Carving in Cincinnati

Magazine Antiques, May, 2004 by Alfred Mayor

By 1870 Cincinnati was the number one producer in the United States of an eclectic array of goods: carriages, glycerin, wine, whiskey, plug tobacco, and coffins. It owed these distinctions largely to its situation on the banks of the Ohio River, which allowed it to ship and receive goods at will.

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Between 1868 and sometime in the 1890s Cincinnati was also the birthplace of hand-carved American art furniture that was faithful in conception to the ideals of John Ruskin, the philosopher of the English aesthetic movement. This achievement relied less on the city's riparian site than on the immigration of three vegetarian, Swedenborgian English wood carvers--Benn Pitman, Henry L. Fry, and his son William H. Fry.

By 1851 the Frys were established in Cincinnati as architectural and ornamental carvers. In describing his past Henry Fry painted a grand picture of distinguished commissions executed in England, although in fact no carving has been firmly attributed to him there. He did not, however, mention his years as a carver in Cheltenham at a time in the early 1840s when the town was simmering with social reform movements. Fry was an enthusiastic participant, preaching vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, universal love, and singing as ways to salvation. William Fry inherited all his father's preoccupations as well as a taste for adventure that reportedly caused him to sail around the world, sire ten children by his English wife, serve as a United States government post rider in the West, and as a volunteer in an Indiana regiment during the Civil War.

Benn Pitman's older brother, Sir Isaac Pitman, invented a shorthand system known as phonography that Benn brought to Cincinnati in the 1850s after teaching it throughout Britain. He established the Phonographic Institute in the city and demonstrated the system as a court reporter during the 1850s and 1860s as well as publishing manuals of phonography. His daughter Agnes took a few carving lessons from William Fry, and she and her mother, Jane, both learned wood carving. Pitman drew up the designs and his ladies did the carving, beginning with the interior of the family's two successive Cincinnati houses. In so doing he adhered to the Victorian ideal of the home as a sanctuary for the family. "What a temple of happiness, what a nest of delight ... that home must be which all members of the family assist in building, and adorning," he wrote in 1875. Later he decreed, "First and foremost, the Home, outwardly and inwardly, must be adorned.... To whom shall we look for the adornment of our homes? To girls and women, most assuredly."

True to his conviction, Pitman designed and his second wife, Adelaide Nourse, carved a marvelously elaborate bed for themselves, to which Adelaide's twin sister, Elizabeth, contributed two painted panels representing Morning and Evening flanking the headboard (illustrated above). The carving abounded in motifs from nature including swallows, hydrangeas, azaleas, geraniums, lilies, palmyras, and balloon vines.

The Frys sought to attract women to their wood-carving classes, particularly ladies of leisure, with the latent thought that they might someday become patrons. At the same time William Fry felt that "women generally have a more delicately organized instrument in the human hand, possess more refined sentiment and I believe they work for less sordid ends." Pitman wanted to develop a distinctively American decorative art while at the same time providing an "interesting and useful occupation to girls during the period intervening between leaving school and marriage, and mainly with a view to the decoration of their own homes." Nonetheless, some women carvers did go into business, including William Fry's daughter Laura, who, in 1885 became the first woman to be listed in the Cincinnati directory as a professional carver. The second was Adina White, a veteran black carver who had sent a carved dressing bureau to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, where she was one of seventy-three Cincinnati women carvers represented, all students of Pitman or William Fry. White had also worked on a gigantic carved screen for the organ in the Cincinnati Music Hall. It was sixty feet tall by fifty feet wide, and when it was finished in 1878 Pitman estimated that 108 of his students, including White, had contributed more than twenty thousand hours to the project. A third professional carver was Janet Scudder, who carved to make money while studying at the McMicken School of Design (now the Art Academy of Cincinnati). She wrote in her autobiography that she "attacked a whole mantel-piece, carved up one side and down the other and all across the front with grapes that stood out in relief as no real ones would have the courage to do." She sold it for what she called "the huge sum of sixty dollars." However, when she found a job as a wood carver in a Chicago factory, the seven hundred male members of the wood carvers' union prepared to strike if she did not leave. She left.