Roberta McKern
Let us suppose, for a moment, that you are back in the early parts of the 20th century, attending a family gathering at Grandma’s.
Grandpa is there, too, but the house is always thought of as Grandma’s. You and your cousin have argued, one of those “He did it; she did; no, did not; yes, did too” affairs.
The verdict having gone against you, you find yourself sitting in the back parlor in a chair several sizes too big, to consider life and your future.
Surprisingly, the parlor looks exactly like the little one in the East Linn Museum.
“Don’t play on the organ,” comes your mother’s voice through the door. “And don’t pull out its stops to see what will happen. And do not rock the rocking chair.”
There are two, and each is so close to the wall that disaster will happen if you rock in them. Near the rocker on which you are seated, a shadow box holding brightly dyed feather flowers rests against the wall. You know well that curses will befall you if you break the glass.
Beyond the parlor you hear the murmur of voices. Your cousins are looking at three-dimensional pictures through a stereoscope. Each picture card has two perspectives, one for the left eye and another, almost identical but as seen from the right eye. Viewed together, it’s like looking into space – 3D. You had just grabbed that stereoscope before being hustled into the parlor.
Instead of sulking, you look for the metal statuettes of Napoleon riding a horse without a tail. The horse once had a tail, all right, but years ago you decided a cannon ball had shot the tail off, which must have surprised the horse considerably.
Not finding Napoleon, who has been removed to a different room, you look at the pictures on the parlor walls. And not only on the walls, because two, like the shadow box of feather flowers, have been set on the floor behind a cold, cylindrical Hottentot stove.
One is a bright blue and silvery scene labeled, “On the Danube,” which might have well said, also, “In the Moonlight,” because the full moon shines down on the river with a boat and in the background stands a castle. Here and there gleam touches of mother of pearl shell and silver foil. A gold-colored oval frame adds to the picture’s look of value and you are young enough to find it beautiful.
The other picture is of peaches and grapes and a blue jar and you’ve never found grapes so big on your grandfather’s Concord vines. On the far wall above the divan hangs the framed motto, “Home, Sweet Home,” which seems appropriate considering the name of the town you’re in. You admire the flower wreath around the motto. Like the blue grapes, the colorful flowers look bigger and brighter than those of Grandma’s garden.
There is a picture there, too, of a mother and her daughter. They are sappy, really too pretty, all dressed up and looking at some sheep. The sheep, at least, are convincing.
But the two pictures on the walls which really interest you aren’t even colorful. They are black and white. One says it’s a painting, but your mother says it is a reproduction. The other has a note on it claiming it is a pencil drawing made by a German orphan boy taken in by a kindly local man, but your mother says it is not a pencil drawing but a print, because it has a caption under it reading “Coming Home” and “Showing How the Game was Won.”
It is a rollicking scene of people sitting around a cleared table as a well-dressed young guy in city slicker duds appears to be telling his mother, father and two brothers about the game, but you can’t tell what kind of game it was.
His father has a beard like Uncle Sam’s and his mother is plump and wearing a striped dress. She has maybe a dish towel in her lap. Two other people, sisters perhaps, seem to be attending to dishes on a side table. The older looks at the guy telling the story and the younger girl is still in short skirts, so she is under sixteen and hasn’t let down her skirts yet like her sister has.
You know it’s an American scene because a gun and powder horn hang above the fireplace. There’s a cat in front of the fireplace and a dog by the cackling old father, so you can tell everything is all right. The younger man has 10 little sticks in front of him and the father has two in front of him so you can puzzle yourself trying to figure out how the unknown game was played.
If you climb on the divan and perch toward its end on your knees you get a better view of the other picture, though, which is even more of a puzzle. Your mother calls it an allegory. She says it means something other than what you see or possibly more than what you see.
Trying to understand it takes serious work.
For starters, a pair of old folks seated on chairs occupies the center.
Everything is shadowy and the woman wears a black dress with a white collar that matches the white of the old couple’s hair. He has a newspaper, and a sort of border collie dog rests its head on his knee.
She is looking out at nothing much, but you see she has some yarn and knitting needles and she was reading a letter, which she still holds, although the envelope is on the floor.
But then you see what the old folks are thinking of, or maybe it’s how they were once, too.
Yet, you aren’t certain.
In the upper left hand corner two soldiers sit at a campfire. Or you think they are soldiers because you can see puttees like those soldiers sometimes wear over their shoes and the bottom of their pants, which were tight down the leg. Also, the supposed soldiers have peaked hats.
The one you can see best reads a letter by the firelight. Below the soldiers are a father and his young son, working at plowing. The dad holds the handles of the plow, and the boy the reins to a horse, which, though unseen, you just know it and the rest of the plow are there because otherwise the father and son would be plowing right across in front of the old couple.
So maybe the father is the old man when he was young and the boy the son who became a soldier. It’s something to ponder.
Then, on the upper corner to your right is a family picture: mother, father, girl with blond curls and a baby, most likely a boy, you think, still in dresses. The baby reaches toward the old lady. So is it a picture of the elderly pair when they were young and the baby is reaching into the future? You can’t tell, even if Grandma claims that’s what it is.
Pictured at the bottom of this collection is a pretty good looking nurse with a cap on her head. She’s looking sort of up, but is it toward the soldiers, or at the elderly woman who does look old enough to be her grandmother? And is the picture about war and maybe someone won’t be coming home?
Just to make it more confusing the shadow behind the older couple turns into a ship’s rigging and the figure of a man can be seen gazing out to sea.
“Home, Sweet Home,” is the picture’s name and to one side is the music which your mother says comes from the song, “Home, Sweet Home.”
Whoever the “Balfour Ker,” who painted the picture was, he wanted to make you stop and think and it does that. You’d lie down and think on the hard divan, but someone has stuck a pair of wax-headed dolls there that are not unlike the elderly couple in “Home, Sweet Home.” So you’ll have to go back to the rocker and wait for someone to set you free while you hope to be in time to get a second piece of cold fried chicken left over from dinner.
Why, we can ask, supposing we have moved one hundred years ahead, did we have this vignette? Actually so we could look more closely at the prints which we can’t always do while they hang on the walls and are difficult to get close to. We can also ask why such a varied sampling of art work turn up in the parlor? Of course one obvious answer is that it depended on what people have donated, but a more pertinent answer also comes to mind, the mail order catalog.
Towards the end of the 19th century, mail order companies like Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward came into being on the heels of the expansion of both manufacturing and of the railroads, which in turn reflected the end of the Wild West with the disappearance of new frontiers.
All across America, from coast to coast, on farms and in towns, ladies wishing to exhibit their interest in enlightenment could order culture from the catalogs, including parlor pictures. In fact, Sears would even send “art by the yard” – pictures of fruits and flowers in long, narrow frames.
And in keeping with the times, even the frames were ornate and decorative, although not like one frame surrounding the print of a scenic view of a boat on the water found in the museum’s kitchen. That frame was a tour de force of shell work.
We can recognize shells from limpets, clams, scallops and sea snails among other mollusk specimens which may also have gone into chowder.
The old Sears catalogs we can look at don’t offer seashell-encrusted frames but they were a popular style.
In part, what Sears advertised were $2.50 paintings for a $1.25, “…handsome oil paintings on heavy canvas with stretchers.” That seems cheap enough to us now, but this is at a time when “a dollar a day was a white man’s pay,” women and children not included.
If these were really oil paintings, genuine oil paintings, we might suspect Sears kept a stable of starving artists. These paintings, Sears stressed, were not to be compared with “cheap, common lithographs sold at large prices.” Sears listed studies of landscapes and castle views.
The homemaker could also order imitation water colors “hardly discernible from real ones” and facsimile pastel drawings. Sears stated: “There is no reason the poorest should not have as handsome a picture as the more wealthy.”
Yet, from looking at the Sears catalogs at the museum, ordering a picture for the parlor appears to resemble the old saying of buying a pig in a poke. The purchaser might be able to specify “landscape with castle” or “landscape with boat” or fruit or flowers, but what came out of Sears’ warehouses would be a surprise.
Orders were in general terms. The products specific. However, Sears and Roebuck did have a policy allowing for returns. Satisfaction, the company claimed, was guaranteed.
It seems possible the two pictures in the parlor to which we gave considerable consideration are lithographs. This was a prime means of producing editions of prints back in the nineteenth century. When Sears spoke of cheap lithographs, Currier and Ives-type prints may have been in mind.
Lithographs were actually printed off smooth slabs of fine-grained limestone. The image reproduced could be drawn directly on the stone with oil-based pencils, crayons or a sort of ink. It’s a process we can wonder at.
Litho means “stone.” It works because oil sticks to oil and is repelled by water, so the greasy image retained by the stone picked up oil base ink rolled on to the dampened surface, but not on areas wanted left clear of ink.
A lot of fine work could be done with lithography, and it was used not only in making prints, but in manufacturing labels for canned goods like those with magnificent plums or cherries, various fancy scrolled certificates and memorial pictures on which the deceased’s name could be printed in gold plus pertinent dates.
It could also be a tedious process because added color had to be hand tinted or the print had to be run through hand-cranked presses anew for each color addition.
Photography doomed lithography to the realm of fine arts.
The print, “Coming Home,” in the museum’s parlor shows how drawing on a stone with the oil- based crayon looks. Fine lines and shading can be achieved. Still, it’s uncertain whether the two black-and-white pictures, one moody and introspective and the other jolly, are not prints made off prints and we know “Home, Sweet Home” plus its bar of music is based on a painting – reproductions made of reproductions.
Ah, the nostalgia of it all.
We can see both of these pictures, “Home, Sweet Home” and “Coming Home,” are meant to raise a yearning. There are other pieces of art at the museum and one that matches a feeling for nostalgia with the view of the elderly couple in “Home, Sweet Home” turns out to be a large oil painting in the main room.
Painted by a local artist Joe Clark and depicting his father-in-law, the picture shows an older man standing before an even older barn. Both are browned and weathered from years of facing the passing seasons.
A white cloud delineating the barn rises high above and matches the white of the man’s hair and of his shirt. He has on bib overalls too and worn shoes. Along the side of the barn stretches remnants of a garden and the man holds a pitch fork. He has been making mounds of the summer dried grasses, and from the fatigued look of the green trees flanking the barn in the background, we can feel autumn’s approach.
So is this feeling of time’s passage the same as the one evoked by the shadowy sight of a ship’s rigging and a man staring out to sea in the print “Home, Sweet Home”?
We can’t find out much about Joe Clark at the museum, which also has a couple of his other paintings. One is of the Santiam sawmill where he apparently worked. We would like to know more about him as his work is admired. He signed his paintings “Avatia.”
Whether we’re looking at pictures in the parlor or not, for nostalgia there is no place like the East Linn Museum, and we are open again, hoping for the best.
We will be part of the July 11 yard sale expected to take place in various parts of town (see page 6). Anyone with goods to donate to our major fund-raiser can bring them to the museum during our open hours from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and may we all stay healthy.