Fraktur Writings and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection - Review

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

Initiated in 1885, the collection of Pennsylvania fraktur in what is now the Schwenkfelder Library in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, numbers more than one thousand examples and is one of the largest in the United States. Most were created by the Schwenkfelders, Protestant followers of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1489-1561) in the duchy of Silesia (then part of Austria). Persecuted at home, the first Schwenkfelder came to America in 1731, followed by forty-four families in 1734. Most of them settled in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia.

The brilliantly colored fraktur in the Schwenkfelder Library are the subject of this catalogue, written by a former director of the library and himself the descendant of an eighteenth-century Schwenkfelder immigrant. The book is a joint production of the library and the Pennsylvania German Society in Kutztown. It is the thirty-first volume in the society's annual series.

The fraktur are divided into those made in what the author calls the Middle and Upper Districts of Montgomery County - a careful distinction indeed given the fact that the county is roughly thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide. For each fraktur illustrated - in brilliant tones - the complete text is printed in the original German and translated into English. While acknowledging that people today are attracted primarily by the decorative motifs in fraktur, the author writes that "during the 'golden age of fraktur,' the first intent of the scrivener was to thank or honor God. God was the inspiration, whether the work was to record a birth, to copy a hymn or segment of scripture as a gift or teaching tool, or simply to draw the image of one of God's creatures." Appropriately, the first entry in the bibliography is the Bible.

The author has placed equal emphasis on tracing the makers of the fraktur he illustrates through the web of family ties that existed among the Schwenkfelders. Grouping them thus will enable future researchers to compare fraktur of unknown origins with those by known artists.

From the 1760s to the 1780s the decoration of fraktur was largely limited to elaborate penwork and rather stiff decorative motifs. Thereafter, and particularly from the 1790s to the mid-1830s, robust design, freehand drawing, and brilliant colors dominated. The passage of the Free Public School Act in Pennsylvania in 1834 ended the church-run Schwenkfelder schools and with it instruction in fraktur, which for all intents and purposes ceased to exist in the 1840s.

True to the title, the book concludes with a chapter entitled "This and That" with a selection of folk art drawings included "because of their artistic merit or for some other unique quality," the author writes. There one finds greeting cards, valentines, labyrinths, sampler patterns, ornamental drawings executed with compass and straightedge, and drawings of birds, beasts, and flowers as well as people and houses. In all cases the drawings have the same brilliant colors and stylish sense of how to fill a page that make the Schwenkfelder fraktur with holy texts so pleasing.

Collectors of fraktur will require this catalogue. At the same time, connoisseurs of folk art will find endless pleasure in counting the ways the Schwenkfelders brightly embellished the word of God.

Fraktur Writings and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection, by Dennis K. Moyer (Schwenkfelder Library, 215-679-3103), $65.00 (hardcovers).