Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: The pandemic has put a halt to a huge number of museum exhibitions.
Speaker: Some of them have been delayed and others canceled.
Speaker: But the curatorial process continues.
Speaker: And Edward Towne of the Yale Center for British Art has been working on a catalog that they'll be publishing this October.
Speaker: The book is called Marking Time, Objects, People, and Their Lives.
Speaker: and you can pre-order it now.
Speaker: The subject is a private collection of nearly 500 objects from Britain between the years 1500 and 1800.
Speaker: These are mostly small objects, keepsakes, and personal effects, and with a few exceptions, they are all marked with a date.
Speaker: That's either the year they were made or another date that's significant in some way in the life of the object.
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.
Speaker: The catalog features several essays, including one by my guest from this program, Glenn Adamson.
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.
Speaker: Adam is a dealer and a scholar here in New York, and several of the objects in the book came through him.
Speaker: So Adam's research has uncovered some exciting information about these pieces, which he'll be telling us about today.
Speaker: And along with Ed, he is one of the young people to watch in the antiques world.
Speaker: So I'm very excited to be having this conversation with the two of them.
Speaker: Adam and Ed, thanks for joining me.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben.
Speaker: Thank you.
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?
Speaker: Well, Ben, it's rather generous of you to call me a scholar, but thank you.
Speaker: I am a dealer, and I have handled four of the items that are being featured in this publication.
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.
Speaker: There's a third shoe horn by Mindham that's already in the collection.
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.
Speaker: And then lastly, there are three horn beakers by a man named Nathaniel Spillman that are quite interesting as well.
Speaker: Tell me about how you initially encountered these objects and what did you think when you first came across them?
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
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
Speaker: And it looks like any other shoehorn.
Speaker: They really haven't changed all that much.
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.
Speaker: And many of Mindam's
Speaker: shoe horns at the end, at the tapered end, they sort of curl up into a sharp tip.
Speaker: Subsequently, many of them have been lost through use and they've broken off.
Speaker: And then another thing that happens with these shoe horns is that the rounded tops get abraded from use.
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.
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.
Speaker: But it comes from a period when more and more people are wearing shoes with soft backs to them.
Speaker: Apparently, they needed an instrument in order to help them in their dressing and getting these shoes on.
Speaker: So sort of indicative of a certain period in dress.
Speaker: And this is a little outside of your normal area of specialty, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah, I do mostly furniture and decorative objects.
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.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: This is not the Paul Storr style, you know, put in the grand dining hall, you know, adorn the palaces of the rich and famous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: These would have been made for every, you know, everyday ordinary people.
Speaker: And the Horners...
Speaker: We're actually a strictly regulated guild called the Worshipful Company of Horners, which dates back to 1284.
Speaker: And Mindem actually wasn't a member.
Speaker: So there have been discussions whether he was doing this professionally or just sort of his amateur work.
Speaker: His origins may be a little unclear, but I want to get to Mindem himself a bit later in the conversation.
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.
Speaker: And sometimes things catch my eye and sometimes I know a little bit about them and sometimes I'm completely perplexed.
Speaker: I don't know anything about them.
Speaker: When you came across this shoehorn, was it a form you were familiar with?
Speaker: Did you already have some idea of how to evaluate its quality and its rarity and its value?
Speaker: Or did it just strike you as an object and then you sort of did your homework afterwards?
Speaker: What was your experience of it?
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.
Speaker: to this day and it was so beautifully decorated, engraved and the engraving sort of inked or stained.
Speaker: And so after encountering it, I did my research and luckily because of
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then so you acquired the piece or you had an idea of who might be interested in it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I became aware of the publication and became aware of the work that Ed was doing.
Speaker: And that's when I thought, as a dated object, this would be a great thing to include.
Speaker: And then that's where sort of the other pieces followed because there was another shoehorn in the collection.
Speaker: And then later we uncovered the beaker, I'm sorry, not the beaker, the powder horn.
Speaker: That's then later been sort of converted into a beaker form or sort of a drinking horn form.
Speaker: And all three objects made it to the Bryan Collection in time to be photographed and catalogued for the publication.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So now, how exactly did you connect with Ed?
Speaker: And Ed, maybe you can answer this from your perspective, too.
Speaker: You know, Adam, you're a dealer and Ed, you're a curator.
Speaker: You sort of exist in slightly different worlds, but they overlap.
Speaker: So for our listeners who may not fit into either of those categories, what does that relationship look like?
Speaker: And how do you start the conversation about something like this shoehorn?
Speaker: Should I take this, Adam?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I think I'd probably start by saying a little bit about the collection itself.
Speaker: This is a collection really like no other in so far of its depth and its reach.
Speaker: And it was put together by John Bryan, businessman, philanthropist and collector.
Speaker: who over the course of a number of decades assembled a really remarkable collection of fine and decorative arts.
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
Speaker: shipping containers worth of brown furniture, I think it's fair to say, of sort of dubious quality back to the States.
Speaker: But that gave him the bug.
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.
Speaker: And over the years, one aspect 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,
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?
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.
Speaker: But that was all to change.
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
Speaker: quirky caveat that the object had to carry a date, it had to be dated.
Speaker: And this gave birth, gave rise to a really, really sort of interesting, an interesting collection.
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,
Speaker: from up and down the social ladder of Britain from the early modern period.
Speaker: But with this interesting proviso that the object had to be dated.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, of course, you have to collect something, right, if you're going to be a collector.
Speaker: So dates are certainly, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the really interesting things, really interesting aspects of the collection and then this book as well.
Speaker: Because, yeah, as you say, he had to collect something.
Speaker: I mean, in a way, Mr. Brian collected everything.
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...
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.
Speaker: Because one of the central arguments of the book
Speaker: is that during this period, there was a phenomenon of dating objects.
Speaker: This is not to say that people didn't date objects before, nor that they didn't continue to date objects afterwards.
Speaker: But there's something particular and almost peculiar about...
Speaker: this early modern period and people's compulsion to date objects.
Speaker: And that may well be at the hands of the maker, such as Robert Mindon.
Speaker: And one of the wonderful quirks of the Bryan Collection now, and thanks to sort of
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.
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.
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...
Speaker: lesser known craftsman such as Mindem, who's actually only really come to light through this publication.
Speaker: And for the first time we've been able to really identify where Mindem was active, where he was working.
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.
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.
Speaker: And in one case, records the names of the person who commissioned the object and the person to whom it was given.
Speaker: So we get an immediate sense that these shoehorns are made
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.
Speaker: And I think this is why some objects like this are just so valuable and have this incredible immediacy.
Speaker: What Adam was describing is just that sort of moment of being bowled over upon encountering such a
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.
Speaker: Yes, Ed, I agree with you completely.
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.
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,
Speaker: you start seeing the rise of the middling sort.
Speaker: And they finally have enough material wealth to buy things, you know, comforts and luxuries beyond the standard necessities.
Speaker: And by the 18th century, we see the beginnings of industrialization and sort of a full-blown capitalism that we'd recognize today.
Speaker: So I think when people are sort of owning things for the first time,
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.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: That is writ large across the book and can be seen in the objects, in the Mindum objects.
Speaker: They document that really nicely.
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...
Speaker: under government mandates, churches started keeping accurate records by law of the births, marriages and deaths up and down the nation.
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.
Speaker: But
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
Speaker: by bringing it together.
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.
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.
Speaker: Shoehorns, as you've said, we still have them today.
Speaker: They're still useful objects.
Speaker: I don't know if everyone has a shoehorn, but certainly some people do.
Speaker: But we're talking about pieces that weren't used 400 years ago, or actually more.
Speaker: What role did the shoehorn play 430 years ago?
Speaker: Where did it originate?
Speaker: Is the form even older than that?
Speaker: Was it a common household item, or was it restricted to certain groups of people or certain cultures?
Speaker: Just to give me a little context there.
Speaker: I cannot claim to be any type of authority on shoe horns.
Speaker: But to my understanding, these are the earliest dated shoe horns that are known certainly from Britain.
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.
Speaker: As you said, I don't know how many people
Speaker: still own shoehorns.
Speaker: My track record with shoehorns is not great.
Speaker: They tend to come with a decent pair of shoes.
Speaker: But today, being made of plastic, promptly snap after two attempts to get the shoe on.
Speaker: It's amazing that these shoehorns have survived, presumably, you know,
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.
Speaker: The 1596 one in the Bryan Collection, which has this beautiful depiction of an Elizabethan woman with her arm.
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.
Speaker: somewhere, I assume, in Pride of Place in the household.
Speaker: And I think the depiction of a woman of, I would suggest, the middling sort, she wears a hat and a falling ruff.
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?
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.
Speaker: I get the sense that these are people that are living in a rural part of the country.
Speaker: who seem to have had a degree of disposable income, but they're by no means wealthy people.
Speaker: These are not people who are medirous or had any role necessarily in local government.
Speaker: These were
Speaker: again, to use a sort of a vague term, but I think it's precisely this group of people who,
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Every day of the week in on silver.
Speaker: I mean, that's the first thing you do, isn't it?
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.
Speaker: But these are quite quotidian.
Speaker: These are everyday objects.
Speaker: And these people didn't have those and those those armadourous devices to to serve their ends.
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.
Speaker: Because, of course, that's what you need a shoehorn for.
Speaker: With these things, it's sort of murky.
Speaker: We don't have the first shoehorn.
Speaker: And I'm sure there's evidence of them being used in the Middle Ages.
Speaker: We do know that Elizabeth I of England, she bought 18 shoehorns from her shoemaker, Garrett Johnson.
Speaker: And then she also bought more steel from her blacksmiths.
Speaker: Isn't that a bit much?
Speaker: Isn't 18 a bit much?
Speaker: Well, I mean, who knows if she was using it for her court or courtiers.
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.
Speaker: But what I think is so amazing about the Mindem pieces is that they,
Speaker: They give us a snapshot of an ordinary community.
Speaker: And I think this is the thing that Edward has been talking about.
Speaker: And that's what sort of makes them amazing.
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.
Speaker: But here we're starting to see ordinary people owning objects of quality.
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.
Speaker: But the decoration on these really is extraordinary.
Speaker: I mean, I encourage people to look at the images of these.
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.
Speaker: And I wonder if this is the sort of object that a middle to upper middle class person might have owned.
Speaker: I mean, gosh, what sort of shoehorns would Queen Elizabeth have been buying?
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?
Speaker: Well, it's difficult to say.
Speaker: I mean, I think these sort of stand out on their own.
Speaker: There's sort of very little to compare them with.
Speaker: But in some ways, if you think about it, horn was very common.
Speaker: It was everywhere.
Speaker: It was sort of like the Elizabethan plastic.
Speaker: And, you know, plastic is actually, was invented to sort of imitate natural materials like horn, tortoise, or ivory.
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.
Speaker: And that's what it is.
Speaker: It's basically a horn that's been split in half.
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.
Speaker: And then engraved.
Speaker: And the engraving is actually sort of a fairly easy form of decoration.
Speaker: It wouldn't have required as much training as, let's say, you know, carving or something, which very easily would, you know,
Speaker: which you would need more training for.
Speaker: And then he sort of repeats these graphic motifs of the Tudoros, crowns, fleur-de-lis, scales, cross-hatching, and trees.
Speaker: So in some ways, the material and the technology would have been fairly simple and commonplace.
Speaker: But I still think these objects are remarkable survivors of their age and quite special.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
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.
Speaker: And fun to speculate as well as to whether or not these objects ever left the vicinity as it happens.
Speaker: The earliest dated Shuhun by Mindem of 1593 is now in the Museum of London.
Speaker: We know, thanks to the inscription, was made for someone described by Mindem as Hamlet Rasdale or Rochdale.
Speaker: who Mindon proudly described on the shoehorn as the Cooper of London.
Speaker: And London spelled sort of curiously with an A at the end.
Speaker: So clearly Mindon was not familiar with London as a place, perhaps understandable given that he was in London.
Speaker: quite a quiet backwater of East Anglia.
Speaker: But interesting to think about this
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,
Speaker: these most beautiful works of art, as you describe.
Speaker: Yeah, as if, like,
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.
Speaker: So, you know, whereas there are some motifs that are familiar to us that appear on the horns, there's a
Speaker: a stylized Tudor rose and something that looks a little bit like a bishop's mitre across a band of decoration.
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.
Speaker: This was his decoration, this was his work and remarkably he was proud of it as well.
Speaker: You know, we're dealing
Speaker: of a period, um, where it was rare even for court painters to claim authorship of their work.
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,
Speaker: important to those of his patrons.
Speaker: One wonders what they made of it and whether or not they cared a great deal whether they owned a Mindum shoehorn.
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.
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.
Speaker: It also just shows what a powerful symbol a Tudor rose was.
Speaker: I mean, it's fairly new.
Speaker: It came from Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII.
Speaker: And then we see this man continuing to use it.
Speaker: And you can speculate.
Speaker: It just sort of shows how removed from London he is possibly.
Speaker: But, you know, it's sort of a glimpse into the common man's understanding of the world, which is quite interesting.
Speaker: Back with Adam Ambrose and Edward Town in just a moment.
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.
Speaker: Thank you so much to those of you who are supporting the podcast by subscribing or leaving a rating or writing a review or telling someone else about it.
Speaker: If you enjoy the show, these are all great ways to help us reach new listeners.
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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.
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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.
Speaker: In this case, it's a powder horn.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Immediately looking at it, it looks like a beaker.
Speaker: And you can look, if you imagine the horn, you can sort of see approximately where, you know, that the piece came from.
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.
Speaker: At some point, we do have one
Speaker: example of a powder horn made by Mindem, and it's in the Museum of the City of London.
Speaker: And there we see the full form.
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.
Speaker: Again, because we sort of have a different relationship to objects today
Speaker: than we did so many years ago where nothing was disposable.
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.
Speaker: When you have beef, you use every part of the animal and this would have come naturally from that.
Speaker: Anyways, it just shows that these objects had always been cared for and that someone, you know, had this object and unfortunately it was damaged, but they went through the effort of having it.
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
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.
Speaker: It retains some remarkable decoration of the Tudor rose and
Speaker: birds and fleur-de-lis and these scrolls and vegetation, which is really amazing.
Speaker: But this is the first time that it's ever been published.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, it was clearly a much loved and cherished object, I think.
Speaker: That's the nice thing about it.
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,
Speaker: it won't stand up on its own.
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.
Speaker: That's very funny.
Speaker: It's almost like a stirrup cup.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: That was always going to be a danger, wasn't it, with the shape?
Speaker: So it is inherently top-heavy.
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
Speaker: known.
Speaker: Surely there are more out there waiting to be discovered.
Speaker: But this is, I think, three years prior to his death.
Speaker: I think we're now confident that he was the Robert Mendham.
Speaker: Well, you're both sketching quite an interesting portrait of this fellow Robert Mendham.
Speaker: But there's another name that we wanted to bring into the mix, and that is Spillman.
Speaker: a name which is associated with a couple of other pieces made in horn from the collection.
Speaker: So, Adam, tell us about your encounter with the Spillman beaker in question.
Speaker: And was it sort of like the shoehorn coming out of nowhere and sort of surprised to you?
Speaker: Or how did you come across it?
Speaker: Well, these were originally made and intended to be beakers, so they're a little bit different.
Speaker: They have much straighter sides.
Speaker: They're engraved as well.
Speaker: The example I handled is just horn.
Speaker: The other two have silver collars or rings or mounts.
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.
Speaker: We have a farmer plowing, and we see
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.
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?
Speaker: Okie do.
Speaker: Sure thing.
Speaker: I can give that a go.
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.
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
Speaker: bare silver mounts.
Speaker: The third seems to have lost those mounts.
Speaker: but all have this most wonderful decoration.
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.
Speaker: So it's unclear to us, at least at this distance, as to the significance of Powderham Castle to either the married couple,
Speaker: John and Mary, who were at that point coming up, they were just shy of their 20-year wedding anniversary.
Speaker: Perhaps they had visited Paldrum Castle.
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
Speaker: and just used this as a whimsical and sort of pleasant decoration for his cup made for this married couple.
Speaker: The other, the undated cup, which is just entirely riotous, depicts a
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
Speaker: And it could sound a little bit like a heavy metal band, but were in fact a small group of Norwich-based bands.
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
Speaker: is digging out these odd stories, these lesser known characters.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, it's quite an interesting set of stories.
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.
Speaker: Are they also made using some comparable methods?
Speaker: I mean, what do you think the crafting process was like for these objects relative to each other?
Speaker: But yes, I mean, I think the technology... Go on, Adam, sorry.
Speaker: Did you want to say something?
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.
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...
Speaker: base and then the silver mount to sort of bring it all together.
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.
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.
Speaker: And that gives them this wonderful immediacy and humanity, which is such an important aspect of the Bryan Collection.
Speaker: Yeah, so we've really taken quite a journey here.
Speaker: I think we've covered quite a bit of ground.
Speaker: And, you know, I just want to take a moment and leap ahead to the present.
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.
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.
Speaker: Where do they go next?
Speaker: What happens next and what do you think the future holds for these pieces?
Speaker: Well, there is a history of collecting the shoehorns.
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.
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.
Speaker: And by publishing them, you know, it puts the information out there and sort of encourages others to become interested.
Speaker: and perhaps more objects by MINDAM will come to be known.
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.
Speaker: Ed, what do you think?
Speaker: Do you have plans or intentions beyond the current publication?
Speaker: Um, as, oh gosh, um, I think my, my main ambition, um,
Speaker: for the book now and moving forward is that it is enjoyed by people.
Speaker: That was always a goal of Mr. Brydon.
Speaker: Much of that was the spirit in which he collected these objects.
Speaker: This was so that they could be studied, better understood, but most importantly enjoyed.
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
Speaker: humanity to them.
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.
Speaker: So I really hope that there's something here for everyone and that it will inspire not only
Speaker: further research and improve knowledge of the makers and the people who own these objects.
Speaker: But will also inspire a new generation of collectors as well.
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.
Speaker: either in a collection or in this case, both in a collection and a publication.
Speaker: New things come to light, new patterns emerge, and we get further insights into the past.
Speaker: Well, I think those are excellent aspirations, and I wish you well with the publication.
Speaker: And thank you both so much for bringing these objects to our attention and sharing their stories with us.
Speaker: I really appreciate your time and your expertise.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben.
Speaker: That's our show for today.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed it.
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.
Speaker: So stay tuned for that.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm your host, Ben Miller.
