My wife introduced me to the concept of balance in a room,” says the husband of his interior-designer spouse, adding, “That does not imply a sense of sameness or symmetry in the house—there’s a lot of variation in time periods and styles and one component does not overpower another.”

This light-filled space in the atrium is defined by the ceiling. The wife envisioned the room around the circa-1800 inlaid Federal secretary, carrying its lines and height upward. The secretary is flanked by samplers, watercolors, and a theorem on velvet. Above it hangs an original circa-1913 color lithograph of the highly acclaimed French cabaret star Mistinguett (Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois) by artist is G. K. Benda. A braided rug adds color to the floor.
The combination of styles and time periods within the house is evident when looking toward the front door, where there is contemporary material (a collage of a horse [on wall] by a Blue Hill, Maine, artist); advertising imagery (the boot trade sign and carousel star); carved folk art figures and painted candlestands; architectural elements; and utilitarian nineteenth and early twentieth-century kitchen food “choppers,” displayed as art in the foreground. The couple has been collecting the latter since they were first married and both students. Not originally intending to form a collection, at one point they owned more than four hundred choppers, many of which adorn walls in the kitchen and back hallway. Through the years they’ve focused on the rare, hand-forged examples.
Two of a set of four Pennsylvania Savery-type side chairs, the style of which is associated with the chairmaker William Savery (1721–1787) of Philadelphia, were acquired from C. L. Prickett, and were previously owned by Israel Sack, Inc. The couple purchased the Chester County, Pennsylvania, chest-of-drawers from H. and R. Sandor. A New York Federal looking glass often reflects the diners seated at the glass top-table, which is supported by a Greek revival column’s plinth and capital from a bank building in Milwaukee. The combination of formal furniture and molded plastic and chrome office chairs is in keeping with the comfort the couple feel in combining time periods.
The couple found the Pennsylvania furniture through antiques dealer C. L. Prickett. The Moorcroft pomegranate ginger jar, signed Wm. Moorcraft, is flanked by nineteenth-century brass candlesticks and Art Deco sconces purchased from Rago Auctions. The wife was attracted to the 1993 painting by Blue Hill, Maine, artist Heidi Prior Gerquest, because its bold, colorful imagery complements the tones of the furniture.

This approach toward furnishing their present home and guiding their collecting has its origins in the 1960s, when the couple, newly married, began purchasing an item here and there, each aesthetically in line with their developing sense of design. At that point they didn’t think of themselves as collectors, but were simply filling their residence with attractive items they’d find at dealers’ shops or small antiques shows while driving around suburban Philadelphia. They bought what they liked. “For our first purchase, we pooled together our money—all of four dollars—,” recalls the wife, “to buy a painted ironstone covered soap dish.” Shortly after the husband completed medical school in 1967, their first major acquisition was a $400 New England candlestand purchased from H. and R. Sandor. “We bought it over time,” they recall. “Some dealers were anxious to help young collectors and were willing to work with us,” adds the husband, “so they were among the dealers we most often patronized.”

The couple’s education in antiques began in earnest when they enrolled in continuing education classes taught by journalist and later Maine Antique Digest senior editor, Lita Solis-Cohen. The husband and wife apparently struck a chord with Solis-Cohen because she took them under her wing and introduced them to many antiques dealers in the Delaware Valley and beyond. Soon the couple found themselves focusing on early American furniture and decorative arts: they had become more serious collectors. Their interest intensified when the husband’s military assignment stationed the couple in Newport News, Virginia. Being so close to Colonial Williamsburg, the wife became a docent, the first of a number of similar guiding, interpretive, and teaching positions at other museums. For her, this “job” was a priceless educational opportunity.

At nine feet in length, this tin advertising sign posed a potential problem for display. Says the husband, “I had an epiphany that, since it was in two pieces, we would hang it at angles.” As such, this mid-twentieth-century sign is given a new life as contemporary sculpture.
The wife used industrial materials when designing the house, including this stair railing. While not unheard of today, when she incorporated these elements in the early 1990s, it was avant-garde for residential homes. The solid-cherry open treads allow light through, augmenting the ethereal aesthetic. The metal Art Deco ice cream trade sign, offset by an architectural finial and hooked rug, was acquired from dealer Judy Milne.
Jimmy Lee Sudduth (1910–2007) was a self-taught African-American artist from Alabama. Known for “painting” in various colored muds, enhanced with natural and man-made materials such as coffee grounds, berries, nut shells, and grease, this outsider artist worked with his fingers, most commonly on plywood. His whimsical work has been featured in a number of museum exhibitions since the 1970s, and in 2005, the Montgomery Museum organized a one-man show and catalogue. The American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution are among the numerous museums that house his work.

When it was time to set up his practice as a physician, the husband and wife settled in historic Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They purchased a nineteenth-century farmhouse and acquired additional period furniture and accessories to complement the period structure. In addition to prominent antiques dealers in the New Hope region such as Sandor and C. L. Prickett, the couple patronized Chester County dealers Phillip Bradley and Herbert Schiffer, among others, as well as antiques shows in Philadelphia, New York, and New England. They also frequently visited Winterthur, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other major collections to learn and admire, returning to Williamsburg countless times.

With a growing family, the couple added a “family” room onto their farmhouse. Rather than furnish it with more early Americana, they began filling it with a mix of modern seating, complemented by nineteenth- and twentieth-century folk art in the overall context of twentieth-century architectural details. They began to acquire new items at smaller venues throughout the Northeast. Says the wife, “That’s when I started liking the eclectic, nutty things.” The material couldn’t really all “fit” in the early house even after building a new wing, so, in 1992, they sold their farmhouse and a portion of their collections and built a contemporary house, which the wife helped design. “It was liberating having blank white walls and big spaces to fill again,” says the husband. “Instead of having a designated space in the house for modern material, we mixed the contemporary and antiques together.” Adds the wife, “I love the colors and funky aesthetic of modern design combined with formal American period furniture.”

This playful space shows the open plan of the house. The assemblage of collections include an early twentieth-century bentwood child’s rocker, dress form, trade sign, tinsel paintings, knitting bags, and a naïve oil of a campsite.
The sun streams into the breakfast room, where the wife converted an early/mid-twentieth-century dove coop into a glass-top table and painted out-of-period Windsor fan-back chairs in a brilliant turquoise. The circa-1820s Pennsylvania cherry corner cabinet holds a collection of French jaspe pottery, mainly acquired from Judy Milne. Other Americana dealers from whom the couple has made purchases include Grace and Elliott Snyder and Howard Szmolko.
“This grouping of objects explains what we’re about,” says the wife. “We wouldn’t have had this sort of display in our previous house, but we now have the freedom to have fun in creating such vignettes.” Shown are a mid-century Danish Finn Juhl table, a circa-1940s carved bathing beauty figure, a papier-mâché rooster, and a Felix-the-Cat figure and a toy steam roller, set against a French poster.
Looking toward the front of the house from the living room, two of the Scalamandre silk screens center two stained-glass panels. A wooden village from Wilsonboro, Pennsylvania, and made for a child’s toy train track, is mounted on the wall beneath the open kitchen. A portion of the mocha collection is visible through the corridor, and the dining room is on the left; a nineteenth-century French gargoyle downspout greets people as they walk into the living room.
The peak of the living room ceiling shares the same profile as that of the atrium, which connects the front and back of the house visually. Glass bricks back the fireplace and add texture to the glass window wall. The fireplace surround, with hand-formed porcelain slabs and torn blocks of unglazed porcelain, is by contemporary artist/potter Paula Winokur, whose work is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and elsewhere. A translucent Scalamandre silk screen, one of three in the room, creates the effect of stained glass. To the right is an early twentieth-century diner clock on a pedestal; opposite is a standing red sculpture that in reality is a painted metal grain chute that the couple purchased at the New York Pier Antique Show because of its visual impact. The rug has a William Morris style design, and the coffee table is a painted goat cart with modern glass top.
A dominant decorative technique shown here is the undulating “squiggle” designs created from slip trailing (a slurry of clay poured through multiple goose quills from a slip cup while the object rotates on a horizontal lathe). Another decorative device, present on the jug in foreground, is the coiled cable or earthworm pattern on a blue slip band. The unusual use of “off-set printing,” whereby an imprint is made from a ring dipped in slip, is evident on the mug in the upper left corner. A very early piece, circa 1770–1775, in the second row, far right, exhibits slip marbled and combed patterning; the “kick” at the base of the applied handle, seen on other English ceramics of the period, is extremely rare on mochaware. The collection includes two such examples.
The “dendritic” or seaweed decoration was made from combinations of tobacco juice, manganese and iron oxides, stale urine, and other recipe ingredients to create mocha “tea.” The effect reminded English potters of a type of moss-agate stone referred to as mocha stone because it was exported from a port in the Southern tip of the Saudi Arabian peninsula (now Yemen) called Mukha; hence the origin of the term mochaware. The central truncated mug is quite rare in its use of copper luster bands. The small jug with cobalt blue mottled surface adorned with putti sprigging is also quite unusual.

The couple’s mocha is displayed in two large cabinets flanking the front gallery hall so they are in full view when anyone passes.
Says the husband, “There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t stop and look at the pieces within and appreciate their variation, color, and design.”

Years before the couple began melding time periods and styles of interior design within their present home, they were drawn to a particular English pottery that does just that in its marriage of traditional forms with strikingly modern-appearing geometric and multi-colored decoration that dovetails visually with contemporary design. This pottery was mochaware, a thinly potted English cream-colored ware associated with “dipped” decoration (first produced in the 1770s) and by the 1780s and 1790s, with an extensive range of dipped and slip (slurry of clay) decorative devices. Examples sought by collectors range well into the mid-nineteenth century. The couple acquired their first pieces of mocha on a trip to the Kent Antiques Show in Connecticut in the 1970s and thereupon resolved to be serious collectors, attracted by the forms, colors, and seemingly endless combinations of designs. It turns out that these two pieces they acquired at the Kent show were rare examples and both remain in their collection.

Shortly after their decision to collect mochaware, they met dealer and collector Leonard Balish at the Philadelphia Antiques Show and continued to work with him through the years until his passing in 2001. Other important sources from whom they purchased include, among others, Bea Cohen, Schorr and Dobinsky, Bill Lewan, Judy and Bill Campbell, Bill King, Greg Ellington, Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Blum, Greg Kramer, and William Kurau, as well as at auctions. The Wilton Antiques Show was where they first met Jonathan Rickard, the authority on mocha: the three remain friends and colleagues. “A number of examples in our collection were in Jonathan’s book on mocha,” says the wife, adding, “Some were once his and others were in other private collections.”

MOCHAWARE

One of perhaps seven double jugs known to survive, this one is decorated with earthworm and cat’s-eye patterns. The two halves had to be constructed and decorated separately—cut at the belly and merged together with the strap handle applied, then fired.

Pale-bodied earthenware (pearlware and creamware) ornamented with slip-decoration was produced in England as early as the 1770s. By the 1790s the term “mocha” was first documented and initially referred to the dendritic, or seaweed-like, designs, which had been used since the 1780s. Part of the family of dipped wares, the term mocha has come to be associated with pale-bodied, thinly-walled pearlwares and creamwares exhibiting both dipped and slipped decoration. A variety of techniques were used to apply one or multiple layers of colored slip (a slurry of liquid clays) to the air-dried clay body of the pot before firing in a kiln. Resulting in a seemingly endless range of designs, techniques employed include dipping, pouring, banding, trailing, marbling (joggling), stirring, combing, or other means of manipulating the slip before it had completely dried and set on the pot. By mounting the pot on a horizontal lathe, the potter could also score linear patterns or mill away repeating geometric designs by a procedure called engine-turning. Further adornment might include rouletting, sprigging (applied press-molded white clay elements), or adding crushed bits of waste creamware.

The key reference book on the subject is Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770–1939 by collector, researcher, historian, and archeologist Jonathan Rickard. The leading scholar and craftsman on the techniques used to create mocha’s designs and patterns is Don Carpentier, founder of Historic Eastfield Foundation. Their efforts to demystify the history of mocha and slip-decorating techniques have proven essential to anyone interested in the material.

Though mochaware was mass-produced, the couple has unique and rare examples (such as a double jug), as well as pieces of rare design and color/design combinations. Though they now own several hundred examples, they are still acquiring. Says the couple jointly, “We have been fortunate to have experienced the growth of knowledge and discovery in the field, both first hand and through the scholarship of others, which has further fueled our enthusiasm for these wares.”

 

Originally published in the Autumn 2014 issue of Antiques & Fine Art magazine, in tandem with InCollect.com. The digitized version of the entire issue is available on www.afamag.com.