Two Philadelphia shadow-box grottoes

Magazine Antiques, March, 2002 by Laura Keim Stutman

From ancient times, people have enjoyed shells for their beauty, usefulness, and symbolism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were among the natural specimens collected by virtuosi, or amateur scientists, who kept their collections in specialized moms known as cabinets of curiosity. Curiosities in the seventeenth century were "things which rewarded especially scrupulous attention, or presented themselves as items upon which care and pains had been bestowed." (1) The word curiosity also "signaled things strange, odd, unusual and ingenious." (2) Ladies' shellwork is a feminine extension of the cabinet of curiosities. In eighteenth-century England, ladies of refinement engaged in shellwork on both a grand scale, decorating entire moms with shells from all over the world, and on the smaller scale of the two shadow boxes that are the focus of this article, both made in colonial Philadelphia. (3)

In creating the shadow boxes, two unmarried, financially independent Quaker women, Anne Reckless Emlen and Mary Sandwith, expressed their participation in the Quaker culture of the Delaware River valley, which valued beauty, refinement, collecting, and learning. Both shadow boxes represent grottoes. While grottoes were not common in Philadelphia (or anywhere else in the American colonies), there was one at Fairhill, a country house outside Philadelphia, by 1766, (4) and there were many in England, which American travelers visited. In 1764, for example, Elizabeth Graeme (later Mrs. Henry Hugh Ferguson; 1737-1801) of Philadelphia went to see the garden grotto the Quaker merchant Thomas Goldney III (1696-1768) had built at his house Goldney Hall in Bristol, England, beginning in 1737. (5) Indeed, Graeme's description bears certain similarities to Mary Sandwith's shadow box. She describes a cistern made of shells, with a shell of "monstrous size" on each side, and a "Cavern that holds a Lion large as the Life, th at faces the door and guards the place." (6)

There are records of shells being commercially imported to England as early as the 1730s, (7) and a mania for them continued for more than half a century. The noted writer Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote of the role of shell grottoes in landscape gardens, and he himself had a much admired shell grotto (no longer extant) at Twickenham, which connected his house to a shell temple. (8) Enthusiasts spent small fortunes importing rare and exotic shells from around the world, particularly from the West Indies, (9) and used them not only in their grottoes but for interior decoration as well. Several English country houses contained shell rooms. Sarah Lennox (1706-1751), the duchess of Richmond, and her daughters created a shell house at Goodwood, Chichester, using local shells as well as ones imported from Jamaica. (10) By the end of the eighteenth century, however; the fashion for shellwork among the English elite had greatly subsided. By the 1790s, for example, the celebrated shell grotto created in 1680 at Basil don Park near Lower Basildon, Berkshire, had been "disowned by an improved and purer taste." (11)

Considering how popular shellwork was in Britain, it is not surprising that this form of ornamentation appealed to some well-to-do colonial Americans. The shadow boxes illustrated here suggest that their American makers were well aware of the wider cultural interest in shells, although they practiced the art on a smaller scale.

The shadow box in Plate I is in the collection at Stenton, the country house built by James Logan (1674-1751) between 1723 and 1730 outside Philadelphia (and now in the Germantown section of the city). The box was bequeathed to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at Stenton by Samuel Betton, a Logan descendant, in 1915, along with the history that it had been made by Anne Reckless Emlen, a sister-in-law of James Logan's eldest son, William (1717- 1776). (12) The initials "A[DIAMOND]E." and date 1757 inscribed on the house in the box support this provenance. (13)

The wooden box, with dovetailed sides and a back made up of two overlapping boards, is painted black, with an applied molded frame that holds in place what appears to be the original handblown glass. The dovetails and sprigs used in its construction confirm an eighteenth-century date. The grotto effect is accomplished almost entirely with shells glued directly to the sides and back of the box. Cast-brass rings at the juncture of the top and the back indicate that the box was intended to hang on a wall.

The scene created in the box is generic rather than specific, but clearly indicates a knowledge of eighteenth-century English landscape gardening and the general shift in attitude away from the country seat as a place for "agriculture and moral improvement" to a landscape about "pleasure and refinement." (14) Dominating the composition is a five-bay pedimented Palladian villa complete with chimneys, finials, a pedimented entry with a paneled door, belt courses, a protruding central bay, window muntins and window "glass." The naturally pink surface of the small bivalve shells applied over red-painted paper suggest that it is a "brick" house; details such as the belt courses and the pediment above the door are picked out with equally small but rounder white shells. The house stands within a crescent-shaped fenced courtyard (see Pl. IV) atop a cliff of shells and overlooks an English style garden park From the side door of the house, a paper wainscoted staircase leads down to a fenced terraced garden that bring s the com position full circle, for it includes a shellwork garden grotto within this shadow-box grotto. Terracing and changing vantage points such as those created by ascending or descending stairs were important aspects of eighteenth-century English garden design.