Two Philadelphia shadow-box grottoes

Magazine Antiques, March, 2002 by Laura Keim Stutman

The landscape includes a mirror "stream" with ducks swimming in it, conical trees made of wood covered with wool fibers and thread, and animal figurines, including deer and raptorlike birds. There are also three female figures placed in the composition: a small wooden figure in mid-eighteenth-century costume stands in the doorway, a larger wax doll, also in mid-eighteenth century dress, is on the second stair landing; and a still larger wax doll is seated in the garden, almost behind the staircase. Her silk damask off-the-shoulder dress possibly suggests a later eighteenth-century date. The use of the differently sized dolls lends perspective to the picture, for the largest one is placed in the foreground garden and the smallest one is furthest in the distance--up at the top of the hill.

Virtually the entire remainder of the inside of the box is covered with shells. Those on either side of the house depict large out-of-scale urns of flowers, with shell petals and strawflower centers (see Pl. III). The latter also serve as bird's nests. Bits of red-dipped coral or wire hang from the top and sides, suggesting the stalactites that one might find in a natural cave. A large tented olive shell (Olivia porphyria) is prominently placed in the center of the composition. It is the most exotic shell in the picture, having come from the Panamic province, located between the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Guayaquil in northwestern Peru, while the rest of the shells in the box are from the shores of the Carolinas and the Caribbean Sea. There was abundant trade in the eighteenth century between the Quaker merchants of Philadelphia and merchants in such places as Charleston, South Carolina, and the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados. The shells could have been brought back as ballast on ships or collected by sailors or travelers for their wives, daughters, or friends. Anne Emlen's brother-in-law Samuel P. Emlen (1730-1799) is known to have taken a tour of the Virginias and Carolinas in 1753, (15) so perhaps he brought back some of the shells.

Smaller, but stylistically and thematically comparable to the Stenton grotto shadow box is the one shown in Plate II, believed to have been made about 1760 by Mary Sandwith of Philadelphia and now in the collection of the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Like the Steaton box, it is painted black and has an applied molded frame that holds in place the handblown glass. There is a wrought-iron ring on the top, so that it could be hung on a wall, and the backboards are held together with eighteenth-century sprigs (along with several modem screws).

The shellwork composition includes two arched grottoes with mirrored glass "pools" with paper fish in them; above the grottoes are a crenellated building on the right and a churchlike building on the left, with a spire or flag on top (and a nesting bird). Between the buildings is a beadwork lion on a green bead carpet. (16) The lion brings to mind Elizabeth Graeme's description of Thomas Goldney's grotto, quoted above, and the large iridescent oval shells mounted on the outside wall of the two grottoes in the shadow box recall those of "monstrous size" on either side of Goldney's cistern.