Materials of the Pennsylvania German fraktur artist

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2005 by Jennifer L. Mass, Catherine R. Matsen, Janice H. Carlson

In 1897 Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) delivered a lecture to the American

Philosophical Society in Philadelphia entitled "The Survival of the Mediaeval Art of Illuminative Writing among Pennsylvania Germans." He described a "rude, lidless paint-box, fastened with wooden pegs" that was presented to him as a paint box used by teachers at Pennsylvania's German schools to paint fraktur in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. (1) The term fraktur describes a popular German typeface developed in the sixteenth century and characterized by "fractured," or broken, letter shapes. (2) By 1897 fraktur also described the decorated paper objects made by the Pennsylvania Germans and other German settlers in the United States. These works often tied family, religion, and community together, functioning as family registers, marriage and death records, birth and baptismal certificates (see Pls. III, IV), and hymn-tune note-books. Other common forms are student rewards of merit (see Pls. XI, XIa), student writing samples (see Pls. VI, VII), bookplates, love letters (see Pl. VIII), poems, personal greetings, illuminated songbooks, and title pages. (3) Although the decorative motifs on fraktur were subject to local and regional variations, common ones include tulips, lotuses, birds, angels, trumpets, hearts, garlands, trees, banners, and wreaths (see Pls. IV, VII). (4) The manuscripts were written in iron gall ink and decorated with watercolor paints (composed of dry pigments and a gum binder) and sometimes embellished by cutwork (see Pl. VIII). While early fraktur tend to be hand-lettered, some later examples were printed, and many combined both. The art of making fraktur was practiced by Pennsylvania German schoolmasters in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, although not all fraktur artists were schoolmasters and not all schoolmasters were fraktur artists. (5) Fraktur were also produced by scriveners (professional penmen), artists, and possibly by stonemasons. (6)

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Mercer's 1897 lecture and subsequent publication of it in the American Philosophical Society Proceedings made him the first scholar of non-German descent to study Pennsylvania German fraktur. He also appears to be the first scholar to approach these works as material culture, recognizing the historical and artistic value of their texts and images and seeking to identify the materials and methods used to prepare them. Mercer identified the "primitive tools" of the fraktur artist as being "goose-quill pens, and brushes made of the hair of the domestic cat ... home-mixed inks and paints of the master once liquified in whisky, and that the varnish was composed of the gum of the cherry tree diluted in water." (7) Although Mercer never exactly identified his source for this information, his statements are reasonable, and his writings on this subject have had a profound effect on the perceptions of subsequent scholars about the brightly colored watercolors used to illuminate fraktur. Donald A. Shelley noted that "in most cases we may assume that the merest essentials were available" and that "the implements of the local Pennsylvania craftsmen were no doubt limited." (8) He went on to propose that the colors were "neutral earth colors" and that cherry tree gum or gum arabic may be responsible for the glossiness of some of the colors. (9) In 1947 Russell Wieder Gilbert stated that the early German teachers trained as fraktur artists could "illustrate the letters with homemade paints. Vegetable, plant, and berry dyes were probably used." (10)

The Pennsylvania German and fraktur collections at the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, have their origins in the 1920s with the first acquisitions by Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969). (11) His passionate collecting of the arts of the Pennsylvania Germans in the countryside near Winterthur led to his being named vice president of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society in 1937. Between 1937 and 1940 du Pont's interest in Pennsylvania German culture increased, and he moved many of his fraktur from his Southampton, New York, residence, Chestertown House, to Winterthur, where he created six rooms devoted to the Pennsylvania German arts. In 1951, in the former wine cellar, du Pont created the Fraktur Room (Pl. V) with late eighteenth-century woodwork from the house built for David Hottenstein in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, in 1783. This room was in du Pont's words a "background" for his fraktur and something that he had been "dreaming about for years." (12) There are currently eight rooms at Winterthur dedicated to the arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, all containing fraktur.

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The materials used to prepare a work of art can be identified by chemical or instrumental analysis of the elements or compounds present. One year before Mercer presented his lecture on fraktur, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) became the first scientist to x-ray a painting. (13) By the early decades of the twentieth century several scientists had positions at American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (14) Today scientific research departments are found in more than a dozen museums and academic or government conservation laboratories in the United States. (15)