Boston's nineteenth century ship carvers

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Jane L. Port

The main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Drowne's Wooden Image" (1846) is a wood carver in colonial Boston. A skilled and respected mechanic whose main business was producing ship's figureheads, Shem Drowne achieved the status of an artist when love inspired him to create a figurehead that seemed imbued with the spark of life. [1] Hawthorne validates the genius of his character's new work by having the artist John Singleton Copley (1738-l815) visit Drowne's shop and proclaim that if "this work were in marble it would. make you famous at once." [2]

The distinction Hawthorne draws between the importance of a figure carved in wood and one carved in marble illustrates the hierarchy of mediums as understood in the nineteenth century. In eighteenth-century America wood was considered a proper medium for artistic expression, and men listed as "carvers" in Boston's tax and other records provided wooden architectural ornament for civic and naval structures, carving for furniture, and statuary for public and private uses. In the nineteenth century, as Americans began to be trained in the academic sculptural traditions of Europe, marble and granite replaced wood as the preferred materials for sculptors. The word mental came to signify only those nonacademic carvers who continued to work with wood. Over the course of the century Boston directories listed more than fifty ornamental carvers, the majority working in the furniture industry and allied trades, and a small number employed mainly as ship carvers. [3]

The brief reign of the clipper ship in the third quarter of the nineteenth century allowed a few talented ship carvers to regain a modicum of the prestige enjoyed by their eighteenth-century predecessors. The dipper ships, developed for the perishable tea of the China trade, poured out of coastal New England shipyards. They also raced to the California gold fields and later to the Australian gold rush. [4] Elaborate carving programs were required for the bow, stern, masthead, cat-head, and living quarters of these ships. In 1847 the Boston firms of S. W Gleason and Sons and J. W Mason advertised their ship and ornamental carving in the city directory (Pl. II).

Donald McKay and Samuel Hall in East Boston, James O. Curtis in Medford, Massachusetts, George Raynes and Fernald and Pettigrew in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, among others, built the "greyhounds of the sea" that sped to San Francisco and then on to Hong Kong via Honolulu. In 1851 McKay's Flying Cloud set a record of ninety days from New York City to San Francisco. [5]

Seen as the epitome of American naval engineering and considered works of art in themselves, the clippers were luxuriously fitted out. One New England carver recalled that "they couldn't seem to get enough carving on them... builders hunted to find places to put on carvings." He went on to note that full-length figures were the most desired and brought good prices. [6]

Figureheads functioned from the beginning as ritualistic devices to ward off danger, protect the vessel, and personify the spirit of the men on board. The Vikings long-necked dragons and the British lion rampant are well known. [7] The classical revival in the eighteenth century initiated the popularity of figureheads drawn from Greek and Roman mythology and painted white to resemble marble. Eager to establish their own mythology and a national identity American ship carvers created figures of Pocahontas, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and most frequently an eagle with outstretched wings for the prows of ships. In the merchant marine figureheads portraying the skip's owner or builder and their wives, daughters, or sweethearts were popular.

As he looked back to the colonial period the nineteenth-century American art critic Henry T. Tuckerman (1813-1871) found that the "figureheads...in our seaports" were the only examples of "native" carving "prior to the Revolution." [8] Today we would include the pre-Revolutionary civic and domestic work of the Skillin family and John Welch (1711-1789), and trace America's sculptural tradition to the gravestones of the seventeenth century. Scholars have focused on the Skillins, William Rush (1756-1833) of Philadelphia, and John Haley Bellamy of Kittery Point, Maine, [9] while the nineteenth-century ship carvers are largely unknown. [10]

The problems inherent in studying figureheads may in part account for the paucity of published material about them and their makers. Few of the thousands made have survived, and they are often only fragments long separated from their origin. Battered by weather at sea, they found homes ashore in shipyards, as garden ornaments, or attached to the exterior of buildings. To date only a few have been securely identified through period documents or historical references.

Isaac Howard Fowle, born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1783, links Boston's eighteenth-century carving tradition to that of the nineteenth." He was a brother-in-law of John Skillin (1745-1800) and apprenticed to John's brother Simeon Skillin Jr. (1756-1806). Isaac Fowle made one of Boston's best-known ship's figureheads, Lady with a Scarf, which served as his shop sign and illustrated his ability as a carver. [12] Although he remained on Skillins' Wharf in partnership with Edmund Raymond for a few years after Simeon Skillin died, by 1813 Fowle was listed in the Boston city directories as a carver at 3 Ship Street, near the wharves in the North End. A receipted bill signed by Fowle and dated June 14, 1818, for thirty-seven dollars for a billet head, trail board, and ornamental drops for the brig Anale survives in the Bostonian Society. A sign for a carpenter's shop carved from a single piece of wood, also in the Bostonian Society is attributed to Fowle. However, no reference has surfaced to architectural or f urniture work by Fowle. He may have been one of the first Boston carvers able to specialize in ship carving because of the growth of the industry and the city (where the population more than doubled between 1800 and 1825). In 1833 Fowle took his sons John D. and William H. (b. 1813) and a local carver, Spencer Beatty (d. 1853), into the business. In 1837 Isaac Fowle and Company exhibited "figure heads and mouldings for ships, well carved in wood" under the category of "Cooper's Work, Boats, and Pump and Blockmaker's Tools," at the first triennial Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association exhibition. [13] In the 1840s and 1850s Fowle's shop is known to have produced a figurehead of Andrew Jackson (1846) for the USS Constitution (Pl. I), an eagle with spread wings and the arms of New York State for the Surprise, built by Samuel Hall (1800-1870) of Boston in 1850, and a head for Hall's Game Cock built the following year: The latter was described in the Boston Daily Atlas of January 29, 1851, as "a large, car ved and gilded Game Cock, represented in the act of crowing." The stern was described as being "tastefully ornamented with carved and gilt branches." The reporter, Duncan McLean, noted that "Messrs. Fowle and Co. executed her carved work." [14] The naval historian M. V. Brewington attributes the figureheads for the Talma (see Pl. III) and the Britannia (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts) to Fowle's shop on stylistic grounds. [15] After Isaac's death his sons kept the business going into the 1860s. After John D. Fowle retired in 1869, the Fowles disappear from the directories.