The Blown Glass Christmas Ornament

Transcription

1 The Blown Glass Christmas Ornament Folk Art in Miniature Beverly Weir-Longacre As told to John Fiske A Glimpse of Gold. Various gold glass ornaments decorate the boughs of a live tree. Page 24 Antiques Journal December 2007

2 Around the turn of the twentieth century, in the German glass-making region of Lauscha, whole villages hummed with energy, making glass ornaments for the Christmas trees of the western world. In every cottage, each member of the family joined in making these sparkling little beauties, literally thousands of them, every year, each one made by hand by untrained village folk out of easily available local materials. Mold blown glass bear with stick. Note the details in the fur and nails. Cotton batting girl with muff and metal ice skates. Cottage industry Bev Longacre s enthusiasm sparkled like the ornaments she loves so much. It s real folk art, she told me, the folk art of the industrial age, not the art of rural, pre- or non-industrial communities, but folk art nonetheless. The ornaments were produced by a literal cottage industry they were made by ordinary folk working at home for the homes of other ordinary folk. The father and probably the eldest son worked in the cottage on a small furnace. The men would buy long glass tubes from the local glass factory as their raw material and bring them home to begin the family work of making ornaments. Wood carving was another traditional art in the region, and someone in the family, or a local toy maker, would carve two-sided wooden molds and forms in a variety of shapes. The father or eldest son would heat the tubes of glass in their small furnace, cut them into short lengths, and seal one end. Then they would blow the glass tube into freeblown forms using a wooden template to form spheres or other shapes, such as animals or coffee and teapots with The best Victorian period Santa in Plane ornament. It is wire-wrapped and has cardboard wheels. A composition Santa is at the controls. Santa in a Convertible. Unusual clip-on Santa driving a car. December 2007 Antiques Journal Page 25

3 Santa Tree with glass, paper and wooden antique Santa ornaments, accompanied by glass Christmas trees and composition Santa boot ornaments. Page 26 Antiques Journal December 2007 delicate applied handles. This was the work of a master craftsman who had accumulated many hours of glassblowing. The other method for ornament making was by blowing the tube into the carefully carved molds to produce representational forms of human or animal figures, St. Nicholas himself, or locomotives, airplanes anything that took their fancy. Next the women came into the process. The mother and daughters would coat the inside of some of the ornaments with silver nitrate which gave a wonderful reflective quality to the glass, dip them in an exterior coat of paint and then leave the ornament to dry overnight hanging upside down on racks near the furnace. Next day they would sit down to decorate it, using paint, lacquer, wax, ground glass known as Venetian dew, scraps of paper or cotton anything that was easily available. The younger children would then cut off the long pike or stem, cap and wire each piece, box it up and prepare it for transport to the city. Bev told me of the photographs she has seen of village women with L-shaped carrying boards on their backs, packed with dozens of boxes, trudging down muddy lanes to the railroad station to board the train to the city to sell their ornaments. Of all these little villages, one made a name for itself. Sebnitz became famous for producing the most elaborate ornaments. Their distinguishing feature was that each ornament used all of the available decorative materials, incorporating glass, fabric, metal, paper and wax. Their most distinctive feature of all, however, was the result of a sequin factory in the village. The round sequins were stamped out of paper-thin sheets of metal foil, which were then discarded. The villagers immediately saw that these foil sheets with hundreds of holes in them provided wonderful decorative material for their ornaments. Today, collectors vie for these highly decorated Sebnitz ornaments, all of which have a consistent look, despite the wide and interesting variety of forms Zeppelins, baby carriages, railroad locomotives and so on. But not all of these ornaments were destined for German homes; Americans wanted them, too. One American in particular changed the scale of the industry. F. W. Woolworth, one of the first to understand how scale could make huge profits from low priced items, quickly saw how well they fit his business model. He personally toured the villages, buying the products and organizing the shipping. Woolworth imported hundreds of thousands of orna-

4 Handmade red, white and blue glass motorcycle ornament. Very scarce full bodied man with applied free-blown legs. Rare free-blown swan swimming in a lake of blue spun glass. Fabulous woman with scrap lithograph paper face. She is made from cotton and is holding a wonderful paper umbrella. ments a year to the US during the first quarter of the 1900s. This period was the peak of popularity for these handmade ornaments. Folk art Bev s definition of one form of folk art as unintentional works of art, created by regular people for regular people using common everyday materials fits squarely within the anthropologist s concept of bricolage. The closest English equivalent to the French word is do-it-yourself. The bricoleur makes things with materials and tools that are at hand, from odds and ends. He draws from what s around him, using both materials and concepts that are part of everyday life, and combines them to make new, useful and creative things. The engineer or scientist, by contrast, seeks to exceed the boundaries of his community; the bricoleur works December 2007 Antiques Journal Page 27

5 within them. In this sense, the folk artist is a bricoleur, working within the community, expressing its values, and keeping alive its traditional life of the imagination. The art is the art of making do with what you have the art of small communities everywhere and in every period, the art of the folk. The high artist, like the engineer or scientist, seeks a new vision, he or she seeks to change the way of seeing the world. The folk artist, by contrast, works to keep traditional ways alive by re-circulating them and using them in new ways. Bev is herself a folk artist of this kind. After graduating with an M. Ed., she spent three years teaching in Germany. While there she became familiar with German Christmas customs, traditions and the contemporary market for German Christmas tree ornaments during visits to various Christmas markets around the country. It was in the mid 1980s, she said, while visiting a friend in the United States during the holidays that I had my first glimpse of a live tree decorated from top to bottom with the most wonderful antique Christmas ornaments. It was like being a child again. Within the next week I had purchased my first group of figural ornaments 15 for $150 and I was hooked. Taking it one step further, Beverly now creates three-dimensional Christmas folk art by using a themed approached. She decorates a live or an antique feather tree with ornaments that relate to a particular category or theme. Some of her favorites are a nautical tree, a patriotic tree, a heart tree, and a Santa tree. Each tree, complete with its many handmade ornaments, becomes a wonderful piece of three-dimensional folk art. You can visit com and click on the Christmas category to see examples. Beverly sells individual ornaments plus antique feather trees and Christmas fences for around the tree, or she will design a tree to your specifications and interests. She will also be a featured lecturer (The Christmas Ornament - Folk Art in Miniature) at the Heart of Country Antiques Show in Nashville, Tennessee, February 14-16, A Sebnitz ornament in the form of a watering can. Cotton batting Father Christmas with scrap face. He is holding a feather tree in his arm. Page 28 Antiques Journal December 2007 Twin Heart Trees with silver and red heart ornaments and many heart candy boxes.