Curious Objects

Curious Objects guest Kay Collier, who is the owner of Kathryn Hastings and Company, purveyor of fine antique and modern wax seals, has always been a letter writer. You can thank her grandmother for encouraging the habit. Every week when she was a child Collier would receive a card with a piece of bubblegum and a dollar bill, and would send mail back. When she was nineteen Collier took a trip to Europe with her sister. Visiting the Amatruda papery on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, one of the oldest paper manufactories in Europe, her heart lit upon a wax seal. “You just have an intuitive feel for an object, it calls to you and you think ‘I don’t know what this is but I have to know more, I have to touch this thing,’” she says.

One thing led to another and today she is the owner of some five hundred seals: wheel seals, case seals, rotating seals, fobs made to be worn with pocket watches by Victorian gents. Each boasts a beautiful matrice (the part of the seal that’s actually pressed into hot wax, to render a design) made from citrine, amethyst, bloodstone agate, and other semiprecious stones, with ormolu intaglios. Although wax seals date back to the Bronze Age, Collier is partial to seals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when designers began incorporating an array of romantics symbols. Bay leaves mean loyalty, forget-me-nots signify remembrance or true love, ships gesture to the highs and lows of the human experience. For years Collier has been on the trail of a witch riding a broom and holding aloft a hammer to symbolize the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a 1486 German treatise on demonology used to charge witches with heresy. The seal is cheekily inscribed “all have their hobbies.” She’s bought three, but all, unfortunately, have been fakes. “There is a witch out there and she’ll find me when she’s ready,” Collier says.

Collecting can be a lonesome pursuit, especially when your quarry is without mainstream appeal. Seeking to break out of her bubble, in 2019 Collier had the idea to make seals to sell. Today she manufactures both antique and modern seals, shifting the age-old practice into the future by using multiple colors and layers of wax, and through such innovations as submerging LEDs in the hot wax so that her seals glow from within. “We’re just a few years away from artists emerging who use seals and wax as a way to make art,” she says.

That her collecting grow out a passion for letter-writing, is Ben quips, “like being a chair collector because you love sitting down so much.” But for Collier her seals are about more than usefulness, and even about more than beauty. They’re a reminder of the fleetingness of life, measured out, perhaps, by the amount of time it takes to make and send a letter to someone you care about, and the time it takes to receive one in return. “Antiques outlive us, they’re much older when we acquire them and hopefully they’ll have lives long after us. We’re stewards, and that idea of using and sharing is really important.”

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A couple of months ago, Ben Miller turned up at the Salmagundi Club in New York’s West Village to assume an unfamiliar role: that of interviewee rather than interviewer, sharing his expertise on nineteenth century American silver with the audience of the Gilded Gentleman. It’s a conversation that we are proud to present to you now.

Silvery was in a state of flux during the nineteenth century. Discoveries of huge lodes such as the Nevadan mother given its name by Henry Comstock, new production methods like silver plating, and most importantly, the maturation of the domestic industry, were shifting American styles from the Englishisms of Paul Revere to the Yankee grandeur that was Gorham, and the glory that was Tiffany.

That’s the metanarrative. But Ben and GG host Carl Raymond don’t shy away from pesky niceties such as the difference between the silver of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his father, Charles, the importance (or unimportance) of hallmarks, and the most consequential question for listeners hoarding family silver in the attic: whether nineteenth-century services have value beyond their weight in . . . well, silver.

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For nearly two hundred years, from his death in 1823, New York potter Thomas Commeraw was out of sight. In 2010 it finally became possible to positively identify him: as a prosperous free Black craftsman with a manufactory in Corlears Hook employing seven people, an enterprise that provided stiff competition to the legacy affairs of Pot Baker’s Hill in lower Manhattan.

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A conversation about broadening the scope of collecting practices beyond traditional Anglo-European material, discussing the challenges and opportunities for collectors taking an interest in previously overlooked or under-recognized fields. Led by Ben Miller, featuring Jeremy Simien, collector; and Jesse Erickson, Curator of Printed Books and Bindings, the Morgan Library and Museum. Venue: New York's Winter Show, 2023 edition.

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In 1750, a millenarian religious movement, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, arose in England. More commonly known as the Shakers for their ecstatic dance, today this movement can claim only two living exponents. But the legacy of Shakerism—ideals such as equality between the sexes and among races, sublime music, and simple furniture that seems to prefigure modernism—lives on. In the second and final part of Curious Objects’ exploration of Shakerism, host Benjamin Miller interrogates the myths that have arisen around this movement in the 150-odd years since its heyday.

Feat. Brother Arnold Hadd of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, Shaker scholar Glendyne Wergland, John Keith Russell of the eponymous antiques dealership, and his associate Sarah Margolis-Pineo.

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In 1750, a millenarian religious movement, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, arose in England. More commonly known as the Shakers for their ecstatic dance, today this movement can claim only two living exponents. But the legacy of Shakerism—ideals such as equality between the sexes and among races, sublime music, and simple furniture that seems to prefigure modernism—lives on. In part one of a two-part exploration, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller considers the Shakers and their material culture in its historical context, with input from Brother Arnold Hadd of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, Shaker scholar Glendyne Wergland, John Keith Russell Antiques’ Sarah Margolis-Pineo, and Michael O’Connor, curator of the Enfield Shaker Museum in New Hampshire.

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In 1837 a family group that flew in the face of convention was committed to canvas, presumably by portraitist Jacques Guillame Lucien Amans. It showed four children. Three were white, dressed in their Sunday best and gazing placidly at the viewer. The fourth, standing behind them in a Brooks Brothers livery coat, was a Black teenager. This is Bélizaire, and at some point around the turn of the twentieth century—for reasons unknown—his portrait was covered up.

In this final installment of the trilogy we consider Bélizaire’s legacy and that of his portrait. Does the debonair boy of 1837 have an afterlife ahead of him? Will Bélizaire and the Frey Children prove to be, as Taylor Thistlethwaite puts it, “one of the more significant paintings that has been rediscovered in American history”?

Feat. collector @jeremy.k.simien, Ogden Museum of Art curator of the collection Bradley Sumrall, historian and genetic genealogist Ja’el Gordon, Washington and Lee University assistant professor of art history Wendy Castenell.Hosted by Benjamin Miller @objectiveinterest.

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In 1837 a family group that flew in the face of convention was committed to canvas, presumably by portraitist Jacques Guillame Lucien Amans. It showed four children. Three were white, dressed in their Sunday best and gazing placidly at the viewer. The fourth, standing behind them in a Brooks Brothers livery coat, was a Black teenager. This is Bélizaire, and at some point around the turn of the twentieth century—for reasons unknown—his portrait was covered up.

Last week we took a close look at Bélizaire the person, and his tortured life-path through antebellum Louisiana society. This week we examine the painting that is the reason anyone knows Bélizaire’s name, and follow the twists and turns by which it traveled from the studio of Jacques Amans in 1837 to the collection of Jeremy Simien, where it is today.

This is Pt. 2 of our three-part series on the painting "Bélizaire and the Frey Children." Feat. Simien and Wendy Castenell, as well as Taylor Thistlethwaite of Thistlethwaite Americana. Hosted by Benjamin Miller.

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Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, the Black child at the rear of this 1837 family portrait was painted out. Why? Benjamin Miller sits down with the painting’s owner—and its primary advocate—Jeremy Simien, as well as scholars, collectors, and other experts in the field involved with the painting’s journey from museum castoff to much-fêted cipher for the Antebellum South, and attempts to nail down why its eponymous figure was forgotten for so long.

Part 1 of a 3-part series on the painting "Bélizaire and the Frey Children." Feat. Jeremy K. Simien, Ogden Museum of Art curator of the collection Bradley Sumrall, historian and genetic genealogist Ja’el Gordon, Washington and Lee University assistant professor of art history Wendy Castenell

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As you await the upcoming season of Curious Objects, please enjoy this special bonus episode, in which Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Abraham Thomas, ceramist Roxanne Jackson, and painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins join host Benjamin Miller onstage at the 2022 edition of the Winter Show to grapple with the legacy of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” How have Benjamin’s contentions about “aura” fared in the ensuing eighty-odd years since its publication? And how might we apply his thoughts on art to works of craft being produced today?

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