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A Picture of Changing Time
The wood that makes up this box represents an unbroken history leading from the first European contact to the creation of the United States. Yet, the overly small and excessively ornamental feet on which this block of wood poses literally and figuratively undercut the stability of this "grave" history. Their paw shape and flowery brackets contrast sharply with the rigid lines and geometrical inlays that compose the box. This union of the inanimate box and the potentially animated feet is grotesque and whimsical rather than sublime. According to the label Watson pasted inside the box, it is primarily constructed of elm wood from Penn's Treaty Tree, which fell over during a storm in 1810. The walnut border comes from "a cluster of forest trees" that stood before Independence Hall. Watson associates both the walnut and the elm with the Founding Fathers and with the trees that covered the area prior to European arrival. The small "star[s] of mahogany" on the lid and front of the box come from "the house in St. Domingo where Columbus dwelt." These inlaid woods replicate a triumphal narrative of progress catalyzed by the actions of great white men from Columbus (mahogany) through Penn (elm) to the United States (walnut). Externally, the box tells a story that resembles the "discoveries of countries" and "foundations of empires" listed in Mnemonika. Yet nearly everything else about the box challenges this traditional concept of history.
The relic wood itself generates a tension between the hard work of great men and the desire for leisure in a pastoral "cluster of forest trees." Typically, the pastoral ideal offers escape from urbanization, mechanization, and linear time, but Watson did not simply use history to flee Jacksonian America. While some of his contemporaries longed to escape back into the slower life of an idealized past, Watson enjoyed experiencing the different tempos of modernity and history, and he was especially delighted by sudden shifts in time. He could suddenly arrest time by holding a miniature relic or speed it up by riding on one of the new forms of steam-powered transportation. For example, his account of a train ride in 1835 abounds with excitement rather than anti-technological nostalgia. "When we had attached ourselves to the Locomotive Engine," Watson recounted, "Oh! With what rapidity we went! It was an amusement to try to count the panels of the fences as we passed them. We went faster—(15 m an hour) than I could count them beyond 20 to 30 times! Wonderful invention!" Even after the event, Watson's exclamation points and interjections convey a very unantiquarian enthusiasm for speed. A similar delight in manipulating the pace of time appears in the contrast between the lively little feet and the measured procession of history in the wood of the box. The objects in the box also document sudden change: dresses less than fifty years old are already in rags; coffins buried in the last century are dug up to make way for new water pipes; steamboats are dashed to pieces by waterfalls; cities are burned to the ground. These miniature relics, like the fence posts Watson tries to count from the train, allow the eye and the hand to stop time for a moment in contemplation, but their ruined state also makes the viewer aware that time is passing rapidly.
Fig. 5. Watson's watercolor of the Treaty Elm. Courtesy of the Winterthur Museum.
Fig. 6. William Birch's image of the Treaty Elm. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Different tempos juxtaposed against one another also form the subject of the watercolor inside the box (fig. 5). Watson's adaptation of William Birch's frontispiece to The City of Philadelphia … as It Appeared in the Year 1800 (fig. 6) presents a pastoral world of leisure against the backdrop of bustling, modern-day Philadelphia. Where Birch emphasizes continuous progress between the construction in the foreground and the commerce in the background, Watson creates a stark difference between pastoral stillness and urban activity. In the left foreground of Birch's image, two men industriously chop and saw wood for the boat being constructed directly behind them. In the middle ground, another group of builders heat construction materials over a smoky wood fire. The proximity of axes, sawyers, wooden ships, and fire to the elm highlights its vulnerability to destruction in the name of progress. Already this tree is one of the only remaining trees from the forests that once covered this area. At any minute one of the men could look up from his work and see the tree in terms of board feet of lumber. Birch does not necessarily condemn this impulse. His frontispiece reminds Philadelphians of their founding story in which Penn signed a fair and friendly treaty with the Native peoples for the land on which he built their city. If this land can be converted from indigenous to European and from woods to city without struggle or loss, then there is no reason that the tree cannot be converted from a relic of the forest into a trading ship with equal ease and felicity.
Watson disagreed. In his watercolor, he removed the threatening sawyers, boats, and fire. In place of these, he depicted a solitary fisherman, slightly larger than the scale would dictate, sitting on a dock. This figure, like Rip Van Winkle or the Angler from Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, avoids productive labor by engaging in the sport of fishing. In this game, he escapes from crowded cities into the static rural world protected by the box where play replaces construction and destruction. The relic box, this image suggests, is Watson's "fishing hole." Here he reels his "keepers," or keepsakes, up from the depths and applies imagination to them in order to visit places and times that are strange and surprising in comparison to the present. "From such materials," he explained in the Annals of Philadelphia, "we may hope to make provisions for future works of poetry, painting, and romance. It is the raw material to be elaborated into fancy tales and fancy characters." By enjoying the delightful surprise of moving back and forth in time, of holding onto a moment and letting it go, Watson believed Americans could shape their identity in "fancy tales and fancy characters" rather than being compelled by unseen forces of change to mindlessly produce and destroy.
