Description:
"Lemuel Curtis" wall clock with a roman numeral, enameled dial; carved and gilded eagle ornament; lyre-shaped carved and gilded throat with red and gilded painted glass panel inscribed "Curtis, Concord" on the throat glass; "Tabor 14 . 15" on a paper label in the lower case; and "Morris Hamm/ Nov. 6 1848" on the reverse of the lower glass. The girandole base section has ball ornaments in recessed molded circlar frame containing a convex, red-bordered scenic painted glass and leaf carved and gilded flaring base bracket. PROBABLY FAKE - This patent timepiece was constructed to deceive and was acquired by HDI for study purposes and special progams.
Label Text:
George Alfred Cluett (1873-1955), of Troy, New York, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, collected American furniture from around 1901, shortly after he and Edith Tucker were married, through the mid-1920s. Cluett was prominent among early collectors. For the first museum exhibition of American furniture, The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, Cluett loaned 22 objects. Cluett, whose family business became Arrow Shirts, finished collecting before Henry Francis DuPont began to amass objects for what became the core of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The Cluett family donated most of its collection to Historic Deerfield beginning in 1960, with its last gifts given in 2003. Cluett’s keen connoisseurship, focused on Classical objects (contemporary to his grandparents’ lives) is notable as he collected before the publication of the first seminal reference books on American antiques. Moreover, the early twentieth-century collectors focused on the so-called Pilgrim Century, which predates the Classical era by over one hundred years. Cluett was particularly intrigued by the work of craftsmen including Seymour, McIntire, Phyfe, and Lannuier. Cluett’s desire for privacy, and reverence for times past has long obscured his creative connoisseurship and legacy as one of the earliest and influential collectors of American furniture.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/test/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+85.007 |
