 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Labeling the Past
With the exception of the "knitting bag and sheaf," which has been recognized as a rare Renaissance sweet bag and knife sheath, the objects in Watson's box are neither striking examples of American design nor valuable artifacts. But the labels change these objects of daily use to fodder for the imagination and to sources of fancy and delight: wood from Penn's Treaty Elm, Colonel Alex Fanning's snuff box, sand from the Sahara. With these associations, Watson made the ordinary, material world testify to the strangeness of its experiences in the same way that the vernacular, fancy style used eye-popping colors, Japanned patterns, perfumes, trompe l'oeil painting, or amusing slogans to transform objects of everyday use into opportunities for imaginative engagement.
Fig. 4. Buttons from Watson's relic box. The labeled buttons are Thomas Willing's. The rest are unknown. Courtesy of the Winterthur Museum.
Certainly curiosity cabinets also used labels to show that an otherwise ordinary object had come from far away. However, as historian Lois Dietz notes, Watson's collection had stricter selection criteria than the typical curiosity cabinet. Virtually all of its objects were important for their relationship to the past and not for their rarity or for their foreign manufacture. As a result, the box creates a distance between past and present because it only preserves objects that have existed in the past. For example, Watson's labels distinguished the buttons in the box from contemporary buttons because of their age, because of the people they have been attached to, and because of the events they have witnessed (fig. 4). If their existence in the past makes these buttons different from functionally equivalent, modern buttons, then the past must be a foreign place from the present. Conversely, if the past is different from the present, then the objects connected to it become more valuable and more worthy of imaginative engagement.
Watson's perception of the past as a rarity that had to be labeled and preserved was not shared by all of his contemporaries. According to the diary of his friend and fellow historian Deborah Norris Logan, his wife, Phoebe Crowell Watson, managed to reject at least one elderly tea table that her husband tried to collect and install in their house as a relic. For her, it was junk, not history. Phoebe Watson judged the tea table by its usefulness and probably also by its style. The fact that the table had existed in the past mattered little if it was too rickety to use or if its scruffy appearance made it seem that the Watsons could not afford better furniture. Her reaction reminds us that whether or not women chose to participate in the work of producing history, they could still be performing the work of a curator or preservationist. John Watson's antiquarian collecting of large and small relics probably added significantly to his wife's labor. Neither the buttons nor the tea tables were magically protected from disintegration by the action of Watson's mind.
Someone was paid to build the relic box; Phoebe Watson refused to dust another tea table.
