by Leigh Keno
On the day that we bought the Canton ginger jar (so named because the form was traditionally used in China for storing shaved bits of ginger root), we were having an impromptu lesson on Chinese export porcelain. Myrtle asked us to collect two similar jars from the top shelf of the tall pine corner cupboard and debate the merits of each vessel. Leigh and I each grabbed one of the fragile blue-decorated white jars from the upper shelf and carried it back to the dining room, where she waited for us on a small couch. We sat down on either side of her and began to study the pair.
Both were ovoid (or egg-shaped), but one was clearly more refined than the other. Its silhouette featured a delicate narrow collar, or neck, that sloped gracefully outward toward the rounded belly of the jar and then cut inward again at the bottom to form a perfect circle. An eggshell-thin flat lid capped this exquisite vasiform, or vaselike shape. The jar seemed particularly successful in its design because the bulbous shape was strikingly enhanced by the brilliant cobalt blue flower pattern that encircled it. The flowers seemed to bloom most expressively at the broad middle of the piece. By comparison, the floral pattern that ran along the body of the second ginger jar was ever so slightly blurred, but that imprecision was enough to damage the impact of the overall design. Furthermore, the proportions of that jar were just a little off—the neck seemed a bit too short, the body a bit too broad. Myrtle was pleased with our analysis and invited us to buy the first jar.
I have sometimes wondered why Myrtle allowed us to visit as often as we did. Usually, we went there in the evening, when our parents were the most free to drive us, and stayed a number of hours. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for Mom and Dad to head for the car and nap until we were finished with our dealings. Perhaps Myrtle liked our company, or perhaps she had seen in us a genuine interest that touched her teacher’s soul and made her think she could make a difference. Regardless of the reason, she did leave her mark on us. Whatever skills Leigh and I now have as negotiators, we first honed in Myrtle’s living room, for she had as much difficulty parting with items like that fifteen-dollar ginger jar as some of the people we meet today who ask us to handle long-treasured family heirlooms.
About this time, Leigh and I began to foster a budding interest in stoneware, the heavy-duty nonporous pottery jugs, jars, and crocks that were commonly made for food storage from the early 1700s through the late nineteenth century. The piece that jump-started our own pursuit of stoneware, however, was a large crock that we found at a yard sale about forty-five minutes from our farm. Interestingly, the sale was held at the home of a late-nineteenth-century balloonist, so some artifacts that would have amazed anyone interested in early aviation were offered in the barn with the rest of the merchandise. There was an enormous deflated cloth balloon, and a giant wicker basket large enough to fit four men and a cluster of oblong ballast bags comfortably. As intriguing as that assemblage was, what caught our attention was a large ovoid crock lying on its side in a pile of hay to the right of the large basket. It measured about thirteen inches high and had a small hairline crack that ran from the edge of the top down about two inches, toward the swelled center of the piece. The crack didn’t bother us, however, because the overall sweep of the form was so expressive, it immediately recalled to our minds the broad-knuckled hands of the potter molding the wet clay as it spun on his wheel. Similarly, the mottled brown tone of the glaze spoke to the scorching heat (roughly 2,300°F) of the wood-burning kiln in which it had been fired so long ago. Boldly stamped across the center of the piece, as an advertisement of his craft, was the name of the man who had made it, Paul Cushman, an Albany-based potter who was active between 1806 and 1820.
The Allman brothers? No, just us inspecting some of our favorite pieces.
Since Cushman was an upstate New York potter, Leigh and I were already somewhat familiar with his work. But this was the first piece of his that we purchased (we tried our best to remain straight-faced when we paid the woman who had owned it the three dollars she was asking for the crock). After we took the piece home, we researched Cushman, who had worked as a building contractor on Albany’s waterfront before he switched to the pottery business. Perhaps it was his late start at the craft, but a surprisingly high number of Cushman’s pots dropped while they were being baked in the kiln (a complicated process that involved stacking dozens, if not hundreds, of pots on top of one another, separated only by small, narrow tiles). This usually resulted in an off-kilter, or lopsided, vessel. Leigh and I were anything but discouraged by such imperfections. Rather, we found them incredibly compelling because they reminded us of the laborious and unpredictable process of making the pots.
My brother and I held on to that Cushman crock for a long time, although sometime before college we sold it to a private collector for upward of two thousand dollars. Eventually, it was joined by nearly fifty more pieces of stoneware, all housed on a set of shelves that we had erected with gray weathered barn boards at the end of the first-floor hallway, near the living room. Most nights after dinner, the two of us would each grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen—always poured into a pair of memorable blue-decorated stoneware mugs that our mother had purchased in’ Bennington, Vermont—and make our way to those shelves. There, in between gulps of coffee, we would go through the collection piece by piece, carefully handling and examining the spun surfaces and swelled bodies of each one. In time, the peculiarities of each crock—the steady rise of the wheel-spun form and the subtle shifts from brown to gray in the mottled glaze—were fixed in our minds like the words of a favorite song.
Flea markets were another great source for stoneware, and the checkerboard grid of booths on their grounds was as familiar to us as our own backyard. Our parents had taken us to shows from the time we were infants, and we loved the whole process. First there was the drive, which was plotted so that we would hit as many small antique shops as possible. Back then, the shops, much like our mom’s, were usually set up in a home, garage, or barn. The intimacy of walking onto someone’s private property lent an aura of freshness to the objects, as if they had just been carried down from the attic or acquired from a neighbor. The group-shop phenomenon, where various vendors pool their goods and resources together, was still a long way off, and I have to say that a sense of intimacy was lost when all those independents began to disappear.
Our collection on display at the end of the hall.
At each stop, our parents, Leigh, and I would pile out of the car and head inside for a quick go-around. My brother and I would separate from them and scan the territory for “sleepers,” a trade term for undervalued merchandise. If we spotted one, he and I might hold a hasty huddle in a corner to strategize, then approach the proprietor and try to strike a’ deal. I think store owners were sometimes taken aback at the sight of us: a matched set of young boys with an almost-exaggerated sense of purpose, our shoulder-length blond hair combed to one side, our T-shirts tucked into low-slung blue jeans held up with two-inch-wide brown leather belts.
I remember one shop in Massachusetts where Leigh and I spotted an incredible early-nineteenth-century Leeds bowl, so called then because it may have been manufactured in Leeds, England, probably as an export item for the American market. This particular piece had a cream-colored body and unusually large polychrome, or multicolored, floral decoration. After many hours in the car, Leigh and I were in the mood for some horseplay and, thinking we were out of view of the shop owner, took turns putting the valuable bowl on our heads like a helmet and marching around the front of the store. We were not out of view, however, and the owner was, not surprisingly, appalled. She thought she had a pair of hoodlums in her shop and didn’t know what to do. We quickly settled down, however, and ended up having a great conversation with her about the merits of eighteenth-century ceramics: how the fragile, thin surfaces can feel creamy to the touch and how the deeply saturated blue, red, yellow, and green tones may have influenced the palette of so many American folk painters. Ultimately, we bought the piece at a reduced, dealer’s pr
ice. As an adult, I have since run into the proprietor, only to have her shake a finger at me in playful reference to our first encounter.
After the long ride to a show, made longer by all our stops and starts, we would arrive at the grounds, usually around nightfall. There, our parents would take their place at the end of what could easily grow to be a mile of cars, vans, and trucks snaking away from the gated and locked entrance. As soon as our parents parked, Leigh and I would be out of the van and on our way, walking the length of vehicles with a pair of high-powered flashlights, hoping to spot some hidden treasures in the packed trunks and perhaps strike an early deal. Our hunger for the search really knew no bounds. As the night wore on, we would repeat this procedure again and again as the line continued to grow. Sometimes, folks would be trying to catch some sleep in the back of their cars. I remember plenty of times when I would shine my light into a darkened van, looking for sleepers, but seeing instead a sleeping dealer throwing up an angry arm to block the beam from our lights.
Eventually, when Leigh and I grew tired ourselves, we would find space on the floor of our parents’ own van and curl up to sleep beneath the heavy quilted packing blankets used to protect the folk art and country furniture in which they specialized. Sometimes, the van was so stocked with merchandise—in the mid-1970s, they branched out into old arcade equipment such as slot machines and jukeboxes—that we had to spend the night outdoors in sleeping bags placed on folding cots covered by large plastic sheets in case of rain. I remember waking up one morning at the big three-day flea market in Brimfield, Massachusetts, barely able to move my arms. During a long night’s rainstorm, what felt like five gallons of water had pooled along the contours of my body, so when I finally managed to roll off the cot, the rainwater came rolling off right with me, hitting the ground with a heavy splat.
As young flea market attendees, we’d already found our direction.
Our parents often brought a trailer along to rest in themselves, but actually, they never seemed to sleep. Our wake-up call was usually the sound of Mom revving the van engine sometime around 5:30 A.M. That meant she had spotted the show manager preparing to throw open the gates to the grounds. Despite the early hour, this was the time that Leigh and I lived for. Within moments, our van would join the line of cars lumbering through the gates and then dispersing through the dew-wet grass to their appointed spots. Then as our parents began to unpack their wares, we two hunters would set off through the rising mists of the brightening fields.
The start of the shows was always an adrenaline-rushing, heart-accelerating time. I remember seeing buyers lined up at the gates, ready to run at full speed to the just-opening booths as the trucks were still rolling in. It was the golden age of antiquing—only no one knew it at the time. It seemed as if it would never end. The reason it felt like a new frontier was because there was so little information available, other than a handful of guides and books on collectibles. Particularly with the early pieces that Leigh and I loved, issues of quality, age, and condition called for seat-of-the-pants judgments. There were simply no established guidelines or standards. As a result, we cut our analytical teeth on the pottery, painted boxes, weather vanes, and furniture that we found. For us, the open vistas of the flea markets—like the fields and woods behind our house—summoned unending possibilities for discovery. I remember one annual show in Amherst, New Hampshire, that was particularly thrilling, simply because it was held on rolling grounds (unusual for a flea market). The landscape really rose and dipped, and certain parts of the field were shielded by small groves of trees, all factors that only intensified our hunger for the search.
The best thing about sleepers, of course, is that they appear without warning. We might scan table after table of disheartening junk, only to be startled back to life by something stupendous. Such was the case at a show we attended when we were fourteen, held on the grounds of the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York. The gates had been open for about twenty minutes when we came upon a man unpacking the contents of a small four-drawer chest (probably made in New York around 1840) onto an oatmeal-colored wool blanket thrown across the open bed of a pickup truck. Perhaps it was the bib overalls he was wearing, paired with the truck, but he looked as if he had decided that very day to switch from farming to the antiques business. The man had yet to open the bottom drawer, so when Leigh and I reached the booth proper, we asked if we might take a look inside. With a nod and a smile, he gave his consent, so we bent over in unison and pulled open the drawer.
We found ourselves peering down at the broad domed lid of a large rectangular painted tin box. Measuring about twelve inches in length, it featured a brownish black ground that shone like Japanese lacquer, and it had a narrow border of highly realistic cherries and strawberries running about half an inch from the edge. The fruit was so carefully delineated that we could see the evenly spaced grid pattern of white seeds on each strawberry. Mounted at the center of the top was a small bail, or curved hoop handle, which one of us seized and used to pull the box up and out of the drawer. As we held it aloft, the squared form rocked slowly in the cool morning air, revealing a cluster of brilliantly painted floral sprays on its front and back. As with the fruit running along the top, the rendering of the highly stylized orange-red flowers was superbly colored, making it an incredible piece of folk art.
Above: Setting up shop with Mom at a flea market.
Left: Inspecting Dad’s latest purchase—a 1939 6C 2500 Alfa Romeo sport coupe with coachwork by Touring.
Opposite: A journal page.
Painted and decorated tin, or toleware, was America’s answer to imported French tôle, which was, in turn, made as an alternative to Oriental lacquerwork. Toleware was popularized in the United States during the early nineteenth century, and many households had at least one toleware canister, tray, teapot, or document box, generally decorated with a pattern involving brightly colored flowers or fruits. The document box that we were passing back and forth in our hands, however, was the largest, most exquisitely rendered example of toleware we had ever seen in our lives—even in books. But there was just one problem: It showed virtually no signs of age.
An early-nineteenth-century American toleware tray.
Realizing this, Leigh and I continued to open and shut the box (the fit was intentionally tight to protect important papers from mice and insects), run our fingers along its contours, and occasionally hold it up to the early-morning sun in an effort to detect some clues to its past. We asked ourselves how this piece could have survived nearly two centuries of use without any wear to its paint. There should have at least been dulled halos in the areas surrounding the lock and bail handle, where the box would have been most frequently touched. Even the finish on the bottom was intact, as if the box had never been dragged across a tabletop. Still, Leigh and I were inextricably drawn to this piece. We asked the man what he knew about the box, but his answer was fairly vague. “My guess is that it had been in our family for some time,” he said, “but I’d never seen it before I looked inside that drawer a few weeks ago.”
The man had an open, honest face, and we decided to give the piece a chance. Perhaps the box had been tucked away for safekeeping and then forgotten, which would account, for its pristine condition. We bought it for his asking price of eight dollars and I remember feeling like we had just robbed a bank as we turned and left the booth. But as we made our way out into the field of dealers, already in search of our next sleeper, a most peculiar thing happened. We began to sense a commotion behind us. Looking back over our shoulders, we noticed a small group of people pointing and gesturing to the box that we held between us. The auburn light of the rising sun was bouncing off those incredibly rendered fruits and flowers with an intensity that further deepened the richness of the colors. Suddenly, two people broke away and approached us. They were joined by two more, and then two more. All were interested in our newly acquired box. We could have held an auction right there on the spot. Someone offered us forty-five dollars fo
r the box, another sixty-five dollars, but, with matching grins, we assured them that it wasn’t for sale.
We did sell it, though, not very long after the Chatham show, to a prominent dealer in American folk art for about ninety-five dollars (a tidy profit, even though today it might be valued at closer to ten thousand dollars). After all, hoarding objects was not the full thrust of our purpose, for we were quite serious about nurturing our business as dealers. We took a great deal of satisfaction from selling off most of the objects we acquired, for a completed sale is the ultimate barometer of taste—it means that your aesthetic instincts are good. Leigh and I had been selling items on our own from about the age of ten. First, there were the iron hinges and handles that we found in the woods behind our house, which we sold from a blanket in our parents’ booth at shows. Later, we branched out into other areas we enjoyed, such as pottery, porcelain, and pewter, and we often brought in a bigger weekend profit than our parents did.
Buying our first piece of American furniture, in the winter of 1972, was a memorable event. It was a black-painted banister-back armchair (the back was formed of a series of four evenly spaced vertical spindles) that had been made in New England, probably around 1760. We found the chair, which cost about two hundred dollars, at an antiques shop in Amherst, Massachusetts, that was run by a retired Amherst College professor of classics and literature named Reginald Foster French, who looked and sounded every inch of his name—tall, distinguished, and thoroughly profound.