Alcoholism and the temperance movement in early American folk art

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1998 by Arthur Kern, Sybil Kern

8 The quilt is in the collection of the National Woman's christian Temperance Union, Evanston, Illinois. It is illustrated and discussed in Pat Ferrero and Elaine Hedges, Hearts and Hands: The Influence of Women and Quilts on American Society (Quilt Digest Press, San Francisco, 1942), p. 15.

9 Cited in Celia Bragdon, "Deacon Robert Peckham, Portrait Painter of Westminster, Massachusetts: His Life and His Work" (1973 Masters thesis in the Forbush Memorial Library, Westminster, Massachusetts).

10 The artist was first brought to public attention in an exhibition in 1984 that included ninety-eight of his brightly colored watercolors (Paul D. Schweizer and Barbara C. Polowy, Panoramas for the People [Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New Yolk, 1984], pp. 12-65 and 70-79).

11 The watercolors were sold at auction at Sotheby's (New York) on October 14, 1989 (sale no. 5906, Lot 37). Their present whereabouts are unknown.

12 American Folk Paintings: Paintings and Drawings Other Than Portraits from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, ed. Beatrix T. Rumford (Little, Brown and Company, Boston, and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1988), p. 247.

13 The other two from the set of four are illustrated ibid., pp. 253, 254. A watercolor based on the parable of the prodigal son, attributed to the little-known folk artist Aruba (Ruby) Devol Finch (1804-1866), is in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center. It is illustrated ibid., p. 236. A similar watercolor is in a private collection.

14 The present whereabouts of all three jugs are unknown. They are described in Ellen Paul Denker, The Kirkpatricks' Pottery at Anna, Illinois (Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, 1986).

15 The inscription and other details are illustrated in George H. Meyer with Kay White Meyer, American Folk Art Canes: Personal Sculpture (Sandringham Press, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with the Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1992), p. 124.

16 Stuart M. Frank, director of the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts, which owns the piece, wrote to us that the museum acquired it from an antiquarian bookseller in London and he observed that the nature of the text suggests that the work is English.

17 Quoted in Mary Q. Burnet, Art and Artists of Indiana (Century Company, New York, 1921), p. 62.

18 William T. Coggeshall, The Poets and Poetry of the West: with Biographical and Critical Notices (New York, 1864), p. 537, notes that Dunn wrote the poem about the death from alcoholism of a Lawrenceburg man known as French John. Besides The Temperance Pledge, only one other painting by Dunn has been recorded: Christ's Descent from the Cross, the whereabouts of which is unknown. In Wilbur D. Peat, Pioneer Painters of Indiana (Art Association of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, 1954), pp. 66-67, it is stated that the painting was "described in the Madison Daily Courier of September 1, 1851, as 'perhaps the largest painting ever produced in Indiana, being 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 feet.'"