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“The Most Awesome Cup of All Time” . . . and 500 Other Objects
38 Plays5 years ago
Dealer Adam Ambros and curator Ed Town join Ben to talk about a collection of mostly small objects made in Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of them marked with a date. During the discussion, Town and Ambros tease out the material history and forgotten figures behind six of the most quotidian of these objects—two Elizabethian shoehorns and a powderhorn by little-known craftsman Robert Mindum, and three beakers by Nathaniel Spilman—and reveal that for the emerging middle class these were not merely useful objects, but status symbols.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast & Catalog Project
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:21
Speaker
The pandemic has put a halt to a huge number of museum exhibitions.
00:00:25
Speaker
Some of them have been delayed and others canceled.
00:00:27
Speaker
But the curatorial process continues.
00:00:29
Speaker
And Edward Towne of the Yale Center for British Art has been working on a catalog that they'll be publishing this October.
00:00:35
Speaker
The book is called Marking Time, Objects, People, and Their Lives.
00:00:39
Speaker
and you can pre-order it now.
00:00:40
Speaker
The subject is a private collection of nearly 500 objects from Britain between the years 1500 and 1800.
00:00:46
Speaker
These are mostly small objects, keepsakes, and personal effects, and with a few exceptions, they are all marked with a date.
00:00:53
Speaker
That's either the year they were made or another date that's significant in some way in the life of the object.
00:00:58
Speaker
Together, they weave a story about daily existence, what that looked like for 16th and 17th and 18th century British people, and how it changed over those 300 years.
00:01:09
Speaker
The catalog
Introducing Guests & Key Discussion Points
00:01:10
Speaker
features several essays, including one by my guest from this program, Glenn Adamson.
00:01:14
Speaker
So I'm pleased to be joined today by Edward Towne, one of the two editors of this volume, and also by Adam Ambrose.
00:01:21
Speaker
Adam is a dealer and a scholar here in New York, and several of the objects in the book came through him.
00:01:27
Speaker
So Adam's research has uncovered some exciting information about these pieces, which he'll be telling us about today.
00:01:33
Speaker
And along with Ed, he is one of the young people to watch in the antiques world.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I'm very excited to be having this conversation with the two
Elizabethan Shoehorns: A Historical Exploration
00:01:40
Speaker
of them.
00:01:40
Speaker
Adam and Ed, thanks for joining me.
00:01:41
Speaker
Thank you, Ben.
00:01:43
Speaker
Thank you.
00:01:44
Speaker
So Adam, why don't you kick this off for us and tell us just what exactly are the objects that we're talking about?
00:01:51
Speaker
Well, Ben, it's rather generous of you to call me a scholar, but thank you.
00:01:57
Speaker
I am a dealer, and I have handled four of the items that are being featured in this publication.
00:02:05
Speaker
Coincidentally, they're all made of horn, or white ox horn, first being two Elizabethan shoe horns by a man named Robert Mindham, who was active between 1593 and 1612.
00:02:17
Speaker
There's a third shoe horn by Mindham that's already in the collection.
00:02:22
Speaker
But perhaps most exciting is, which is being published for the first time, is a powder horn by Mendem, the second only known to be made by him, the first being in the collection of the Museum of the City of London.
00:02:40
Speaker
And then lastly, there are three horn beakers by a man named Nathaniel Spillman that are quite interesting as well.
00:02:50
Speaker
Tell me about how you initially encountered these objects and what did you think when you first came across them?
00:03:00
Speaker
I encountered the objects in a private collection and I actually was there for a completely unrelated reason and we were actually looking at a large collection of Regency Silver by Paul Storr, sterling flatware and
00:03:20
Speaker
and even silver gilt pieces in him so we could that to the exude that the grand juror and then glamour of of the regency period and and george the fourth and suddenly the collector handed to me wrapped in tissue paper a small object and i opened it and it was uh... a shoehorn uh... which is quite jarring uh... just because the the contrast between this shoehorn and and the the silver
00:03:50
Speaker
And it looks like any other shoehorn.
00:03:52
Speaker
They really haven't changed all that much.
00:03:54
Speaker
There's a broad end with a rounded tip, and the body is curved, sort of matching the curve of a person's heel, and then it tapers to an end.
00:04:06
Speaker
And many of Mindam's
00:04:09
Speaker
shoe horns at the end, at the tapered end, they sort of curl up into a sharp tip.
00:04:15
Speaker
Subsequently, many of them have been lost through use and they've broken off.
00:04:23
Speaker
And then another thing that happens with these shoe horns is that the rounded tops get abraded from use.
00:04:34
Speaker
But I was looking at this shoehorn, which is engraved with designs like the Tudor Rose and a crown, and there was actually an inscription running along the edge that read, Robert Mindum made this shoeing horn for Rose Fales, Anno Domini, 1598.
00:04:59
Speaker
And that's when I realized I was holding an Elizabethan, you know, 400-year-old object in my hand, which was quite amazing, an object that you wouldn't really expect to have survived.
00:05:12
Speaker
But it comes from a period when more and more people are wearing shoes with soft backs to them.
00:05:20
Speaker
Apparently, they needed an instrument in order to help them in their dressing and getting these shoes on.
00:05:29
Speaker
So sort of indicative of a certain period in dress.
00:05:34
Speaker
And this is a little outside of your normal area of specialty, isn't it?
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, I do mostly furniture and decorative objects.
00:05:45
Speaker
This horn is definitely on the early side and it's sort of a utilitarian object, almost a piece of costume as opposed to a great table or a chair or something like that.
00:06:01
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:06:02
Speaker
This is not the Paul Storr style, you know, put in the grand dining hall, you know, adorn the palaces of the
Cataloging and Collaboration in Decorative Arts
00:06:11
Speaker
rich and famous.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker
These would have been made for every, you know, everyday ordinary people.
00:06:18
Speaker
And the Horners...
00:06:20
Speaker
We're actually a strictly regulated guild called the Worshipful Company of Horners, which dates back to 1284.
00:06:29
Speaker
And Mindem actually wasn't a member.
00:06:31
Speaker
So there have been discussions whether he was doing this professionally or just sort of his amateur work.
00:06:39
Speaker
His origins may be a little unclear, but I want to get to Mindem himself a bit later in the conversation.
00:06:47
Speaker
But I'm just curious about your own experience because I'm a dealer, as you know, in antique silver, and I'm often traveling to auction houses and viewing sales that have silver, but also plenty of other objects.
00:07:01
Speaker
And sometimes things catch my eye and sometimes I know a little bit about them and sometimes I'm completely perplexed.
00:07:07
Speaker
I don't know anything about them.
00:07:09
Speaker
When you came across this shoehorn, was it a form you were familiar with?
00:07:17
Speaker
Did you already have some idea of how to evaluate its quality and its rarity and its value?
00:07:23
Speaker
Or did it just strike you as an object and then you sort of did your homework afterwards?
00:07:28
Speaker
What was your experience of it?
00:07:31
Speaker
No, I mean, this is the first time that I've encountered or seen an Elizabethan shoehorn and I had no idea who Robert Mindum was, but I was just intrigued at this 400-year-old sort of utilitarian object.
00:07:48
Speaker
to this day and it was so beautifully decorated, engraved and the engraving sort of inked or stained.
00:08:00
Speaker
And so after encountering it, I did my research and luckily because of
00:08:05
Speaker
Because all of Mindem's horns are inscribed, there's actually quite a nice little timeline into which you can slot these shoehorns into, which gives you sort of a wonderful picture of his work and his career.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:22
Speaker
And then so you acquired the piece or you had an idea of who might be interested in it.
00:08:29
Speaker
Right.
00:08:30
Speaker
So I became aware of the publication and became aware of the work that Ed was doing.
00:08:42
Speaker
And that's when I thought, as a dated object, this would be a great thing to include.
00:08:49
Speaker
And then that's where sort of the other pieces followed because there was another shoehorn in the collection.
00:08:58
Speaker
And then later we uncovered the beaker, I'm sorry, not the beaker, the powder horn.
00:09:05
Speaker
That's then later been sort of converted into a beaker form or sort of a drinking horn form.
00:09:12
Speaker
And all three objects made it to the Bryan Collection in time to be photographed and catalogued for the publication.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
So now, how exactly did you connect with Ed?
00:09:27
Speaker
And Ed, maybe you can answer this from your perspective, too.
00:09:32
Speaker
You know, Adam, you're a dealer and Ed, you're a curator.
00:09:35
Speaker
You sort of exist in slightly different worlds, but they overlap.
00:09:39
Speaker
So for our listeners who may not fit into either of those categories, what does that relationship look like?
00:09:46
Speaker
And how do you start the conversation about something like this shoehorn?
00:09:50
Speaker
Should I take this, Adam?
00:09:54
Speaker
Sure.
00:09:54
Speaker
I think I'd probably start by saying a little bit about the collection itself.
00:10:00
Speaker
This is a collection really like no other in so far of its depth and its reach.
00:10:10
Speaker
And it was put together by John Bryan, businessman, philanthropist and collector.
00:10:20
Speaker
who over the course of a number of decades assembled a really remarkable collection of fine and decorative arts.
00:10:32
Speaker
And although it wasn't his initial intention when he began his collection, I think quite by accident during a holiday with his wife to Britain, in which he ended the holiday shipping an entire
00:10:49
Speaker
shipping containers worth of brown furniture, I think it's fair to say, of sort of dubious quality back to the States.
00:10:59
Speaker
But that gave him the bug.
00:11:02
Speaker
And Mr. Brown sadly passed away in 2018, but had a sort of a voracious appetite for collecting and a very open-minded approach to what he collected.
00:11:16
Speaker
And over the years, one aspect
The Role of Dates in Historical Context
00:11:20
Speaker
of his collecting, or something that came to the fore and that was actually only pointed out to him by an academic who came to visit his home at Crabtree Farm, such was the prestige and the quality of this collection that it brought into its orbit a number of the world's leading experts on decorative arts, in this case, a leading expert on silver,
00:11:45
Speaker
who made what was at the time just an innocuous comment to Mr. Bryan, viewing all of these objects, and that was, why are all of these objects dated?
00:12:00
Speaker
And Mr. Bryan had never really thought about that in the past, and up until that point, a date and an object had been a sort of a desirable attribute for acquisition, but it was by no means, you know, something that had to be on the object.
00:12:24
Speaker
But that was all to change.
00:12:27
Speaker
And from henceforth, Mr. Bryan really began collecting with a mind towards assembling an almost encyclopedic collection of British decorative arts with this one sort of interesting and slightly
00:12:47
Speaker
quirky caveat that the object had to carry a date, it had to be dated.
00:12:52
Speaker
And this gave birth, gave rise to a really, really sort of interesting, an interesting collection.
00:13:00
Speaker
But on the one hand, it was sort of bold in its ambition, because Mr. Bryan wanted to collect an example of every type, an object of every type,
00:13:13
Speaker
from up and down the social ladder of Britain from the early modern period.
00:13:20
Speaker
But with this interesting proviso that the object had to be dated.
00:13:25
Speaker
And it's sort of interesting to think about, particularly talking with you and Adam, about why dates have such an appeal to collectors.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:37
Speaker
Well, of course, you have to collect something, right, if you're going to be a collector.
00:13:40
Speaker
So dates are certainly, you know.
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:46
Speaker
And I think that's one of the really interesting things, really interesting aspects of the collection and then this book as well.
00:13:53
Speaker
Because, yeah, as you say, he had to collect something.
00:13:57
Speaker
I mean, in a way, Mr. Brian collected everything.
00:14:00
Speaker
but he also collected dates, and that in turn gave rise to this research project, the research that this book showcases, because it's given myself and other people working on this book project, the other authors of essays, Glenn included, to consider...
00:14:25
Speaker
this interesting shift that happens over the course of the 16th, 17th and 18th century, that period we loosely and vaguely describe as the early modern period, in terms of the way in which people thought about and experienced time.
00:14:43
Speaker
Because one of the central arguments of the book
00:14:47
Speaker
is that during this period, there was a phenomenon of dating objects.
00:14:52
Speaker
This is not to say that people didn't date objects before, nor that they didn't continue to date objects afterwards.
Mindham's Craftsmanship and Influence on Material Culture
00:15:00
Speaker
But there's something particular and almost peculiar about...
00:15:04
Speaker
this early modern period and people's compulsion to date objects.
00:15:11
Speaker
And that may well be at the hands of the maker, such as Robert Mindon.
00:15:19
Speaker
And one of the wonderful quirks of the Bryan Collection now, and thanks to sort of
00:15:26
Speaker
Adam's work in bringing these objects into the Bryan Collection is that we have this incredible hat-trick of shoehorns that date from consecutive years of 1596, 1597 and 1598.
00:15:37
Speaker
Now, if we were in the 16th century, we would be convinced, I'm sure, that this was some kind of... this had been preordained by God and this had a great cosmographical significance.
00:15:53
Speaker
But the book is full of these nice little accidents and we can follow what's pleasing is that we can follow the evolution of this...
00:16:08
Speaker
lesser known craftsman such as Mindem, who's actually only really come to light through this publication.
00:16:17
Speaker
And for the first time we've been able to really identify where Mindem was active, where he was working.
00:16:25
Speaker
And that was just a really happy accident of these three objects coming together at once, because it gave us a critical mass of names.
00:16:36
Speaker
As Adam mentioned, Mindem has this wonderfully helpful habit of inscribing not only his own name, the date, but also the name of the person for whom this shoehorn was made, be that a man or a woman.
00:16:51
Speaker
And in one case, records the names of the person who commissioned the object and the person to whom it was given.
00:17:01
Speaker
So we get an immediate sense that these shoehorns are made
00:17:06
Speaker
gifts, often between women, and they're just the type of object and there's the type of social interaction and transaction that is lost to us.
00:17:19
Speaker
And I think this is why some objects like this are just so valuable and have this incredible immediacy.
00:17:25
Speaker
What Adam was describing is just that sort of moment of being bowled over upon encountering such a
00:17:33
Speaker
on the one hand, you know, quotidian object, this everyday thing, this shoehorn with its wonderful plastic properties and everyday feel that went sort of in and out of someone's shoe for years upon end, that suddenly has this incredible significance because it was important to someone and important to Mindem as well.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yes, Ed, I agree with you completely.
00:18:02
Speaker
And I think the shoe horns and the powder horns would have had an extraordinary effect in the 16th century when they were first made.
00:18:14
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if you'd agree, but I think part of the reason that we see objects being dated from this period in England, from the 16th century to the 18th century, I think in the 16th century,
00:18:26
Speaker
you start seeing the rise of the middling sort.
00:18:30
Speaker
And they finally have enough material wealth to buy things, you know, comforts and luxuries beyond the standard necessities.
00:18:41
Speaker
And by the 18th century, we see the beginnings of industrialization and sort of a full-blown capitalism that we'd recognize today.
00:18:49
Speaker
So I think when people are sort of owning things for the first time,
00:18:55
Speaker
there's sort of a desire to sort of mark the circumstances of a family or an individual, showing a rise in their circumstances.
00:19:07
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:19:08
Speaker
That is writ large across the book and can be seen in the objects, in the Mindum objects.
00:19:17
Speaker
They document that really nicely.
00:19:19
Speaker
I think that people were increasingly, well, for a start, people were, for the first time in Britain, increasingly aware of how old they were because for the first time and...
00:19:36
Speaker
under government mandates, churches started keeping accurate records by law of the births, marriages and deaths up and down the nation.
00:19:51
Speaker
And much of the research that underpins some of the news stories, some of the stories mentioned in the title of the book, is derived from these records.
00:20:05
Speaker
But
00:20:06
Speaker
the great thing was is that we found Mindum and it was only but it was through the process of um collecting I mean in a way research is a form of collecting you're you're bringing things together um in order to try and make sense of them and that was certainly something that John Bryan tried to do over the course of his life and with his collection it was collecting was a way in which he learned about the past
00:20:33
Speaker
by bringing it together.
00:20:34
Speaker
I think there's no better example of this than the Mindem shoehorns, because for the first time we have an identity to this craftsman.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yes, well, and thank you for bringing it right back to the shoehorns there, because I'm curious to know a little bit more about the cultural context behind the object itself.
00:20:55
Speaker
Shoehorns, as you've said, we still have them today.
00:21:01
Speaker
They're still useful objects.
00:21:03
Speaker
I don't know if everyone has a shoehorn, but certainly some people do.
00:21:10
Speaker
But we're talking about pieces that weren't used 400 years ago, or actually more.
00:21:18
Speaker
What role did the shoehorn play 430 years ago?
00:21:23
Speaker
Where did it originate?
00:21:25
Speaker
Is the form even older than that?
00:21:27
Speaker
Was it a common household item, or was it restricted to certain groups of people or certain cultures?
00:21:35
Speaker
Just to give me a little context there.
00:21:40
Speaker
I cannot claim to be any type of authority on shoe horns.
00:21:46
Speaker
But to my understanding, these are the earliest dated shoe horns that are known certainly from Britain.
00:21:54
Speaker
And I think Adam mentioned earlier, you know, the mechanics of shoe design did dictate that one would need an instrument by which to divest oneself of the shoe and indeed get it on in the first place.
00:22:13
Speaker
As you said, I don't know how many people
00:22:15
Speaker
still own shoehorns.
00:22:17
Speaker
My track record with shoehorns is not great.
00:22:19
Speaker
They tend to come with a decent pair of shoes.
00:22:22
Speaker
But today, being made of plastic, promptly snap after two attempts to get the shoe on.
00:22:30
Speaker
It's amazing that these shoehorns have survived, presumably, you know,
00:22:35
Speaker
Despite its sort of plastic qualities, the horn is perfect insofar as that it has a degree of flexibility, but it's also robust.
00:22:47
Speaker
The 1596 one in the Bryan Collection, which has this beautiful depiction of an Elizabethan woman with her arm.
00:22:58
Speaker
hands on her hips is more or less entirely intact with a sort of hole at the top, presumably the means by which it was hung.
00:23:10
Speaker
somewhere, I assume, in Pride of Place in the household.
00:23:16
Speaker
And I think the depiction of a woman of, I would suggest, the middling sort, she wears a hat and a falling ruff.
00:23:29
Speaker
So someone of, you know, possibly yeomanry class or lower gentry, someone who was, you know, interested enough in preserving their footwear in good condition, right?
00:23:52
Speaker
But I think the honest truth is that even though we know where many of these people lived and spent their lives, thanks to their appearance in the parish registers, we don't have a good sense of what they may have done professionally.
00:24:11
Speaker
I get the sense that these are people that are living in a rural part of the country.
00:24:18
Speaker
who seem to have had a degree of disposable income, but they're by no means wealthy people.
00:24:27
Speaker
These are not people who are medirous or had any role necessarily in local government.
00:24:39
Speaker
These were
00:24:42
Speaker
again, to use a sort of a vague term, but I think it's precisely this group of people who,
00:24:53
Speaker
saw the appeal of seeing not only their names, but also dates on objects, this sort of interesting way to underscore the significance of a particular moment.
00:25:06
Speaker
In this case, it seems often to have been the exchange of a gift from one set of families to another, from one friend or couple of friends to another.
00:25:19
Speaker
Probably because these people did not have the ability to represent themselves in the established norms of sort of status, that is, through heraldic devices, things that you must see correctly.
00:25:37
Speaker
Every day of the week in on silver.
00:25:39
Speaker
I mean, that's the first thing you do, isn't it?
00:25:41
Speaker
You inscribe your your coat of arms on silver ahead of making a gift of it because this signifies your status and that of the recipient of the gift.
00:25:50
Speaker
But these are quite quotidian.
00:25:52
Speaker
These are everyday objects.
00:25:53
Speaker
And these people didn't have those and those those armadourous devices to to serve their ends.
00:26:01
Speaker
Adam, you spoke earlier about this idea of the rising middle class, and you also alluded to the emergence of the shoehorn in parallel with leather shoes.
00:26:16
Speaker
Because, of course, that's what you need a shoehorn for.
00:26:18
Speaker
With these things, it's sort of murky.
00:26:20
Speaker
We don't have the first shoehorn.
00:26:27
Speaker
And I'm sure there's evidence of them being used in the Middle Ages.
00:26:31
Speaker
We do know that Elizabeth I of England, she bought 18 shoehorns from her shoemaker, Garrett Johnson.
00:26:39
Speaker
And then she also bought more steel from her blacksmiths.
00:26:42
Speaker
Isn't that a bit much?
00:26:45
Speaker
Isn't 18 a bit much?
00:26:47
Speaker
Well, I mean, who knows if she was using it for her court or courtiers.
00:26:52
Speaker
So we do have, you know, we do, I mean, you know, we do, we see more, we see them becoming common or more common in the Renaissance.
00:27:04
Speaker
But what I think is so amazing about the Mindem pieces is that they,
00:27:08
Speaker
They give us a snapshot of an ordinary community.
00:27:12
Speaker
And I think this is the thing that Edward has been talking about.
00:27:16
Speaker
And that's what sort of makes them amazing.
00:27:20
Speaker
We're not talking about dukes or kings and queens that would have been the, or the church, which would have been the sort of the normal patrons of objects and works of art.
00:27:31
Speaker
But here we're starting to see ordinary people owning objects of quality.
00:27:42
Speaker
I'm going to ask you to speculate here a bit because I know, as you've said, we don't have a plethora of examples of shoehorns from the period.
00:27:49
Speaker
But the decoration on these really is extraordinary.
00:27:52
Speaker
I mean, I encourage people to look at the images of these.
00:27:58
Speaker
at the magazine antiques.com slash podcast or else to buy the book and see the pictures in print because they're really, you know, they're quite impressive as works of design and craft.
00:28:13
Speaker
And I wonder if this is the sort of object that a middle to upper middle class person might have owned.
00:28:22
Speaker
I mean, gosh, what sort of shoehorns would Queen Elizabeth have been buying?
00:28:30
Speaker
I mean, where would you suppose that these would fit into the sort of hierarchy of quality of shoehorns or value of shoehorns in the period?
00:28:43
Speaker
Well, it's difficult to say.
00:28:46
Speaker
I mean, I think these sort of stand out on their own.
00:28:48
Speaker
There's sort of very little to compare them with.
00:28:53
Speaker
But in some ways, if you think about it, horn was very common.
00:28:56
Speaker
It was everywhere.
00:28:57
Speaker
It was sort of like the Elizabethan plastic.
00:29:00
Speaker
And, you know, plastic is actually, was invented to sort of imitate natural materials like horn, tortoise, or ivory.
00:29:08
Speaker
And I think to the craftsmen, it sort of would have inherently sort of, you know, that curved conical shape would have inherently lent itself to a tool like that.
00:29:20
Speaker
And that's what it is.
00:29:21
Speaker
It's basically a horn that's been split in half.
00:29:25
Speaker
And then it's heated, which sort of takes advantage of this natural thermoplastic quality of horn, molded to the shape, and then finally cut out into the final shape, filed, refined.
00:29:39
Speaker
And then engraved.
00:29:40
Speaker
And the engraving is actually sort of a fairly easy form of decoration.
00:29:48
Speaker
It wouldn't have required as much training as, let's say, you know, carving or something, which very easily would, you know,
00:29:55
Speaker
which you would need more training for.
00:29:58
Speaker
And then he sort of repeats these
Transition to Spillman's Beakers
00:30:00
Speaker
graphic motifs of the Tudoros, crowns, fleur-de-lis, scales, cross-hatching, and trees.
00:30:14
Speaker
So in some ways, the material and the technology would have been fairly simple and commonplace.
00:30:24
Speaker
But I still think these objects are remarkable survivors of their age and quite special.
00:30:34
Speaker
It starts to sound a little, and this is anachronistic, but it starts to sound a little like what we would call folk art.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:30:43
Speaker
I think, I don't know, I love your question and I, you know, what fun to speculate as to what Elizabeth used to put on her shoes or, you know, the lady in waiting who had that absolutely thankless task.
00:31:01
Speaker
And fun to speculate as well as to whether or not these objects ever left the vicinity as it happens.
00:31:09
Speaker
The earliest dated Shuhun by Mindem of 1593 is now in the Museum of London.
00:31:18
Speaker
We know, thanks to the inscription, was made for someone described by Mindem as Hamlet Rasdale or Rochdale.
00:31:29
Speaker
who Mindon proudly described on the shoehorn as the Cooper of London.
00:31:38
Speaker
And London spelled sort of curiously with an A at the end.
00:31:44
Speaker
So clearly Mindon was not familiar with London as a place, perhaps understandable given that he was in London.
00:31:54
Speaker
quite a quiet backwater of East Anglia.
00:31:57
Speaker
But interesting to think about this
00:32:02
Speaker
this Londoner who comes up for whatever reason, um, to, uh, towards the, um, East Anglian coast, um, by, by way of Cambridge, um, as a cooper, he may well have, um, been in the business of procuring horns for his own business and chances upon, um, this remarkable Horner, um, called Robert Mindon, um, who produces these most, this most beautiful, um,
00:32:33
Speaker
these most beautiful works of art, as you describe.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah, as if, like,
00:32:40
Speaker
what we would describe today as folk art, sort of something, a sort of a tradition that was existing in relative isolation from the metropolis, etc.
00:32:56
Speaker
So, you know, whereas there are some motifs that are familiar to us that appear on the horns, there's a
00:33:04
Speaker
a stylized Tudor rose and something that looks a little bit like a bishop's mitre across a band of decoration.
00:33:14
Speaker
One feels this is very much of Mindon's decoration and unlike other engravers, he wasn't slavishly looking to continental print sources for his inspiration.
00:33:25
Speaker
This was his decoration, this was his work and remarkably he was proud of it as well.
00:33:32
Speaker
You know, we're dealing
00:33:34
Speaker
of a period, um, where it was rare even for court painters to claim authorship of their work.
00:33:43
Speaker
Um, but here we have a quirky Horner in, um, yeah, sort of, yeah, well outside of, um, the city who is proudly, um, inscribing his name, um, and giving it as equal, um,
00:34:00
Speaker
important to those of his patrons.
00:34:05
Speaker
One wonders what they made of it and whether or not they cared a great deal whether they owned a Mindum shoehorn.
00:34:12
Speaker
Well, what I think is interesting and sort of plays into that is that Mindum continues to use the Tudor Rose motif long after the death of Elizabeth and the Stuarts are on the throne.
00:34:24
Speaker
And, you know, this is purely speculative, but you wonder if that, you know, is a hint of his politics or of his loyalties.
00:34:33
Speaker
It also just shows what a powerful symbol a Tudor rose was.
00:34:37
Speaker
I mean, it's fairly new.
00:34:38
Speaker
It came from Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII.
00:34:41
Speaker
And then we see this man continuing to use it.
00:34:47
Speaker
And you can speculate.
00:34:49
Speaker
It just sort of shows how removed from London he is possibly.
00:34:53
Speaker
But, you know, it's sort of a glimpse into the common man's understanding of the world, which is quite interesting.
00:35:19
Speaker
Back with Adam Ambrose and Edward Town in just a moment.
00:35:22
Speaker
If you're interested in seeing pictures of the beakers and the shoehorns, which I really recommend, they're visually striking objects, you can see those at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:35:38
Speaker
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00:35:46
Speaker
If you enjoy the show, these are all great ways to help us reach new listeners.
00:35:50
Speaker
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00:35:58
Speaker
Check out themagazineantiques.com, where new and archival stories are uploaded daily, as well as the magazine's social media channels, where you'll find the antique of the day, selected by editor-at-large Glenn Adamson.
00:36:11
Speaker
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00:36:29
Speaker
There's one other Robert Mindum piece in the collection that we wanted to talk about, which is not a shoehorn, but it's also made out of horn.
00:36:39
Speaker
In this case, it's a powder horn.
00:36:42
Speaker
So, Adam, tell me about this powder horn, which actually, to look at it, you wouldn't necessarily recognize it as a powder horn.
00:36:51
Speaker
Right.
00:36:51
Speaker
Immediately looking at it, it looks like a beaker.
00:36:57
Speaker
And you can look, if you imagine the horn, you can sort of see approximately where, you know, that the piece came from.
00:37:07
Speaker
But it doesn't look like the full horn that you'd see, you know, draped, you know, across someone's someone's body that comes to a point.
00:37:16
Speaker
At some point, we do have one
00:37:19
Speaker
example of a powder horn made by Mindem, and it's in the Museum of the City of London.
00:37:24
Speaker
And there we see the full form.
00:37:28
Speaker
I suspect that this was, the horn was damaged, and at some point it had silver mounts put on it to sort of transform it.
00:37:40
Speaker
Again, because we sort of have a different relationship to objects today
00:37:46
Speaker
than we did so many years ago where nothing was disposable.
00:37:51
Speaker
The use of horn is not only because it's a wonderful material to work with, because it's easy to mold and create things and it's watertight, but because it would have been plentiful.
00:38:03
Speaker
When you have beef, you use every part of the animal and this would have come naturally from that.
00:38:11
Speaker
Anyways, it just shows that these objects had always been cared for and that someone, you know, had
Future of John Bryan's Collection & Conclusion
00:38:20
Speaker
this object and unfortunately it was damaged, but they went through the effort of having it.
00:38:26
Speaker
fixed and instead of using you know you know common you know metal they had it fixed with with silver so it just shows you how valued this this object was and then and then it continued life
00:38:44
Speaker
in some sort of beaker form, which we don't really, you know, we don't have sort of a firm evidence, but we do have the original inscription, which is dedicated to Thomas Draper, and it's dated 1612, I believe.
00:38:58
Speaker
It retains some remarkable decoration of the Tudor rose and
00:39:05
Speaker
birds and fleur-de-lis and these scrolls and vegetation, which is really amazing.
00:39:13
Speaker
But this is the first time that it's ever been published.
00:39:17
Speaker
So to my knowledge, it really hasn't been known ever since we started seeing articles on men done by Joan Evans in Burlington Magazine in 1944.
00:39:27
Speaker
So, you know, you know, we'll have to, to, you know, it just shows how much there, there is to learn about Mindum and his work still, even, even still.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, it was clearly a much loved and cherished object, I think.
00:39:42
Speaker
That's the nice thing about it.
00:39:44
Speaker
My favorite thing about this horn is the fact that in its recalibrated state as a drinking vessel, as opposed to something to hold powder,
00:39:58
Speaker
it won't stand up on its own.
00:40:00
Speaker
So one has to fill it with liquid in order to keep it steady on a table, which presumably encouraged the person lucky enough to be drinking from it to finish, to down the contents of the cup and then demand a refill, else the cup is going to spill.
00:40:26
Speaker
That's very funny.
00:40:27
Speaker
It's almost like a stirrup cup.
00:40:31
Speaker
Exactly.
00:40:32
Speaker
Exactly.
00:40:32
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:40:33
Speaker
That was always going to be a danger, wasn't it, with the shape?
00:40:37
Speaker
So it is inherently top-heavy.
00:40:42
Speaker
yeah one of the nice things about it as well is it's a late piece by Robert Mindum going through the 26 shoehorns and two powder horns so this is one of only two powder horns
00:40:58
Speaker
known.
00:40:59
Speaker
Surely there are more out there waiting to be discovered.
00:41:02
Speaker
But this is, I think, three years prior to his death.
00:41:06
Speaker
I think we're now confident that he was the Robert Mendham.
00:41:10
Speaker
Well, you're both sketching quite an interesting portrait of this fellow Robert Mendham.
00:41:16
Speaker
But there's another name that we wanted to bring into the mix, and that is Spillman.
00:41:22
Speaker
a name which is associated with a couple of other pieces made in horn from the collection.
00:41:28
Speaker
So, Adam, tell us about your encounter with the Spillman beaker in question.
00:41:37
Speaker
And was it sort of like the shoehorn coming out of nowhere and sort of surprised to you?
00:41:47
Speaker
Or how did you come across it?
00:41:49
Speaker
Well, these were originally made and intended to be beakers, so they're a little bit different.
00:41:56
Speaker
They have much straighter sides.
00:41:58
Speaker
They're engraved as well.
00:41:59
Speaker
The example I handled is just horn.
00:42:03
Speaker
The other two have silver collars or rings or mounts.
00:42:12
Speaker
So now we're in the late 18th century, so we are moving away from those 16th century motifs that relate to the Tudor family, and here we are already seeing figural representation.
00:42:24
Speaker
We have a farmer plowing, and we see
00:42:28
Speaker
harbors and birds and we see neoclassical motifs and neoclassical buildings but they're still a bit naive and they sort of have this sort of stilted forced perspective.
00:42:40
Speaker
But Ed, would you rather talk about the Beakers as a group as two of them were already in the collection and you might be able to tell a better story about the entire group?
00:42:58
Speaker
Okie do.
00:42:59
Speaker
Sure thing.
00:43:00
Speaker
I can give that a go.
00:43:03
Speaker
So there are three Spillman cups in the collection and it was working with Adam on the possibility of bringing the Minden pieces, including those in the publication, that brought to light the third of these three cups.
00:43:29
Speaker
your listeners will be able to see online but they are a complete joy because they are a riot of engravings sort of totally eccentric and actually the three cups are quite different even though they take the same in terms of the decoration they have an identical horn form two of the three are
00:43:59
Speaker
bare silver mounts.
00:44:01
Speaker
The third seems to have lost those mounts.
00:44:07
Speaker
but all have this most wonderful decoration.
00:44:11
Speaker
The two objects that are dated bear dates of 1788 and an inscription that reads, a view of Powderham Castle in the county of Devonshire, and then the names of John and Mary Ann Page of Ludham, Norfolk, June 7th, 1788.
00:44:32
Speaker
So it's unclear to us, at least at this distance, as to the significance of Powderham Castle to either the married couple,
00:44:44
Speaker
John and Mary, who were at that point coming up, they were just shy of their 20-year wedding anniversary.
00:44:56
Speaker
Perhaps they had visited Paldrum Castle.
00:44:59
Speaker
But I think it's equally possible that Nathaniel Spillman, who was an engraver in his own right, had access to Samuel and Nathaniel Buck's engravings of
00:45:11
Speaker
and just used this as a whimsical and sort of pleasant decoration for his cup made for this married couple.
00:45:26
Speaker
The other, the undated cup, which is just entirely riotous, depicts a
00:45:36
Speaker
sort of a chest of drawers out of which springs a plethora of musical instruments above which are a number of small but immediately recognizable masonic symbols and above that it's again is a sort of a banderol that reads in capital letters success to the sons of harmony
00:46:05
Speaker
And it could sound a little bit like a heavy metal band, but were in fact a small group of Norwich-based bands.
00:46:17
Speaker
musicians who belonged to a masonic lodge based there and we know from various newspapers of the period that they performed up and down norwich as part of an annual feast in 1791 so in a way this object can be dated because it can be tethered to the history of this of this group i think what's nice for me at least is just
00:46:46
Speaker
is digging out these odd stories, these lesser known characters.
00:46:52
Speaker
I think often the grand narratives of American and British history, particularly seen through the decorative arts, can tend to flatten history in a way that writes people like Spillman and the owners of these cups out of history.
00:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's quite an interesting set of stories.
00:47:16
Speaker
I'm curious, you know, we have crossed about two centuries between the shoehorns and these beakers, and yet they're both made with the same materials.
00:47:28
Speaker
Are they also made using some comparable methods?
00:47:33
Speaker
I mean, what do you think the crafting process was like for these objects relative to each other?
00:47:42
Speaker
But yes, I mean, I think the technology... Go on, Adam, sorry.
00:47:46
Speaker
Did you want to say something?
00:47:49
Speaker
All I was going to say is that, you know, you really eloquently described the way in which the shoe horns have been made.
00:47:55
Speaker
I assumed that the cups are actually a little more straightforward because they are just a horn that is sort of truncated at either end and then given a wooden...
00:48:11
Speaker
base and then the silver mount to sort of bring it all together.
00:48:18
Speaker
But I think what's nice and certainly interesting for me is that they are both products of the same parts of the country and do show this wonderful continuity in craftsmanship over the centuries.
00:48:34
Speaker
And that same compulsion to inscribe and to decorate and for our purposes, importantly, to date as well, the objects and to record the names of the people who owned them and who commissioned them.
00:48:53
Speaker
And that gives them this wonderful immediacy and humanity, which is such an important aspect of the Bryan Collection.
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, so we've really taken quite a journey here.
00:49:08
Speaker
I think we've covered quite a bit of ground.
00:49:11
Speaker
And, you know, I just want to take a moment and leap ahead to the present.
00:49:16
Speaker
You know, these objects are going into this book, which, as you're listening to this, will be available very shortly, if not already.
00:49:31
Speaker
And the pieces are in a private collection, but clearly have now attracted the attention of the two of you and presumably will attract the attention of others from a scholarly perspective, from a connessorial, but also just the perspective of people interested in history and storytelling.
00:49:55
Speaker
Where do they go next?
00:49:56
Speaker
What happens next and what do you think the future holds for these pieces?
00:50:03
Speaker
Well, there is a history of collecting the shoehorns.
00:50:08
Speaker
There are articles from the Society of Antiquaries from the late 19th century and Percival Griffiths, the great collector of English furniture, was known to have at least one, maybe two shoehorns by Minden.
00:50:21
Speaker
And so, you know, that's why I think it's the fascinating thing about collecting is in bringing these objects together, we sort of understand them better and with, you know, in context with each other.
00:50:36
Speaker
And by publishing them, you know, it puts the information out there and sort of encourages others to become interested.
00:50:47
Speaker
and perhaps more objects by MINDAM will come to be known.
00:50:53
Speaker
And hopefully they'll come with more information that will sort of put the whole sort of group into sort of a greater context and understanding.
00:51:06
Speaker
Ed, what do you think?
00:51:07
Speaker
Do you have plans or intentions beyond the current publication?
00:51:16
Speaker
Um, as, oh gosh, um, I think my, my main ambition, um,
00:51:24
Speaker
for the book now and moving forward is that it is enjoyed by people.
00:51:29
Speaker
That was always a goal of Mr. Brydon.
00:51:33
Speaker
Much of that was the spirit in which he collected these objects.
00:51:38
Speaker
This was so that they could be studied, better understood, but most importantly enjoyed.
00:51:44
Speaker
There is that so many of the objects have, I know it's a dangerous word to use, but they have charm and a tremendous
00:51:54
Speaker
humanity to them.
00:51:56
Speaker
And there is so much within this book in terms of the variety, everything from, you know, pots, you know, teapots to tape measures, barber bowls, porringes, you name it, it's in the book.
00:52:15
Speaker
So I really hope that there's something here for everyone and that it will inspire not only
00:52:23
Speaker
further research and improve knowledge of the makers and the people who own these objects.
00:52:31
Speaker
But will also inspire a new generation of collectors as well.
00:52:35
Speaker
Because I think something that comes out of working with Adam is that often with objects of this type, it's so important to... There is great value in bringing things together.
00:52:51
Speaker
either in a collection or in this case, both in a collection and a publication.
00:52:57
Speaker
New things come to light, new patterns emerge, and we get further insights into the past.
00:53:04
Speaker
Well, I think those are excellent aspirations, and I wish you well with the publication.
00:53:11
Speaker
And thank you both so much for bringing these objects to our attention and sharing their stories with us.
00:53:18
Speaker
I really appreciate your time and your expertise.
00:53:22
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:53:23
Speaker
Thank you, Ben.
00:53:30
Speaker
That's our show for today.
00:53:31
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:53:32
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed it.
00:53:33
Speaker
Next episode, I'll be speaking with a specialist at Christie's and a very special consigner about some French decorative arts pieces in an upcoming sale of theirs.
00:53:40
Speaker
So stay tuned for that.
00:53:42
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:53:45
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm your host, Ben Miller.