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Around the World at the Peabody Essex Museum
29 Plays2 years ago
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the United States’ oldest continuously operating museum. Today it embraces nearly 1 million objects from around the globe. However, as with most museums, space and programming constraints mean that only a fraction of these can be on view at any one time. Enter PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, a massive new facility that gives curators, visiting scholars—and Ben Miller, host of Curious Objects—access to Jingdazhen punch bowls, documents from the Salem Witch Trials, showy Persian shoes, and much, much more.
Feat. Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.
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Transcript
Introduction to Peabody Essex Museum
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:15
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:16
Speaker
One of the most evocative museums in the country is the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
00:00:24
Speaker
And I say evocative because this isn't your standard encyclopedic collection.
00:00:29
Speaker
At heart, and in its roots, it's a museum of exploration.
00:00:35
Speaker
That's because it began as a maritime museum all the way back in 1799, when it was called the East India Marine Society.
00:00:43
Speaker
Merchant captains could join the society only if they had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn,
00:00:50
Speaker
And so the society collected objects that these captains brought back from their distant voyages, like ostrich eggs and ivory carvings and even taxidermied penguins.
00:01:03
Speaker
It quickly became a repository for some of the most fascinating objects in America, brought to Salem from around the world.
Exploration and Collection at PEM
00:01:12
Speaker
And that tradition continues today with the Peabody Essex Museum playing to its strengths, wonders and rarities from around the world which speak to global trade and cultural exchange across hemispheres.
00:01:25
Speaker
And curious objects got special access to a part of the museum that most visitors never see.
00:01:32
Speaker
In fact, I had the chance to feel just a little like a world traveler myself.
00:01:36
Speaker
Because like so many museums, PEMS collections long ago outstripped their physical display space.
00:01:42
Speaker
Thousands upon thousands of objects need to be kept elsewhere and to be kept safe and ideally to be kept accessible to curators and researchers who rely on the collection to make new discoveries.
00:01:56
Speaker
Enter the Collection Center, PEM's brand new state-of-the-art off-site storage facility with 120,000 square feet full of, well, curious objects.
00:02:09
Speaker
The museum invited me to tour the facility.
00:02:13
Speaker
So I spent a full day poking my head around, looking at everything from a whaling ship's logbook to a giant bell made by Paul Revere to a pair of Christian Louboutins traversing the globe and the centuries in just a few hours.
The Collection Center Experience
00:02:31
Speaker
To be honest, it was overwhelming.
00:02:34
Speaker
But fortunately, I had help from three of PEM's curators, plus their director of the collection center, to guide me through the building and through the incredible array of objects stored there.
00:02:46
Speaker
It was a day of discovery after discovery with whole categories of objects I had never seen before, and I've seen a lot.
00:02:54
Speaker
This is a place where someone like me, or you, could wander for eons, constantly encountering fantastic new experiences in the form of objects.
00:03:05
Speaker
I heard fascinating stories about everything from original documents about the Salem witch trials, to Chinese porcelain made for Swedish royalty, to a shoe designed for southern slave plantations.
00:03:19
Speaker
In fact, I heard so many great stories that we couldn't fit them all into one episode.
00:03:24
Speaker
So this week and next, we'll be heading to Salem, Massachusetts to experience a side of the museum you've never seen before, the Collection Center, where the behind-the-scenes magic happens.
00:03:38
Speaker
Now, first off, a little housekeeping.
00:03:41
Speaker
I want to thank the Peabody Essex Museum for supporting this episode and their staff for sharing their time and experience with me, especially Dinah Carden, who made it all possible.
Podcast Engagement and Contact Info
00:03:51
Speaker
You can see photos of all the objects discussed today at vmagazineantiques.com slash podcast, which I highly recommend checking out.
00:04:00
Speaker
And if you're listening to this episode and you're not already subscribed to Curious Objects, you should do that right now to make sure you don't miss future episodes, including the second part of my visit to the Peabody Essex Museum.
00:04:11
Speaker
On Apple Podcasts, that's the follow button in the top right.
00:04:15
Speaker
On Spotify, you just tap the three little dots on the top right and then hit follow.
00:04:20
Speaker
And if you're enjoying Curious Objects, please do take a moment to leave us a five-star review and better yet, tell a friend about the show.
Museum Storage and Preservation Techniques
00:04:29
Speaker
If you want to get in touch, you can email me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com or find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:04:38
Speaker
You've been sending me some great ideas for future episodes, which I really appreciate.
00:04:41
Speaker
So please keep those coming.
00:04:43
Speaker
And as always, thanks for listening.
00:04:45
Speaker
It's a valuable space, it's an important space, and it feeds into every function of the museum.
00:04:53
Speaker
That's Angela Segala, director of the collection center and my guide through the cavernous storerooms and endless passageways that make up this remarkable building.
00:05:02
Speaker
And before we dive into the actual objects and their stories, I want to give you a mental picture of what a top-of-the-line museum storage facility looks like.
00:05:11
Speaker
Because for all the time that you might have spent exploring the galleries of great museums, it's these storage facilities where 90 or 95 or 99% or more of their collections actually live.
00:05:23
Speaker
So this is a 420 foot long hallway.
00:05:27
Speaker
And on the right side of the hallway is storage only.
00:05:31
Speaker
On the left side, these are function slash program rooms.
00:05:36
Speaker
So at this moment, things are...
00:05:39
Speaker
for the most part, packed away with the exception of the library.
00:05:43
Speaker
So we have to assist curators in pulling things out.
00:05:47
Speaker
One day, hopefully maybe about a year from now, we're going to have some really exciting furniture in place and curators will once again be able to come in, access the objects on their own time.
00:06:00
Speaker
But right now we pull them out for them and we put it into the art
00:06:03
Speaker
work review room.
00:06:05
Speaker
So it's a space dedicated to viewing.
00:06:10
Speaker
And we use it for outside researchers.
00:06:12
Speaker
So if you wanted to see our silver, for example, we would pull it out for you.
00:06:17
Speaker
We would pull it out for you, put it in this room.
00:06:19
Speaker
I did want to ask, you mentioned that these cabinets are inevitably expensive.
00:06:24
Speaker
Why is that?
00:06:26
Speaker
Well,
00:06:27
Speaker
Let's imagine you have a cabinet at home.
00:06:31
Speaker
Let's say you have a dresser and you put your clothing in your dresser and you have a leak.
00:06:38
Speaker
What do you think is going to happen to the pieces in your dresser?
00:06:42
Speaker
Not great things.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, they're going to get wet, right?
00:06:44
Speaker
They're going to get wet.
00:06:46
Speaker
If you leave them in your dresser for a long period of time and temperature and humidity fluctuate, there could be some environmental concerns that end up impacting that clothing.
00:07:01
Speaker
Things turn yellow, right?
00:07:03
Speaker
Things get spots on them.
00:07:05
Speaker
So you want the environment for the pieces in your dresser to be somewhat stable and free of pollutants.
00:07:12
Speaker
Sure.
00:07:13
Speaker
And wood is a pollutant, basically.
00:07:16
Speaker
So you want something that's inert.
00:07:18
Speaker
You want something that is, in our world, powder-coated metal is great because it's not going to off-gas the way that wood does.
00:07:26
Speaker
Sure.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so...
00:07:29
Speaker
You have cabinetry that is watertight, that if you have a fire, a flood, any kind of event, the things inside are safe.
00:07:38
Speaker
So you have advanced kind of gasketing and so forth.
00:07:42
Speaker
And that's what makes it expensive, you know, and I can't wait to show you our cabinets.
00:07:47
Speaker
In fact, people have often said to me in the museum, I can't believe you get so excited about cabinets.
00:07:52
Speaker
But really what we're doing is
00:07:55
Speaker
It's providing a home.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:57
Speaker
It's providing a home for these objects that, you know, they've been folded and they've been in drawers.
00:08:04
Speaker
And we are, the museum is taking steps to give these pieces a home where they can be safe, where they are not deteriorating at an advanced rate and people can see them.
00:08:17
Speaker
One of the challenges inherent to managing a collection of thousands and thousands of objects is simply keeping track of them.
00:08:25
Speaker
What object is what?
00:08:26
Speaker
Which thing belongs where?
00:08:28
Speaker
And even outside of museums, private collectors have sometimes struggled as they acquire more and more objects.
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, so collectors often wrote on these where they bought them, or if somebody brought it back and gave it to a friend, they might do that.
00:08:44
Speaker
And even when they came into our predecessor institutions, curators or caretakers would write, yeah, crazy places, actually writing on the objects in a place where you see it.
00:08:58
Speaker
So sometimes when you go through the collection on view in a museum,
00:09:02
Speaker
you see labels and things and you're like, why would somebody do that?
00:09:06
Speaker
But it wasn't unusual.
00:09:07
Speaker
You find that in silver, of course, generation after generation engraving onto the bottom of objects, you know, their initials are given from X to Y or even just a number, a private collection number.
00:09:22
Speaker
And sometimes that can be very informative, tell you things about the object that you wouldn't have known otherwise.
00:09:29
Speaker
Well, whenever you see a maker's mark on the body of a piece of hollow wear, kind of right at eye level when you're looking at the piece, how do you feel about that, Ben?
00:09:41
Speaker
I love it.
00:09:41
Speaker
You do?
00:09:42
Speaker
I love it.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:09:43
Speaker
And it's interesting, and I mean, not to get onto silver, but it's interesting to think about the ways that the locations of the sort of typical locations where marks are struck, how that evolves over time.
00:09:59
Speaker
So, you know, in the 17th century, in English silver, hallmarks are put sort of haphazardly.
00:10:07
Speaker
You know, they were fairly consistent from object to object.
00:10:11
Speaker
If you have a tankard, the hallmarks are struck near the rim on the outside next to the handle, right?
00:10:17
Speaker
And that's pretty much true for all tankards from that period.
00:10:20
Speaker
But then by the mid to late 18th century, those hallmarks are now being struck on the bottom where you can't see them anymore.
00:10:28
Speaker
And that's, you know...
00:10:31
Speaker
Nobody really wrote about that transition.
00:10:33
Speaker
We don't have special insight into the psychology behind it, but we can imagine, well, you know, silver is sort of professionalizing and they're starting to look at the object as more of a kind of work of art and they don't necessarily want to mar it with these marks that are an indication of the commerce that went into their production.
00:10:53
Speaker
So they're starting to hide them or place them more...
00:10:56
Speaker
symmetrically or more evenly, but now we're getting off onto a completely different subject.
00:11:03
Speaker
Well, no, actually, this is totally appropriate because in the history of this collection, you can see writing on the outside of it and you can see numbers.
00:11:16
Speaker
on the objects and the numbers in a museum, they're an identifier, of course.
00:11:21
Speaker
So very much like people have a social security number, that's your number, your identifier from the government, et cetera.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:29
Speaker
So anyway, the numbers that are applied to an object, it's based today on when they come in.
00:11:37
Speaker
And as the museum profession professionalized over the years,
00:11:42
Speaker
We started to get better about where to put those numbers.
00:11:44
Speaker
So same thing.
00:11:45
Speaker
You know, the identifier these days is you would put it underneath and you put it on the corner and you would put it, you would apply it with a material that would be easily removable if you wanted to.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's not marking it forever like we see over there.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
Not engraving the bottom of a piece of silver.
00:12:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:05
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:07
Speaker
Okay, so you just know I had to get in some silver talk.
00:12:10
Speaker
But now, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear me say that talking about the enormous number of objects in the collection center set me to thinking about access.
00:12:19
Speaker
Because the museum itself has limited space to display these pieces,
00:12:24
Speaker
And yet each one has its own history, its own beauty, and its own stories.
00:12:28
Speaker
And the idea of all of that being stuffed away in a dark storeroom never to see the light of day is honestly distressing to many of us who think and care about these objects.
00:12:39
Speaker
But one of the core ideas behind PEM's new collection center is making these pieces more accessible, not less.
00:12:46
Speaker
Now, I'm so glad you asked about storage and access in general and how often we rotate because, you know, it's my belief that in general, the way folks view storage is based on a really effective image at the end of a very popular movie.
00:13:08
Speaker
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
00:13:11
Speaker
That darn Indiana Jones impacts my daily life so much because, you know, they have the crate for the Ark and they show someone pounding in the nail and wheeling it off into a dark abyss of other like objects just kind of sitting there in the dark.
00:13:29
Speaker
you know, with no one to ever look at them again.
00:13:31
Speaker
That's the implication, right?
00:13:33
Speaker
But actually, I've been working in storage for over 20 years of my professional career, and it's actually a very active place.
00:13:42
Speaker
So yes, things are being pulled out and rotated quite often.
00:13:48
Speaker
I think in 2022, even with the pandemic, we did eight or 10 different rotations.
00:13:56
Speaker
throughout the year.
00:13:58
Speaker
We rotate for conservation purposes.
00:14:03
Speaker
We rotate in order to get additional objects on view.
00:14:08
Speaker
However, another way to do that is through digitization.
00:14:12
Speaker
through photography, taking these images and getting them online or sharing them with researchers, that happens here as well.
00:14:21
Speaker
So does research.
00:14:22
Speaker
So does access or programs with small groups.
00:14:27
Speaker
And so the activation of storage, you know, that's not...
00:14:32
Speaker
singular to PEM, that's across the world.
00:14:34
Speaker
More people are looking at how do we activate storage to make it come alive for more people so that it's not that dark abyss that Indiana Jones shows us at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arctic.
00:14:48
Speaker
It is, in fact, a very vibrant place.
00:14:52
Speaker
And because we have this building now and we have this space that you are experiencing,
00:14:58
Speaker
the public is going to no longer be limited by the gallery wall.
00:15:04
Speaker
The experience can extend
00:15:07
Speaker
And I don't mean that through traditional exhibition.
00:15:10
Speaker
I mean through programs.
00:15:12
Speaker
You know, we can bring groups of 15 people at a time into the space to experience a program surrounded by objects and storage.
00:15:23
Speaker
So it's no longer a select person that gets to see these objects or someone who is at the height of their, you know, scholarly career and wants to come in and see something.
Salem Witch Trials and Historical Documents
00:15:34
Speaker
That's not the case.
00:15:35
Speaker
It doesn't have to be that way.
00:15:55
Speaker
Okay, now that we've thoroughly covered Indiana Jones, I think it's time to start looking at some of these extraordinarily curious objects in this collection center.
00:16:05
Speaker
At the beginning of the show, I mentioned that the origins of the Peabody Essex Museum are rooted in exploration and global trade, and that's true.
00:16:14
Speaker
But it's also a museum in Salem, Massachusetts, a town whose claim to fame I probably don't have to remind you about.
00:16:22
Speaker
And the witch trials are a double-edged sword for Pemm.
00:16:33
Speaker
On the one hand, it's a touchstone of American history, not to mention an evergreen metaphor in our politics that never seems to lose relevance.
00:16:41
Speaker
And it brings countless tourists to Salem, chasing after ghost stories and the occult.
00:16:46
Speaker
On the other hand, it's an incredibly sensitive subject, despite more than three centuries elapsing since those terrible events.
00:16:54
Speaker
And the excitement around witchcraft can sometimes obscure the horrors that really took place in Salem.
00:17:01
Speaker
The false accusations, mass hysteria, the forced confessions, and brutal executions.
00:17:08
Speaker
So for curators at PEM, there's a tough balance to strike.
00:17:13
Speaker
How do you feed and encourage people's excitement about history without letting misconceptions and stereotypes overwhelm the truth?
00:17:25
Speaker
And I think the key is really to go back to the source, go back to the objects and the records, and to quote Mark Twain, show, don't tell.
00:17:36
Speaker
Show people with their own eyes what happened.
00:17:40
Speaker
And one of the treasures of the Peabody Essex Museum is a collection of hundreds of documents relating to the witch trials.
00:17:47
Speaker
They range from letters and petitions to depositions of people like Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Good to a bill for 40 pounds sterling that the jail keepers sent to Essex County for keeping, quote, the witches.
00:18:02
Speaker
These documents all date to the time of the trials, starting in 1692.
00:18:07
Speaker
One of them is a manuscript handwritten by the accused witch Mary Esty, sent to the governor and the court, begging for them to see reason.
00:18:16
Speaker
She wrote, I petition to your honors not for my own life, for I know I must die and my appointed time is set.
00:18:25
Speaker
But the Lord, he knows it is, that if it be possible, no more blood, innocent blood may be shed.
00:18:35
Speaker
Mary Esty was hanged on September 22nd, 1692, one of 14 women and six men executed by the state for witchcraft.
00:18:46
Speaker
This heart-rending document is kept in the Phillips Library, which is housed in the collection center.
00:18:52
Speaker
And at 331 years old, along with hundreds of other witch-child documents, it's the oldest of the curious objects on our path of exploration through the collection center,
00:19:02
Speaker
They're among the foundational, if shameful, records of the history of American law and justice.
00:19:08
Speaker
So I wanted to start by speaking about these documents with the director of the library, Dan Lipkin.
00:19:14
Speaker
When we spoke, he told me that the library was right in the midst of a collaboration with the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Supreme Court to return numerous documents that the state had loaned to PEM decades ago.
00:19:27
Speaker
We made this pickup this morning.
00:19:29
Speaker
Our friends in collections management and our manuscript librarian picked up this stuff from BPL that was returning to us.
00:19:36
Speaker
We dropped off another batch of material to digitize, and we also returned maybe 32 boxes of Essex County and Salem court records to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court archives, which was kind of part two of the arrangement we made
00:19:52
Speaker
in the fall to return the witch trials documents to them.
00:19:55
Speaker
So we returned almost 530 original documents.
00:19:59
Speaker
They had put that material on deposit with the Essex Institute with us in 1980 and said, we'll be done with our storage facility in a few years.
00:20:08
Speaker
And 43 years later, they're ready.
00:20:14
Speaker
So tell me about these witch trial documents.
00:20:17
Speaker
What are they?
00:20:17
Speaker
What do they consist of?
00:20:19
Speaker
So they consist of the official court records of the WICH trial.
00:20:22
Speaker
So there are warrants for arrest.
00:20:25
Speaker
There are transcriptions of examinations.
00:20:28
Speaker
There are depositions, records of depositions and testimonies given for and against the accused.
00:20:34
Speaker
There are documents issued by the state about making restitution payments and exonerations after the trials.
00:20:44
Speaker
So it's a whole wide mix of
00:20:47
Speaker
documents, you know, documenting the whole process of what happened.
00:20:51
Speaker
Some of the restitution documents go all the way up to 1712, 1713, 1718.
00:20:56
Speaker
It's basically the closest thing we have to the truth of the trials, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
That's the record of what happened in the courtroom.
00:21:05
Speaker
So what do these documents tell us that we might not have understood in popular culture about the trials themselves?
00:21:13
Speaker
Well, I think in the exhibitions that I've worked on here, and we're going to be opening another one in September about the witch trials, what we've really tried to do is focus on
00:21:24
Speaker
the real human impact or the impact on real humans.
00:21:27
Speaker
You know, these aren't movie characters.
00:21:30
Speaker
They're not made up cartoons.
00:21:31
Speaker
You know, they are, these are real people dealing with this crisis in these conditions.
00:21:36
Speaker
And so what we've tried to do in the exhibitions and what I hope people get from both the exhibitions and from the documents is some sense of how people thought about the crisis, what people were dealing with.
00:21:46
Speaker
You can read their words through these, the transcriptions of the examinations when
00:21:51
Speaker
people are protesting their innocence or when people are submitting petitions on behalf of their neighbors saying this person can't be a witch.
00:21:58
Speaker
I've known them for 30 years and they're a good Christian.
00:22:01
Speaker
So I think that that human dimension of the story is what I hope gets across.
00:22:07
Speaker
The objects that we have that are associated with the people involved in the trials were not part of the deal with the state.
00:22:13
Speaker
Those don't belong to the state.
00:22:16
Speaker
And so we will continue to build exhibitions and
00:22:21
Speaker
galleries around the objects that we have.
00:22:24
Speaker
A window that belonged to the town family, a sundial that belonged to John and Elizabeth Proctor.
00:22:29
Speaker
So we can continue to tell those stories about what happened and hope that people take the lessons of what happened and apply them to how they act and behave and advocate for people suffering injustice today.
Global Trade Artifacts and Cross-Cultural Connections
00:23:04
Speaker
We'll hear more later on from Dan Lipkin, but for now, we've had a look at some of the deep and difficult local history of Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum.
00:23:14
Speaker
So let's turn now to the global history.
00:23:18
Speaker
And we'll just move right along chronologically from the witch trials of the late 17th century
00:23:23
Speaker
to the 18th century in the age of global trade, when merchant vessels are careening around the world carrying ideas alongside objects and goods alongside, of course, money.
00:23:35
Speaker
And some of the objects that Europeans most coveted were fine porcelain pieces from the kilns of Jingdezhen, a Chinese city some 200 miles inland from Shanghai,
00:23:45
Speaker
the porcelain capital of the world for the last 600 years and even up to today.
00:23:50
Speaker
One piece in the PEM collection has a really incredible story behind it, connecting two parts of the world that really couldn't be more physically remote from each other.
00:23:58
Speaker
And the story behind this piece took some serious sleuthing to uncover.
00:24:03
Speaker
I spoke about it with Karina Corrigan, PEM's Associate Director of Collections and Curator of Asian Export Art.
00:24:11
Speaker
So this is an amazing piece that was made in the ceramics capital of the world in Jingdezhen that was for punch for that, you know, alcoholic 18th century beverage of choice.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:24
Speaker
It's an enormous punch bowl.
00:24:26
Speaker
It is an enormous punch bowl and very wonderfully surviving with its under dish.
00:24:31
Speaker
Not all punch bowls had under dishes.
00:24:32
Speaker
A lot of them don't survive with them, but this one does.
00:24:36
Speaker
And then even more surprisingly, it has this lid.
00:24:42
Speaker
So really, even before you know what this is, you might say a punch bowl fit for a king.
00:24:50
Speaker
And we acquired this... And just for listeners who aren't looking at it right now, so this is a... it's colossal.
00:25:00
Speaker
It's a large dish.
00:25:01
Speaker
What is this, 18 inches across?
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, probably.
00:25:04
Speaker
Give or take, with an enormous bowl on top and the bowl with a cover.
00:25:10
Speaker
and all of it elaborately decorated.
00:25:13
Speaker
We have scenes, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
00:25:16
Speaker
We have geometric designs.
00:25:19
Speaker
I mean, it's a visually impressive object, but just the scale of it is really- It's a lot of punch.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's a ton of punch.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah, geez.
00:25:27
Speaker
Okay, sorry to interrupt.
00:25:28
Speaker
No, no.
00:25:29
Speaker
So we knew, you know, obviously from a scale perspective, exciting.
00:25:34
Speaker
The enameling is beautiful, very unusual borders on here.
00:25:39
Speaker
And then this kind of odd scene on both the lid of the punch bowl and on the under tray.
00:25:47
Speaker
And we didn't know what it was, but we often buy things that we don't know entirely what they are, and then we try to figure out what they are later.
00:25:55
Speaker
I'm familiar with that situation.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes.
00:25:57
Speaker
I'm sure you are, actually.
00:26:00
Speaker
And PEM has a very large and important collection of this kind of ceramics.
00:26:06
Speaker
Ceramics made in Jingdezhen, really from...
00:26:10
Speaker
Some pieces are as early as the 14th century, right up until the 19th and early 20th century.
00:26:15
Speaker
And in fact, if you go to Ikea, a very significant number of ceramics at Ikea are still being made.
00:26:22
Speaker
And when the tradition continues.
00:26:24
Speaker
It is still the ceramics capital of the world.
00:26:28
Speaker
So PEM has a huge collection, over probably 7,000 pieces of ceramics.
00:26:34
Speaker
Chinese ceramics made for export.
00:26:36
Speaker
A lot of it for Europe, a lot of it for the Americas.
00:26:39
Speaker
Obviously the things that have been in the collection the longest were made for Salem or Massachusetts.
00:26:45
Speaker
But we've also been collecting pretty aggressively in the last 30-40 years.
00:26:52
Speaker
So a lot of things for the Middle East, for the Southeast Asian markets, for the South American markets.
00:26:59
Speaker
And so Bill Sargent, my predecessor, had a suspicion, particularly with this wonderful Swedish flag, that this was for the Swedish market and potentially... So it's a little boat with a number of oarsmen.
00:27:17
Speaker
And then at one end, this, yeah, this, this rippling in the wind, sort of Swedish flag.
00:27:25
Speaker
So, and we see this little boy who's running down the path and some, some fancily dressed people here waiting on the dock or having, perhaps having just arrived from this boat onto the dock.
00:27:38
Speaker
And to cut to the chase, this is not only a view of the Chinese pavilion at Drottningholm,
00:27:46
Speaker
Brotningholm is the current home for the king of Sweden.
00:27:50
Speaker
And in the 18th century, mid-18th century, the king at the kind of height of Shinmozuri
00:27:57
Speaker
wanted to surprise his queen with a lovely birthday present.
00:28:01
Speaker
And he builds a temporary Chinese pavilion for her.
00:28:06
Speaker
And this is indeed a depiction of her birthday, her birthday surprise.
00:28:10
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:28:12
Speaker
She was put on a barge, brought over from the house to where this pavilion is for the unveiling of this surprise.
00:28:21
Speaker
Wow.
00:28:21
Speaker
A totally chinoiserie, a chinoiserie wonder.
00:28:25
Speaker
Have you ever been?
00:28:26
Speaker
Sweden?
00:28:26
Speaker
I haven't, no.
00:28:27
Speaker
It's an amazing place.
00:28:29
Speaker
And the thing, so that's exciting in and of itself, this major moment in Sweden and fascination with China and the Queen Ulrika, Louisa Ulrika's birthday present.
00:28:44
Speaker
But what made this even more exciting is the Queen loved her birthday present so much that this was a temporary structure.
00:28:51
Speaker
This was not intended to survive long term.
00:28:55
Speaker
the king decided he was going to build it permanently.
00:28:58
Speaker
So it stayed up for a little while, was torn down, and now when you go to Drotteningholm, you will see the permanent structure.
00:29:06
Speaker
This is one of only two depictions that survive of the original building.
00:29:11
Speaker
There's one watercolor and this.
00:29:14
Speaker
So the architect to the king was on an Addingham course.
00:29:21
Speaker
And so I mentioned this to him and he said, well, send me pictures.
00:29:24
Speaker
And he was the one who said, oh my God, not only is this Drottningholm, this is a very rare depiction of this building.
00:29:32
Speaker
And he came to see it at some point and then significant enough that he mentioned it to the king.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so, in fact, my first day in my full curatorship, we welcomed the King of Sweden.
00:29:46
Speaker
Incredible.
00:29:47
Speaker
And he was coming specifically to see this and I think was very delighted and impressed.
00:29:55
Speaker
I think he was a little bit curious as to how it had left the royal collections, which we're still not entirely sure about.
00:30:02
Speaker
But we do hope someday to actually be able to send it back on
00:30:06
Speaker
on long-term loan to Drottningholm.
00:30:09
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:30:10
Speaker
And so is the idea that the king would have commissioned this contemporaneously with the construction of the pavilion as a kind of memoriam or as a celebratory object or maybe to be housed inside it?
00:30:27
Speaker
Or what context do you imagine for his order of this piece?
00:30:33
Speaker
It is an unusual thing.
00:30:35
Speaker
There is a very similar covered punch bowl with underdish in the Met's collection.
00:30:42
Speaker
And there are a small number of these with Scandinavian scenes on them.
00:30:48
Speaker
So it's plausible that it was a commission by the king.
00:30:51
Speaker
It's plausible it was for some exciting event after.
00:30:58
Speaker
I don't... Well...
00:31:01
Speaker
The short answer is we don't know.
00:31:03
Speaker
We don't know.
00:31:05
Speaker
Interestingly, the bowl at the Met has an early American provenance, which is a little bit confusing.
00:31:13
Speaker
This turned up in a small auction here in Massachusetts.
00:31:18
Speaker
So we don't entirely know what that is.
00:31:23
Speaker
early 19th century history for, and I would suspect both of those pieces is.
00:31:30
Speaker
Bill Sargent certainly featured this prominently in his magnum opus on the Chinese ceramics at PEM.
00:31:39
Speaker
But I think we still have many, many discoveries to make about this.
00:31:45
Speaker
Gosh, have you drunk punch out of it?
00:31:48
Speaker
We have not.
00:31:49
Speaker
We have not.
00:31:50
Speaker
Although we should have.
00:31:51
Speaker
We should have had them at the auction house have punch out of it before.
00:31:55
Speaker
Typically, we're no longer using works in the collection for their intended purposes.
00:32:00
Speaker
Not even the king of Sweden would have allowed to.
00:32:02
Speaker
Not even the king of Sweden.
00:32:03
Speaker
No.
00:32:04
Speaker
No.
00:32:05
Speaker
I'm personally a little bit obsessed with these sorts of objects that tie the world together, and the 18th century is chock full of them.
00:32:13
Speaker
And so I have one more object I want to share with you today, another really striking cross-cultural exchange, this time with Persia.
00:32:21
Speaker
But it's a type of object you might not expect to come across in a refined museum collection.
00:32:28
Speaker
Shoemaking was a huge industry here on the North Shore of Massachusetts and throughout Massachusetts.
00:32:34
Speaker
Like the textile industry in the 19th century, in the early, before the Civil War, well before the Civil War, decades, there were early manufacturers who were on the kind of the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution in this area.
00:32:56
Speaker
I think people know more about the textile industry that was here, but the shoe industry was also here.
00:33:04
Speaker
And it does continue on in New England to today.
00:33:09
Speaker
That's Paula Richter, a curator who specializes in textiles and fashion.
00:33:14
Speaker
And the very first object she showed me was this incredible eccentric shoe.
00:33:19
Speaker
Actually, the best way I can think to describe it is as a sort of jester's shoe.
00:33:24
Speaker
Well, it was collected by one of the members of the East Indian Marine Society in 1799, and he recorded that it was from Persia.
00:33:38
Speaker
And his name was Ichabod Nichols.
00:33:40
Speaker
He was born in Salem.
00:33:41
Speaker
He later lived briefly in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
00:33:45
Speaker
He intermarried with the Peirce family of Salem.
00:33:48
Speaker
So he was connected through to some of the leading merchants in Salem who some of them were sending ships to China or to India.
00:34:00
Speaker
or to many points in between.
00:34:04
Speaker
And somewhere in his travels, we don't know exactly where, he came across the shoe and he brought it back because I think he could not have imagined coming across this shoe.
00:34:14
Speaker
It's really, it's quite a visual feast.
00:34:18
Speaker
Well, it is.
00:34:19
Speaker
It's colorful.
00:34:22
Speaker
So it's made out of leather, several types of leather.
00:34:26
Speaker
It also has red wool fabric.
00:34:31
Speaker
which is shown, you can see a lot of it, which has then been re-embroidered and ornamented with metal thread embroidery and beadwork.
00:34:43
Speaker
And it's a type of shoe that was, it could be from Persia or what is now Iran.
00:34:53
Speaker
And it's a type of shoe that was,
00:34:58
Speaker
It has geometric patterns.
00:35:00
Speaker
It has flowers all done in beads.
00:35:03
Speaker
It's gold.
00:35:03
Speaker
It's green.
00:35:04
Speaker
It's red.
00:35:06
Speaker
It has a, the toe of the shoe is curved back.
00:35:09
Speaker
This is why I say jester shoe.
00:35:11
Speaker
It looks, it looks very fanciful and jocular.
00:35:17
Speaker
And then this is actually how these shoes were worn.
00:35:20
Speaker
This folded down.
00:35:22
Speaker
So it does become, you mentioned clogs actually.
00:35:26
Speaker
It becomes like a slipper that you slide your foot into.
00:35:33
Speaker
You could choose to wear it the other way, but the style was often worn like that.
00:35:40
Speaker
With the heel sort of flattened down so your heel falls on top of the material of the shoe rather than putting inside it.
00:35:48
Speaker
Interesting.
00:35:49
Speaker
And...
00:35:51
Speaker
we don't, we're not, we haven't actually pinned down where this came from.
00:35:55
Speaker
And the shoe with this curved toe and the way the tongue comes up and is shaped, and then the way the heel falls down, there are a number of shoes, some from India, like the Mughal Empire, some from Persia, the Persian Empire at the time,
00:36:19
Speaker
or the Ottoman Empire, so more on closer to Turkey, what is now today Turkey.
00:36:26
Speaker
And the Persian Empire, of course, would be the region that's now Iran.
00:36:32
Speaker
And so we're not exactly sure where this came from.
00:36:37
Speaker
Probably more research to do.
00:36:40
Speaker
I do want to see if I can turn it over here.
00:36:43
Speaker
When the East Union Marine Society, when they set up their cabinet of curiosities, they numbered things.
00:36:51
Speaker
And that's their number, 349, and then later numbers were added to it.
00:36:56
Speaker
So 349, does that mean it was the 349th object?
00:37:01
Speaker
That 349th object that came into the collection.
00:37:03
Speaker
Right.
00:37:03
Speaker
Donation.
00:37:06
Speaker
The museum did publish a catalog.
00:37:08
Speaker
The East Union Marine Society published a catalog early on, I think beginning in the 1820s.
00:37:14
Speaker
And then they republished it as the collection kept expanding.
00:37:16
Speaker
They did it again in the 1830s.
00:37:19
Speaker
And so there is a record, there's a printed record that were, it was like our gallery guides today.
00:37:28
Speaker
People would be able to pick it up if they were a visitor back in,
00:37:32
Speaker
you know, 1820.
00:37:33
Speaker
Look through the pages until they find the number.
00:37:37
Speaker
And interestingly enough, there was enough trade going on by the British and some of the other Europeans across that same region, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Sephavid Empire of that time,
00:37:54
Speaker
and then over to India, that they were aware of these styles of shoes that were so different from what Europeans, and some of it actually influenced shoes in Europe.
Teaser for Next Episode
00:38:17
Speaker
We've talked about shoes and Sweden and witches and Indiana Jones.
00:38:23
Speaker
And believe it or not, we've barely touched the surface of what I saw at the collection center of the BBD Essex Museum.
00:38:29
Speaker
So next week, we'll journey back to PEM and see what else we can turn up.
00:38:34
Speaker
It will surely involve whaling ships and Louboutins.
00:38:38
Speaker
And what exactly does it take to physically move an entire museum collection anyway?
00:38:45
Speaker
Meanwhile, this has been Curious Objects.
00:38:47
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:38:53
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:38:57
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:38:59
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.