A Checkered Past

My recent post about our new acquisition of a carved wooden plaque from the Elmira Reformatory caught the attention of several readers who wanted to see other examples of prison art in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. I’ve been meaning to post about a magnificent work that we have from the Auburn Prison (founded in 1816 and renamed Auburn Correctional Facility in the 1970s) in Auburn, New York, so this seems like a great reason to do so.

It is a large (23 ¼” square) and elaborate checkerboard complete with a separate box of 24 checker pieces. Every inch of the piece, no matter how large or small, down to each individual checker, is decorated with wood marquetry inlay in lively patterns. Using hundreds of tiny pieces of a variety of woods, the unknown maker created details such as pinwheels on the checker squares that match those on the checker pieces, a parquet design on the border around the playing surface, and many other fancy border designs around the outer edge of the board.

As far as we know, this piece was made before the 1870s, when it was given to a David Upton, an ancestor of the donors, “in payment of a debt.” It sat in the family’s Rochester, New York attic for more than 70 years. It was given to us in 1977 by Mr. and Mrs. Russell Crosby, in memory of Ruth Upton Morgan and Leah Upton Marlowe.

It is worth noting that the Auburn Prison espoused a system of prisoner reform that included labor and hard work. The “Auburn System,” as it was known, compelled prisoners to work during the day, with the profits of their labors going to support the operation of the prison. The prisoners worked in silence, as the prison rules forbade any conversation. They wore the prison’s signature outfit, the horizontal black and white stripes we now associate universally with convicts everywhere. When they walked from one part of the prison to another the prisoners were compelled to walk in lockstep, one hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front of each.

Hardly an atmosphere for creative expression. But the Auburn Prison is known for the beauty of its hand-crafted products. Of particular note is the decorative cabinetry that reflects the same skill and care so evident in our checkerboard. Several of these pieces were featured in a 2003 exhibition, “Both Sides of the Wall,” at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art in Auburn. One of them is pictured at left above.

I have written often in this forum about the passion, vision, and commitment of self-taught artists. Our checkerboard, however, forces us to confront the issues of creativity in different ways. How do we account for uncommonly beautiful items made under forced labor? Perhaps the unknown maker of this piece, living in silence and marching in lockstep, poured all of his remaining humanity into the delicate tracery that delights our eyes today.

"Stimp": The Wall Stenciller of Bump Tavern

They are the most elusive folk artists, even though their output was prolific and widespread. I’m talking about the stencillers who decorated the plaster walls of homes, businesses, and public buildings in the early 19th century. Only a few have been identified, but if you have been to The Farmers’ Museum, you have probably seen the work of one of the most interesting and colorful of these characters.

Bump Tavern is very popular among the thousands of museum visitors that come to the museum each year, but few people realize that the wall decoration relates closely to a body of decorative work in Connecticut, where the Bump family came from. When the tavern was moved to the museum in the 1950s, workers discovered stenciling under wallpaper in three second floor rooms. The plaster was beyond restoration, so the museum decided to preserve one section of the original wall (viewable behind a hinged wallboard, above) and have the rest of the stenciling recreated by a member of the Historical Society of Early American Decoration.

Early scholars of American wall stenciling noticed the similarity of the original Bump Tavern stencil patterns with a number of homes in Litchfield County, Connecticut, including the Isaac Hartwell house in Washington. The stenciller is thought to have also worked in Northfield Farms, Massachusetts, where he decorated the Stratton Tavern (right and below left), and in Dover Plains, New York, where he stencilled the walls of the Perry House (above). Local tradition held that the stenciller of the Hartwell house was a man known only as “Stimp,” who drifted into town as an older traveling artist and decorated Mr. Hartwell’s parlor in the early 1830s. According to one local source’s childhood memory, Stimp went to his client’s home in 1834, “crazed with drink,” and tried to kill Hartwell. He was taken into custody, said to have been led to the village whipping post, and sent to the town jail. There is no other mention of his whereabouts after this incident.

In the late 1990s a local museum researched Stimp, and although the jail records were no help, they did find a Caleb H. Stimpson living in the area in the 1830s. There is no direct evidence to tell us that this was the Stimp in question, but it is interesting that there are also several Stimpsons, from Connecticut, who were among the early settlers of Windham and Ashland, New York, the original site of Bump Tavern. This research is summarized here.

So now when you wander through the second floor of Bump Tavern admiring the artist’s signature pinwheel and acorn borders, distinctive swag and tassel cornice patterns, and S-curved floral motifs, you can appreciate the New England ties of both the owner and the artist. You can also see how a 19th-century folk artist used his repertoire of images to decorate a complex space full of nooks and crannies. You can wonder why he left the job before it was complete (see below). And, lastly, you can imagine how an artist prone to drinking to excess managed to work day after day in a tavern with temptation stalking him in every corner.

Limner on the Lam

Have you ever felt like you’ve known someone for decades but perhaps don’t know them at all?

To me, Samuel Jordan was some little-documented, mild-mannered itinerant portrait painter working in New Hampshire in the 1830s. Our two signed and dated portraits by him have hung in our storage area (they’re not great artworks) at least since I arrived here in 1983. My 1987 entry on him in our catalogue Folk Art’s Many Faces refers to the scarce biographical data and the few known paintings in the Fenimore Art Museum and other collections.

Boy do I have a new opinion of this guy now.

This month’s Antiques and Fine Art includes an article on Jordan by Deborah Child that is just stunning in its revelations. It turns out that Jordan, who was born in Boston in 1804 and fought in the War of 1812 on board a privateer, once told a prison keeper that he “was never given to Drink & that this is almost the only vice to which he was not addicted.”

Jordan was sent to Massachusetts State Prison in the mid 1820s for passing counterfeit money. While incarcerated he continued plying this trade, and was caught altering bills during a prison search in 1825. Three months after his release, he stole a horse and, angry at the prison keeper, wrote a letter under the pseudonym “Richard III” threatening the keeper and his family. He was arrested again, and served five years of an eight year sentence.

While in prison in 1829, Jordan began to sketch and received encouragement to become an artist. This is not surprising, since the prison officials wanted to give him something better to do than steal from other inmates, traffic in contraband, and try to escape. Jordan was eventually pardoned on the condition that he leave the United States for four years.

He got as far as New Hampshire, and that’s where our portraits come in. They were painted in Plaistow, and may depict the local postmaster and his wife (above) and the postmaster’s parents (below).

Jordan’s respectable career as an artist didn’t last long, however. Charged with burglary in 1834, he was tried under an assumed name and given 20 years, but that sentence was changed to life when he arrived at the prison and officials recognized him as a repeat offender. Two years later, in September 1836, he escaped from prison with six others who planned to make their way to Texas. He was never heard from again.

I’m pretty sure that Samuel Jordan is not someone I would have wanted to paint likenesses of me and my family, for reasons of both aesthetics and self-preservation. It is an intriguing thought, however, that somewhere out there we might find a previously unknown group of portraits of frontier settlers in the southwest. Or maybe just a wad of altered bills moldering away in a hot Texas attic.