmaster in Yorktown, Westchester County, New York. Album quilts are generally associated with Baltimore, but as this example demonstrates, those from New York have a certain flamboyance of color and scale that sets them apart. Appliqued and embroidered in cotton, this quilt is further distinguished by an unusual double-scalloped border.

The basket is the work of Louisa Keyser, arguably the most famous American Indian basket weaver of all time. Her life and work are a fascinating blend of truth, surmise, and fiction. A Washoe Indian, she is believed to have been born about 1850 and raised in California at the southern edge of the Washoe territory. By 1895 she was working as a laundress and housekeeper for Abe and Amy Cohn, the owners of the Emporium Company clothing store in Carson City, Nevada, who were drawn to the baskets she wove in her spare time. They encouraged her to weave them full time and promoted sales by having her work where tourists could watch her. Originally using indigenous designs, she created visually stunning and technically innovative baskets that eventually transformed Washoe basket weaving. Amy Cohn kept meticulous records for each basket but felt compelled to fabricate many, details about the artist's life, designs, and techniques to make them suit American tourists' romantic notions about American Indian art. For example, she devised a whole legend for the flamelike motif on Beacon Lights that is only remotely related to the Washoe tradition and symbolism.

Sabina Elliot Wells married fluid form and organic decoration to create some of the best work produced by the Newcomb Pottery' in New Orleans in the early years of this century. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Wells was enrolled at the pottery's H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for Women (a division of Tulane University) from 1902 until 1904 and was a member of the pottery design class in 1903 and 1904. Her finest work, such as the vase illustrated, incorporates deeply incised floral designs that perfectly complement the rounded shapes of the objects and feature the pottery's characteristic soft colors and luminous glazes. Her work was included in Newcomb's display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904 as well as at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, long after Wells had left Newcomb and moved to Baltimore. Besides Wells's marks, the vase bears the cipher of Joseph F. Meyer, who made or supervised the making of all the objects to be ornamented by Newcomb's decorators. It is one of a number of important recent additions to the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio.