Museum accessions

The collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation have been elucidating day-to-day life in the eighteenth-century Virginia town for seventy-five years, as the furniture, silverware, architecture, tools, paintings, ceramics, and textiles in this issue attest. The picture is constantly evolving as new objects and new research reveal more about how the town's residents--and by extension, many other early Americans--dressed, worked, slept, decorated their houses, entertained, and protected themselves. Some recent additions to the collection that contribute to this evolving interpretation are discussed here.

The fused silverplate bread basket (illustrated above) is an unusually handsome example of the form, successfully replicating the fashionable neoclassical appearance of more costly sterling examples. As John D. Davis points out in his article (pp. 220-225), fused silverplate (more commonly known as Sheffield plate because it was most successfully produced in that English city) was a perfect medium through which middle-class Americans could express their growing material well-being. The piercing on this example is extensive and exceptionally fine, and the short die-stamped sections of C-scrolls with human masks above the handle pivots are delightful details.

The cause of liberty is adroitly addressed in one of the most recent additions to the collection--the Chinese export bowl shown below, which portrays the English politician and journalist John Wilkes, whose satirical diatribes against the government of George III made him a favorite of early Americans. The decoration is based on a famous caricature by William Hogarth of the extremely ugly Wilkes (who is said to have boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face"). Published on May 16, 1763, it shows Wilkes with a traditional liberty cap on a pole and with copies of the two issues of his North Briton newspaper that made him famous: number seventeen contained an obscene and blasphemous Essay on Woman, and number forty-five, a devastating attack on one of the king's speeches to Parliament. Profligate by nature, Wilkes drank, spent, bribed, and exploited his way through life, but in the long run his challenges to royal and parliamentary control of the press resulted in freedoms of expression that are integral to a democratic society. The decoration on the reverse of the bowl is taken from an engraving entitled The Queen's Arms, a Night's Amusement, published on August 13, 1764. It can be interpreted as representing the dissolute side of Wilkes's personality, depicting as it does four boisterous figures, one forcefully spoon-feeding a beverage to another while the onlookers offer encouragement and advice.

A far cry from this rambunctious scene is offered by the needlework picture illustrated above, done by a student at Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Academy Connecticut. According to family tradition, it was embroidered by Orra Sears of Bloomfield, New York, who, while at the school, resided with the family of the Reverend Lyman Beecher. Depicting Chiswick, the idyllic seat of Lord Burlington in what is today London, the scene is worked in chenille, crinkled silk, and metallic and silk threads, with many details in ink and watercolor. The left-hand portion is taken from at least two print sources, A View of the Back Front of the Cassina and Part of the Serpentine River, terminated by the Cascade, in the garden of the Earl of Burlington, at Chiswick, by John Donowell, and View of the back part of the Cassina and Serpentine River in Chiswick Gardens, by an engraver named Carey. The other side of the composition is likewise probably derived from prints, although the specific sources have not been identified. In the ch oice of subject matter, intricate composition, and skillful stitching, the embroidery represents the refinement of taste and handwork that were among the goals of the best education offered to young ladies in the early American Republic.

Although such an education was not available to all or even most young American women, advanced schooling was nearly impossible for blacks, as witness the story of William Ansah Sessarakoo, the subject of the mezzotint portrait shown at the lower right on page 40. A young African prince, Sessarakoo was on his way to school in England in 1744 when the captain of the ship on which he was making the voyage from Africa sold him into slavery in Barbados. It took four years for his father to procure his freedom, and he subsequently made his way to England, where his misfortune engendered great sympathy. The print was created in 1749, only a year after his arrival in England, and is based on a painting by Gabriel Mathias. In 1753 an account of the young man's ordeal was published in London under the title The Royal African, or, Memoirs of the young prince of Annamboe. It is indeed possible that his story, and others like it, were instrumental in the foundation of the abolitionist movement.