Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: What is it about the age of sale that is so damn enticing?
Speaker: I don't know about you, but if I hear five seconds of a sea shanty, I'm just there.
Speaker: I'm smelling brine, I'm feeling the salt spray on my face, I'm probably wearing a tricorn or I'm climbing the crow's nest, or because I'm a decorative arts nerd, I am etching scrimshaw on a walrus tusk or a coconut shell, or I'm whittling some woodwork, or maybe on a bad day, I'm assembling a Napoleonic prisoner of war ship bottle.
Speaker: The point is, it's a historic moment and a historic setting that is so sensory and visceral and that so captures the imagination.
Speaker: And part of that is the sense of adventure, the exploration and global travel and trade.
Speaker: And then part of it is the actual sailing, the maps and reckoning and sextants and spy scopes and, you know, the risk taking of it all, that sense that you will run into problems and solving those problems might be the difference between living and drowning.
Speaker: And because I am a decorative arts nerd, and maybe you are too, I love the objects and the works of art that make me feel those feelings.
Speaker: And I'm pleased to report that I have found a place full of these evocative things.
Speaker: It's called the Independence Seaport Museum.
Speaker: And I'm sitting in their offices right now.
Speaker: We're in Philadelphia, right on the Delaware River.
Speaker: And it's actually important that it's on the river because they have two actual ships that you can visit alongside everything else.
Speaker: I am so pleased to be partnering with the ISM to bring you two episodes about two remarkable pieces in their collection.
Speaker: One is a book of flag signals that is going to take us on a wild ride through the American Revolution and one of its most famous admirals and the critical importance and huge difficulty of communicating between ships across the sea.
Speaker: We'll get to that one next week.
Speaker: But for this week, our curious object is a watercolor that was recently the subject of a major research breakthrough.
Speaker: And it's going to introduce us to a mysterious folk artist who also knew his way around a ship.
Speaker: And it reveals a fascinating relationship that he had with his mentor, who just happened to be the father of the US Navy.
Speaker: Joining me is ISM president and CEO, Peter Siebert.
Speaker: Peter, welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Welcome to Philadelphia.
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, Thank you very much.
Speaker: Now, are you ready for some rapid fire questions?
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, I am ready.
Speaker: I've had three cheese steaks, so I am stoked.
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, You're in the mood.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: How's your pirate accent?
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, Arrgh, I'm not sure maybe how it is today.
Speaker: PETER SIBERTT, God.
Speaker: Wow, that was so much better than I was expecting.
Speaker: What's your favorite sea shanty?
Speaker: I'm dang nabbit.
Speaker: I don't have one because I'm sort of more of an Aerosmith guy than a Sea Shandy guy.
Speaker: Well, after that pirate accident, I was really expecting you to break out.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I was going to break out, and I've had people who do it, but, you know, I just, it never was quite my cup of tea.
Speaker: I can't carry a tune.
Speaker: I can't carry a log.
Speaker: I can't carry anything.
Speaker: Okay, you're gonna have to practice that and get back to this.
Speaker: I will work on it.
Speaker: What's the oldest object that you personally own?
Speaker: The oldest object in my own collection, so I collect ancient coins, so I'm going back to definitely some BC stuff, which is pretty cool.
Speaker: That was like the earliest thing I started to collect, you know, when I went through the phases of stamps, coins, Indian stuff, and then, you know, got to college and had to figure out how to furnish an apartment.
Speaker: Yeah, we've all been there.
Speaker: So you can travel back in time to take a ride on any historic ship.
Speaker: What are you choosing?
Speaker: I think I'd want to be there with John Smith coming up the Susquehanna River and exploring Pennsylvania.
Speaker: You know, because Smith, you know, he comes up, he arrives in Pennsylvania, he's wandering and then he goes back to England and he writes this book which was so all about selling books.
Speaker: You know, the Indians are six feet tall, they are 16 feet tall, they have calves that are 36 inches in diameter.
Speaker: I'd like to see what he actually saw.
Speaker: I think that's what I want to see.
Speaker: Plus, it would have been very, very cool to see all the areas that now are so developed that would have been pristine forest, which here in the East, there just aren't a whole lot of those places left.
Speaker: The ISM actually owns the World War II submarine, the Bakuna.
Speaker: Am I saying that right?
Speaker: That is right.
Speaker: On a scale of one to 10, how much would you hate to be part of that crew?
Speaker: With 10 being like...
Speaker: Like which one?
Speaker: The worst.
Speaker: 10 is the worst.
Speaker: You would hate it the most.
Speaker: Okay, so I'd be a 35 on that scale of 1 to 10.
Speaker: Definitely not.
Speaker: You know, I've been in a lot of those World War II submarines, and I have to admire the folks.
Speaker: They definitely have the temperament.
Speaker: I'm not claustrophobic until I get into that submarine.
Speaker: And then I think like most people, I'm like, yeah, get me the hell out of here.
Speaker: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Speaker: So let's say you've just commissioned a spiffy new galleon to sail the high seas.
Speaker: What figurehead are you going to put on the prowl?
Speaker: Oh, I would have to like steal the one from the museum that we just had restored because we spent so much time restoring her.
Speaker: I feel like I know her inside and out.
Speaker: Don't let my wife hear me say that.
Speaker: But Mary is her name and she's just magnificent.
Speaker: Sort of 1820s, the wind is blowing through her hair, pushing back her dress, not in an immodest way, just in a...
Speaker: sailing kind of way.
Speaker: And a very, very cool ship's figurehead.
Speaker: So, Mary, done by William Rush, I'd steal from the museum and no one would ever notice.
Speaker: Our curator, I just pretended to tell him, I borrowed it for the weekend and that's who we'd put on.
Speaker: That's too bad.
Speaker: We just got you on record.
Speaker: What is the best movie about the age of sail and why is it Master and Commander?
Speaker: Oh, it is Master Commander.
Speaker: You can't stop.
Speaker: There's no contest, right?
Speaker: No contest.
Speaker: It's the coolest movie.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: I mean, it's well shot and, you know, you get that sense of the unknown.
Speaker: And what I liked about it actually was, is it sort of showed the unknown aspects of sailing.
Speaker: You know, the older movies, it's amazing how fast you go, never accounting for dead wind or dead space.
Speaker: And that movie really catches that really, really well.
Speaker: I mean, it was either that or like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Speaker: And I went from Astro Commander, so, you know.
Speaker: Nice choice.
Speaker: How historically accurate is that movie overall?
Speaker: I think it's pretty accurate.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not a scholar of that time period, but my sense is that it's pretty darn good.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: I find it, as I say, it's one of those ones you can watch over and over again.
Speaker: You know, if I'm needing it to watch on YouTube, I could just pull it up because it definitely is a good one.
Speaker: And it is funny because you ask people the question, you know, what's the movie?
Speaker: That is the one they remember more than anything else.
Speaker: Yeah, I bet.
Speaker: It's so visceral.
Speaker: What piece in the Seaport Museum's collection would you say visitors are most surprised by?
Speaker: That's actually a really interesting question because I think our mission has evolved over the years so many different ways that when they come in and they see some of the things we have in general, and I'll hone it down from there, but they just assume, oh, you're a boat museum.
Speaker: Oh, you're a museum of ships of the world.
Speaker: And then they come in and they'll see, for example, downstairs this tin figure that looks like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz.
Speaker: And it's, where did that come from?
Speaker: And then there's a bicycle not far from, where'd that come from?
Speaker: Both of them came from the Philadelphia Navy shipyard, which was a huge employer here, built many, many important ships over time.
Speaker: The Tin Man was made by the workers there for a kind of a family worker Sunday
Speaker: to do to show what their families, what they could do.
Speaker: It's very cool.
Speaker: The bicycle is because the place is so freaking huge.
Speaker: They have bicycles to get around and they made them available to their workers.
Speaker: So, hey, I got to get over that building, hop on the company bike and get over there.
Speaker: Both of those things speak to the stories that we tell here, but in completely atypical of what people think they might see here.
Speaker: We'll be right back with Peter Siebert and the Independent Seaport Museum, which, by the way, has just opened a brand new entrance and a major redesign.
Speaker: So even if you've been here before, this might be a great time to go back.
Speaker: If you'd like to see images of today's curious object, which I know you do, you can see those at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: If there's something you'd like to tell me about today's episode or a topic you'd like to hear about on Curious Objects, or just say hi, you can reach me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: I always love to hear from you.
Speaker: And I know you've heard me say this a million times, but I'll say it again because it really does help me out when you, dear listener, open up your podcast app and go to the Curious Objects podcast page and then go to ratings and reviews and give us one.
Speaker: Those ratings are what tells the algorithm that people like the show and that it should nudge more people to listen to it.
Speaker: So it really only takes a few seconds and you will receive my eternal gratitude, which I think is a pretty good deal.
Speaker: Now, Peter, we are talking today about a watercolor.
Speaker: It is about 16 by 24 inches.
Speaker: There's a lot going on in this picture, but tell me, just looking at this before we get into the discoveries that your staff has made, what do you see?
Speaker: Well, it's fascinating.
Speaker: The first time that I saw it, it looked like one of those wonderful New England watercolors you see of the husband and wife seated on a painted floor covering with a window and a pot of geranium.
Speaker: You know, Davis was the big artist who did all those.
Speaker: And it struck me that bit, except it sort of took a lot of steroids because it's very large.
Speaker: And there's a whole lot more going on in here than you've seen.
Speaker: And then you look at the profile and you think, well, maybe it's this whole tradition of watercolor profiles.
Speaker: But again, it's kind of over the top because you have two men holding maritime instruments.
Speaker: One seated, the other one standing, gesturing with it.
Speaker: Behind them, you know, is a pair of globes.
Speaker: And then you've got the artist who is clearly showing off.
Speaker: I mean, there's no two ways about it.
Speaker: He's got an open window with a little landscape out the window and then he's got two paintings on the wall and he's depicted both of those, the scenes in both of those of a maritime scene.
Speaker: So, you know, it's clearly an artist who
Speaker: wasn't just gonna do, I'm gonna catch the moment and that's all that's gonna be a very literal work.
Speaker: It was somebody who was definitely taking it up a couple of notches and saying, hey, I've got some artistic talent here.
Speaker: It's one of those ones that all the folks who write books about interiors will love because it's got a great painted floor.
Speaker: It's got Windsor chairs.
Speaker: It's got curtain details.
Speaker: It's got all those things that, you know, you want to do an 1820s house.
Speaker: This is, you know, this is the one to address.
Speaker: But it's a fascinating work.
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, personally, I love a painting within a painting.
Speaker: Any kind of meta art, it just hits my buttons.
Speaker: But stylistically, at first glance, it might look, as you say, a little crude, sort of very, very folksy, but the devil is in the details.
Speaker: And as you look closer, you see the globes that you mentioned, which one of them is a globe of the earth, and one of them is a globe of the heavens, and the paintings on the walls.
Speaker: I mean, it's really a lot more sophisticated as you get into it, as you look at it more and more closely.
Speaker: So, I mean, how would you overall describe the style and the level of skill and quality that went into the production of the piece?
Speaker: Well, you're absolutely right.
Speaker: I mean, the composition is very well put together.
Speaker: Yes, I mean, as many of these sort of, you know, works are, it's a study of symmetry.
Speaker: You know, got to have it on the left, we'll have it on the right.
Speaker: You know, that is so inherent in painting of that period.
Speaker: What to me is really striking about it, beyond the incredible level of detail that's included in it, is the figures are engaged in action.
Speaker: You know, it's not like Jacob Mantell here in Pennsylvania,
Speaker: Mantell almost always had their hands in their pockets or behind their backs or sort of dangling loosely.
Speaker: Here you've got people gesturing and doing something.
Speaker: So there's some action that's brought into the composition, which I think makes it again, that and the scale really, I think are the two things that caught me the most when I first observed it, because it was very different and it's different both from New England and mid-Atlantic painting in the sense that it is not quite so rigid.
Speaker: You see a Davis, you see a Mantell, you can kind of pretty much pick them out.
Speaker: Here's one that you say, and then I guess this is always the question that haunts one,
Speaker: it's technically very good.
Speaker: So is this, and he's showing off.
Speaker: So is this the only one he ever did or are there others out there to be discovered?
Speaker: Yeah, so we're going to get into that later because I think that's such a tantalizing question.
Speaker: And I want to start to tease out a little bit of the process of discovery that's occurred around this picture because it's really fascinating.
Speaker: There's a reason that we're talking about it today and it's not just because it's a pretty picture.
Speaker: It's because there's a story behind it.
Speaker: And just to start to whet our appetite a little bit, tell us, you said that these two figures are engaged in action.
Speaker: What kind of action is it?
Speaker: So what it appears to be is that the seated figure and the standing figure, so they're two of them sort of facing each other, are engaged in some sort of
Speaker: what we believe is teaching.
Speaker: One is teaching the other one, and they're holding these mathematical instruments that are used for ocean navigation.
Speaker: You know, ocean navigation is an art and a science, and it's not one that,
Speaker: you don't want to take seriously because it's a big empty out there with not a lot of landmarks and hoping you'll see the mountains soon is probably not the best way to navigate.
Speaker: And so you really need to know what you're doing and you need to study that.
Speaker: And so you have these two figures, one clearly engaged in teaching the other one about what these devices are.
Speaker: And obviously, we know when you see, you know, in paintings of this period, someone shown with an object that represents their profession, it's intended to point out to you, this is a blacksmith, a butcher, you know, whatever it is, they're holding that tool of their trade.
Speaker: Here, you've got two of them, each of them holding a mathematical, you know, scientific instrument.
Speaker: that was part of their trade.
Speaker: So, it's revealing to us when you look at it what their jobs were, but it also very much of the positioning of it suggests that one is the older is probably teaching the younger what the heck these things are and why you need to know that.
Speaker: So the piece was actually just given to the ISM a few months ago.
Speaker: And your researchers went straight to work trying to understand the context behind it.
Speaker: But there was actually a clue.
Speaker: There was something else that the museum already had in its collection since 1984 that helped to get the ball rolling.
Speaker: What was that?
Speaker: Well, and this is such the story of collecting antiques and museums.
Speaker: The family had donated in the past this manuscript book, but they had removed the watercolor drawings that were in it.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I applaud them for wanting to reunite them.
Speaker: That is wonderful.
Speaker: I think everyone knows stories of pieces that were split up and one ends up one place and one ends up the other and they are never back together.
Speaker: In this case, we had a book that was very filled with mathematical calculations and practice.
Speaker: So, it suggested that whoever had the book and had kept the book was involved somehow in
Speaker: learning maritime navigation because he was practicing all of this and he was recording it as it happened.
Speaker: And we know that that's how people learned.
Speaker: It was a matter of copying and recopying and rote memorization in a lot of cases.
Speaker: So we had the clue, obviously, that whoever had that book
Speaker: and made those things probably was the student in the watercolor drawing.
Speaker: Because obviously, it seems to make some sense.
Speaker: It could have belonged to the teacher, but more than likely, it belonged to the student.
Speaker: And the timetable of the dates that were in the book certainly seemed to suggest that they blended very, very well.
Speaker: That, yeah, the young one in the watercolor and the keeper of the book were watercolors.
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Speaker: on in the same person.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And now there's another really important clue in this picture, which I've unfairly withheld from listeners until now, which is that the figures each are labeled with a name.
Speaker: And the older one who's seated is labeled I-Barry.
Speaker: And then the younger one standing up
Speaker: is labeled C. Buskirk.
Speaker: And that is a very tantalizing clue, but anyone who's tried to do genealogy or really any kind of historical research knows that tying a historic name to a particular person can be really tough.
Speaker: So can you talk me through that process for I, Barry, and C. Buskirk?
Speaker: Yeah, so the Buskirk one was the slightly easier of the two because it's a unique name.
Speaker: And we've seen it as Buskirk and Van Buskirk.
Speaker: So we know we have a Dutch link and we have ties up into New York and New England with that family.
Speaker: He's a little enigmatic because he seems to pop up there, pop up in Pennsylvania.
Speaker: And then at least one source places him in the hinterlands.
Speaker: So perhaps this wasn't his cup of tea, or maybe there's another one.
Speaker: And that's always the challenge when you do this kind of work, because there could be a father, a son, a cousin.
Speaker: You know, our ancestors had this
Speaker: unfortunate propensity for naming each other and carrying on these blooming family names.
Speaker: So, but Van Buskirk of Buskirk seems to be the owner and probably more than likely the artist because it matches up with the book and these watercolors were in the book.
Speaker: the I. Barry a little more complicated, but clearly the reference would be that the I is in fact a J, and we see of course an interchange of those two letters, and that would be J. Barry, more than likely John Barry, the father of the US Navy from here in Philadelphia.
Speaker: And our curator had noted, in fact, that Barry had, was recorded as having a rather ruddy complexion.
Speaker: In fact, a portrait of Barry hangs in my office.
Speaker: He and I chat a lot.
Speaker: And, you know, the watercolor figure now, maybe a little artistic-like, it's hard to say.
Speaker: Does seem to have a ruddy complexion as well.
Speaker: Barry was tall.
Speaker: He's the figure seated, so that doesn't help us a whole lot.
Speaker: But certainly,
Speaker: Barry had a knowledge of sailing.
Speaker: And the question then becomes, was Barry... What was Barry doing?
Speaker: Was this...
Speaker: his side gig.
Speaker: Today we all talk about side gigs.
Speaker: Was this a side gig in his time?
Speaker: Certainly there seems to be a lot of evidence.
Speaker: We can't find anything within Barry's writings, but Barry's writings are mostly his military and business writings, not necessarily anything about his side gigs.
Speaker: So I'm not...
Speaker: I don't think that's a negative that necessarily takes it away that he doesn't write about it.
Speaker: But certainly there's precedent that we see many of these, particularly military leaders, around the time of the revolution or right afterwards, kind of looking to pick up that side work.
Speaker: And so we suspect that Barry may have been teaching in his home, and that's the presumption, as this is Barry's home here in Philadelphia, teaching Buskirk or Van Buskirk
Speaker: the art and the science of maritime navigation.
Speaker: And that's pretty cool.
Speaker: That is very cool.
Speaker: And I'm so curious.
Speaker: So it's circumstantial evidence, of course, that we've been talking about.
Speaker: There wasn't necessarily the silver bullet where you discovered instantaneously this is who this was.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But this is how it often goes with historic research.
Speaker: You build up the case one bit at a time and gradually the picture starts to become clearer.
Speaker: And I wonder what the feeling was for you and the researchers here at the ISM as that started to come into focus, as you started to have a theory at least about who these people were.
Speaker: Well, you're absolutely right.
Speaker: I mean, it's why I joke to students sometimes they call it re-search because we're constantly going back and searching over and over and over and trying to, you know, peel it away.
Speaker: Or someone once said, you know, the study of the past is to look through a very dirty, cracked telescope.
Speaker: and some fleeting images and hope that those turn out to be... that what you're seeing is actually, you know, the reality of the moment, and you only see it through that narrow lens of the optic.
Speaker: And I think in this case, you know,
Speaker: The leap didn't take too far to realize that this was probably, I mean, obviously the name, this is Buskirk learning to do maritime navigation.
Speaker: That didn't take a bit of a leap.
Speaker: I think the bigger leap is, you know, John Barry and then John Barry, the father of the Navy, got a side gig teaching the art and mystery of
Speaker: maritime navigation.
Speaker: And I think it comes down to, as you noted, making some assumptions about how that was, how few people there were who were skilled in this, and even how a smaller number could actually teach it.
Speaker: You know, that's the thing.
Speaker: Well, he knows how to do it, but can he teach it?
Speaker: And I think in Barry's case, he had that ability to do so.
Speaker: And then it gives us this amazing sense of Barry's home.
Speaker: And I mean, it makes sense for a man of the sea to have the celestial and the sky and the earth globes and to have paintings of maritime scenes.
Speaker: All of that makes perfect sense then for him.
Speaker: And so assuming that it is John Barry, I mean, how did he go on to become the father of the US Navy?
Speaker: in the sense that his involvement really was in those years of the time of the revolution and just after trying to create a fledgling United States Navy, trying, recognizing that we were up against and would continue to be facing perils on the sea and that we were facing the greatest naval power that the world had ever known.
Speaker: And so, you know, he is charged with developing a fleet that ultimately would become the modern U.S. Navy.
Speaker: So in the scene, in the picture, you've mentioned the tools that they're holding, the fact that they're seemingly engaged in what might be a lesson.
Speaker: Tell me a little more about the situation, these tools, this lesson.
Speaker: Can this tell us something about the state of the nautical sciences in the 18th century?
Speaker: I'd love to say absolutely, but I don't think so because I'm not sure the technology, frankly, had evolved that much and won't evolve that much until really the 19th century.
Speaker: These are the same tools that had been used in many cases in the 17th century and arguably earlier than that, where you're simply relying upon the sun, the stars, a watch,
Speaker: charts and so forth to get you from point A to point B. That really doesn't change a whole heck of a lot over time and really, you know, arguably until modern GPS and other
Speaker: devices, and even people today who still study this, still study that same way of getting around, because they know they can be out there and lose that signal.
Speaker: So it's one of those, to my mind, I think the maritime skills are one of those things that will always have that relevancy, because one cannot assume that
Speaker: modern technology will completely replace it.
Speaker: So most modern sailors might not be familiar with those, you know, the tools for shooting the sun and shooting the stars to determine your place, but they would have some sense of all of that and would have some knowledge of maritime navigation.
Speaker: So even if they're not familiar with those specific tools, they might understand the general idea.
Speaker: Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: And I think that's an important part.
Speaker: One of the fascinating things is there was a, you know, Philadelphia in the 18th century, it's been sort of reported, and I have no reason to believe it's not, that it was the largest city outside of London in the British Empire.
Speaker: We had maritime instrument makers here who were cranking out the tools to supply to the ships that were being built here and to the fledgling, you know,
Speaker: navigational officers and captains like Van Buskirk or like John Barry or like the US Navy.
Speaker: They were supplying all of that.
Speaker: And that was part of Philadelphia's really big link to the outside world is this was a good place to come and get those tools.
Speaker: So one of the really exciting things about this picture is that it's sort of the discovery of a new artist.
Speaker: Buskirk is not somebody who's sort of well recorded and explored in the annals of folk art history.
Speaker: And now here we have this picture that is so interesting, so detailed, that is a demonstration of a considerable degree of skill.
Speaker: I mean, what is this picture telling us about Buskirk as an artist, about his abilities, his interests?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that is the part that I have to confess that I struggle with sometimes because there's a lot of technical skill for a quote unquote folksy watercolor that's going on here.
Speaker: And there's always the argument is, is it folk art or just really bad art?
Speaker: You know, and I think we've all seen paintings where just go, yeah, that one, that wasn't just hit with the ugly stick, it was hit with the whole ugly forest.
Speaker: You know, this is really a work that's got some complexity to it.
Speaker: And it's got those show off pieces that a trained artist would put into it.
Speaker: And that's the piece that makes me scratch my head about it.
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: It does not seem to relate to other known works, but I can't look out there and find 20 others like this.
Speaker: And so, did he have training and did this?
Speaker: And then this was his masterpiece, never did another one.
Speaker: There's an accompanying watercolor of a ship that's pretty
Speaker: pretty straightforward.
Speaker: It's the kind of thing that would turn up at any auction in the Mid-Atlantic or New England and people go, oh, nice folksy ship watercolor, and not think much of it because it's a broadside view of the ship, not particularly complicated.
Speaker: This one as an interior is definitely head and shoulders far more complex.
Speaker: And so the question is, where are the others?
Speaker: Or is it that old adage that's talked about, did he just have one in him?
Speaker: You know, and after that.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: I go back and forth like in my own tennis court of my brain of wondering whether that's the case or someday, you know, we'll walk in that door, another one, and we'll make us all rethink it all.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: Dollars to donut.
Speaker: I mean, you've got to put your money on one side or the other.
Speaker: Are other Buscourt paintings going to come to light?
Speaker: Are they going to appear?
Speaker: I think there has to be only because
Speaker: he's technically showing off so much, it means he had some training and he knew that aspect of painters, you know, where we've seen portraits and they do a big landscape in the background, where they do a still life in the foreground of a bunch of fruit next to it.
Speaker: And you know they're just showing off, you know, because they want to show off their technical skill.
Speaker: Hey, I can do something more besides portraiture, I can do landscape, I can do still life, you know.
Speaker: It's relatable.
Speaker: And you know, so if that,
Speaker: accepting that as a truism, then there has to be others out there, because he just didn't spring full blown into doing this.
Speaker: Did he do all of these and kept them himself when they were destroyed in a tragic fire?
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Or are they sitting out there in somebody's attic?
Speaker: And there's been great, this work has been known for a number of years.
Speaker: There have been folks who've cited it, the family allowed it to be seen, and it's been a head scratcher from day one.
Speaker: And only as antiquarians and curators and museum geeks and collectors can be, we fixated on the little details going, ah, this can't be any earlier than this, or can't be any later than this, and you go, but step back and see that this is a complex, large work, not just a Sunday painter who's taken a swipe at it and moving on to doing something else.
Speaker: that would presuppose there are others out there.
Speaker: And I'm very comfortable with saying this is Van Buskirk, I think it's coming out of his book.
Speaker: If for some reason, if it isn't, there still should be others out there.
Speaker: And we have yet to see that.
Speaker: So my hope is, as in getting the word out about this, somewhere in a collection in Tulsa or Toledo or Timbuktu, that's a nice bit of alliteration there, we would be able to find
Speaker: other examples of this because I think as an interior scene, it's a rarity unto itself, let alone an interior scene that's built around a maritime theme, let alone one that has these sort of show-off elements that are incorporated into it of the landscape out the window, the two paintings, and so forth.
Speaker: In the meanwhile, while we're waiting for these other hidden lost works to resurface, what are the museum's plans for this piece?
Speaker: What research is left to be done on it and what kind of story do you want to tell about it?
Speaker: The question really becomes what happens to him?
Speaker: So why does he seemingly give this up and ends up in the hinterlands?
Speaker: Or is that the same person?
Speaker: And I mean, that's where, you know,
Speaker: you go back and I think we all do this, you check Ancestry from time to time to see if they've uploaded new records.
Speaker: I mean, it's that crassly,
Speaker: you know, not lofty, but pretty much down to earth how you do the research is you hope that somewhere out there there's gonna pop up a record, some document that, you know, pulls that curtain back even for just a second and reveals, oh, you know, he failed as a ship captain because he wrecked everybody and he decided maybe, you know,
Speaker: Tennessee was a much better place to live.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, I can relate to that as a Tennessean.
Speaker: Well, there you go.
Speaker: All good ship captains flee to Tennessee if they wreck the ship.
Speaker: But no, we're gonna continue.
Speaker: It's on exhibit.
Speaker: We've put it out because I wanna showcase it in our brand new opening installation we just did.
Speaker: We've tried to put some of our masterpieces out, things that people haven't seen, either that they're very new or that they've been tucked away and haven't been out in a number of years.
Speaker: This one's very new.
Speaker: And I show it because I think it's wonderful.
Speaker: It speaks to the times, speaks to the maritime.
Speaker: But always there's just that little part that comes in that, you know, might get that knock on the door and some little old lady says, yes, that's so-and-so and I can reveal the mystery and the curtain pulls back for us.
Speaker: Well, fingers crossed that somebody listening right now will bring that revelation to your doorstep.
Speaker: Peter Siebert, thanks so much for talking with me and we'll chat again next week.
Speaker: Sounds great.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Palata.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
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