Description:
Waxwork sconce in a shadow box shape with a doubled arched top (similar to frames used for quillwork) and 2 brass candlesticks attached to the base. According to Anne Vogel, this is one of 8 waxworks known to exist from early colonial times, which were produced circa 1720-1740 by Boston school girls: "Waxworks have been dated through estate inventories as documented examples, and newspaper advertisements from Boston finishing schools confirm the making of waxworks as part of their curricula. The works even share enough formal and stylistic elements to suggest the same teacher or school, with most sharing allegorical themes with well-known paintings, mezzotints, and needlework of the period.... All have fruit trees and grassy mounds sprinkled with seashells, frolicking lambs, dogs or deer, and a variety of other creatures and diverse botanical references.... In addition to classical imagery, motifs from classical literature were recurring themes in schoolwork waxworks. Virgil's "Bucolis" (37 B.C.), pastoral poems modeled on the Idylls of Theocritus (310-250 B.C.), gave significance to the meaning of the simple rural life of leisure that became a conscious attribute to symbolize life among the elite in early eighteenth century Boston...with a fashionably dressed shepherdess at leisure in a garden landscape. By choosing a shepherdess, the students created an idealized vision of their privileged life. It is suggested that for daughters of upper class families, such images, omitting any reference to the tiring labors of rural work or urban industry, was fundamental to their social identity and aristocratic status. Pastoral scenes also portrayed a developing understanding of the feminine ideal and prescribed role of young women that developed in the eighteenth century. The pastoral imagery of young ladies masquerading as shepherdesses links these waxworks to the portraiture of the era. John Singleton Copley's paintings of Ann Tyng (circa 1756) and Elizabeth Gray Otis (circa 1764), the daughters of two wealthy Boston merchants, depicts each with a shepherd's crook in her hand." Vogel suggests that the teacher may have been Mrs. Susanna Hiller Condy (1686-1747) who was born in Boston of English parents, and whose services are thought to have been available from the 1720s until her death; her daughter-in-law, Abigail Stevens Hiller, continued Condy's schooling legacy. Scholarship associates Condy's teaching with the early Adam and Eve sampler patterns and with initiating Boston's Fishing Lady pastoral embroidered pictures (see HD 1707, 2027, 2134). Vogle notes that the creation of fancy ornamental work was considered an essential component of female education, as important as reading writing, math, music, and dancing, in preparing young girls in their practice of religious and moral values, supervision of a household, and in securing an advantageous marriage. Using fingers or simple tools made of boxwood, bone, or ivory, wax could be mixed with powdered colors and poured into molds or hand-worked from thin sheets; head, arms, hands, and smaller figures and animals were produced from mold. Skill and agility were required to attach small wires to the wax forms, and then anchor those forms to wooden posts, cover the posts with green tape for camouflage, and then hide those construction techniques with more wax decoration. The individualized costumes were made from thin sheets of wax, sometimes painted or already mixed with powdered colors, and embellished with lace trim dipped in wax and often gilded, bows, linens, aprons, bonnets, hats, earrings, etc. Green wax was forced through sieves to create grass-like mounds with sea shells and fruits for accents; silken threads similated hair and wool fibers, a lamb's coat. This waxwork has a woman wearing a white cap and dress, green and white glass bead necklace, and holding a bird on her left wrist standing in the left corner of the box beside a tree with fruit, leaves, and berries.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+54.024.1 |
