Basket (Bowl)

Description

By the 1820-30s, production of hornware items, particularly straight and ornamental hair combs, was light manufactory work in America, largely in Rhode Island and New England. Craft practices for horn and tortoiseshell combs contributed to the making of this basket. The side panels were created independently, clarified and shaped by heat and templates into S-curves with lush pierced and engraved ornament added by hand. Threaded lacing holds the sides together with the bottom plate to produce a familiar tinware shape called an apple basket. Like this basket’s decorative interior, large hair combs were sometimes richly engraved. One given to Mrs. Henry Clay was described as having "the American Eagle, supporting wreathes of vines and flowers, which spread in rich profusion over the whole surface of the comb plat[e], and indicate something of the floral beauties characteristic of New England..." (Boston Journal quoted by the Easton Gazette (Maryland), Sept. 19, 1829, p. 3.) Florid hair combs survive today but larger hornware items requiring more horn panels are scarcer, likely also due to stress from more frequent domestic use and insect damage. This basket’s nearly symmetrical paired panels have idiosyncrasies suggesting freedom in the engraving which include vases of flowers and a political design. One of the two patriotic Federal eagles is depicted with sixteen stars. These may represent one of Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns (1828 and subsequent) which brought prominence to the sixteenth state, Tennessee. Two other known decorated hornware baskets refer to William Henry Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1840. The basket's central panel design of a reclining man with a windmill is unclear, perhaps representing a landmark windmill such as those on Nantucket or Long Island.