Prohibition: The View from Thuringa

In 1896, Gustav Schafer and Gunther Vater founded the Schafer and Vater Porcelain Factory in Thuringa, Germany, with the purpose of making high quality porcelain items. By 1910 the reputation of the pottery for craftsmanship and design had grown to international proportions and Sears Roebuck was importing and selling large quantities of Schafer and Vater pottery in the United States.

Among the pottery’s products were a host of small figural liquor bottles for distribution by American distillers and saloons, called nips.” The term is taken from an Old English word nipperkin, meaning a container of liquor holding a half pint or less. These German giveaways were always imported empty, then filled by a distiller, whiskey distributor, or saloonkeeper and handed off to favored customers.

An example is the “Old Sedgwick” ceramic figural. That was a brand of the A. Bauer Distillery of Chicago, a distiller profiled briefly in my blog of Sept. 18, 2009. This bottle has the brand name glazed right along with the figure of the jolly Dutch toper, sitting on a barrel and smoking his pipe. Many nips bore paper labels identifying the giver and containing company advertising.

With the coming of National Prohibition to the United States, this major business opportunity was largely denied to Schafer and Vater. Profits from their American exports were severely curtailed. The company response was to design and sell objects lampooning the notion of abolishing alcoholic drink. Several of these nips are my favorites.

For example, the pottery produced a jolly Uncle Sam sitting on a barrel pouring himself a large drink from a large bottle. On the barrel is written -- What We Want. This was a clear message about the unpopularity of Prohibition. Uncle Sam’s hat comes off to decant the liquor. This figure came in blue and brown glazes and also in multicolored painted versions.

Another figural nip makes fun of the hatchet-wielding Temperance terror from Kansas, Carrie Nation, discussed in my blog of Oct. 23, 2009. The nip is a pious looking woman in a bonnet and shawl clutching a large bottle, her eyes lifted heavenward, her hands folded a in prayer. Her skirt carries the message: God save Miss Carrie Nation. This same figure comes with a range of messages. One of them asks God to save Francis Willard, the well-known leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Often Schafer andVater nips came in bottle shapes with a cartoon in bas relief on one side. Among them is one multicolor ceramic showing the good ship “Prohibition” whose captain is swigging down what one presumes to be alcohol, throwing the empties into the sea, while a sailor looks on in some alarm. Another in a brown glaze, contrasts the happy drinker with the stern faced Prohibitionist and asks the (easily answered) question: “Wet or Dry?”

We conclude with a nip figurine of a rather stout gentleman with a wide smile on his face and carrying bottles, presumably of whiskey, in his hand, arms, and pocket to point of breaking, nine in all. The caption at this feet says simply Prohibition. I have pondered what message Schafer & Vater tried to get across with this image. My guess: This gent represents the fact that drinking in America actually increased in many places during Prohibition.

After a fire destroyed its first factory in 1918 Schafer and Vater rebuilt and continued to produce high quality ceramics. As a result of World War II and its postwar location in Communist East Germany, the company’s international customer base was cut off. The pottery began a slow decline that ended in 1962 when it closed. In 1972 the East German Government assumed full control of the vacant factory and is reported to have destroyed all company records and molds. The interesting and inventive ceramics of this Thuringan firm presumably can never be reproduced. As a result, Schafer and Vater nips today not only are avidly collected, they often bring fancy prices.

Nudes: Paris Salon to U.S. Saloon

By 1748 the official exhibit of the French Academy of Fine Arts, known popularly as the Paris Salon, had become the greatest art event in the Western World, a status it maintained for 142 years. First held annually and later biannually, the Salon had undisputed influence in Europe and abroad. Nudes were a regular feature of the exhibits, many of them “dressed up” in mythological references. As shown here, in 1864 Artist Honore Daumier satirized middle-class French women scandalized by the Paris Salon’s many paintings of the naked Goddess Venus.

Nude paintings in the exhibit, often in reproduction, found a ready audience in the United States. American drinking establishments, from which women and children almost always were barred, regularly featured paintings of unclothed women over the bar or on the walls of their dark wood environs. The fleshy products of the Salon inevitably made their way to the American saloon.

Among the most popular and widespread were the works of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). Shown here in a self-portrait, Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose realistic paintings on mythological themes were interpretations of classical subjects with a heavy emphasis on the female body. One of his most popular Salon offerings was called “Nymphs and Satyr,” showing a bevy of unclad damsels cavorting around a half-man, half-goat figure.

It was just the thing to lend a touch of French class to a Yankee bar. At the Hoffman House, a well-known Manhattan males-only bastion, a copy of the notorious Bouguereau painting resided on one wall. For a hefty fee Hoffman House allowed its name and the painting to be used to advertising products like cigars and whiskey. As a result “Nymphs and Satyr” was replicated on saloon signs and a wide array of merchandising items. It became as well known in the U.S. as in France.

At the Paris Salon of 1884 appeared a painting by a popular French artist named Emile Antoine Bayard (1837-1891). Entitled “An Affair of Honor,” it represented a duel with rapiers between two women who were stripped to the waist. The scene was laid in a well known Paris park where reputedly many encounters of this kind reputedly occurred among French courtesans. The popularity of the picture was enormous and it was exhibited all over the world.

Much reproduced, the image found its way into many of our 19th and early 20th Century barrooms. The Klein Brothers distillers of Cincinnati added advertising for their whiskey brands on the picture and gave copies away to favored saloon keepers. As for Artist Bayard, shown here on an 1891 magazine cover, he later moved to illustrating novels, among them “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Angelo Asti (1847-1903) was another frequent exhibitor at the Paris Salon. Born in Italy, he resided most of his life in France and was considered a French painter. Asti was renowned for paintings of women with long hair and loose bodices as well as erotic nudes -- some depicted on those infamous French postcards.

Asti is reputed to have spent some time in America, specifically Ohio, where he may have met the Bieler boys, three scions of a Cincinnati distilling family. The Bielers had an eye for advertising their Brookfield Rye whiskey with feminine pulchritude. They distributed signs and other artifacts that displayed a fetching lady wearing a diaphanous dress and contemplating a bottle of their whiskey. It bears Asti’s signature in the lower left.

Just as the Paris Salon lost popularity in the early 1900s, so the death knell of saloon nude art was sounded by the onset of Prohibition in 1920. When Repeal occurred in 1934 women now had the vote, openly quaffed alcoholic mixtures, and increasingly frequented dens of strong drink. As the females began to walk through the swinging doors in ever great numbers, the nudes behind the bar began to come down until today they are virtually as extinct as the dodo.

Key Words: The Salon of Paris, nude saloon art

The Collecting Impulse

Newsman Jim Lehrer, himself a world class collector of bus signs and memorabilia, once said that there are important people and organizations working to preserve the “big things of life” like buildings and battlefields. It is left to the rest of us, Lehrer said, to preserve the other things.

But we would be kidding ourselves if we pretend that research and preservation are the only reasons for collecting. Lehrer himself has characterized the thrill of the “The Find,” the rush a collector gets when at last encountering that most highly sought item.

Scientists have studied the phenomenon and some concluded that the drive to collect comes from deep in the human psyche and may be almost as old as homo sapiens himself. Says Anthropologist David Given, “This focus on artifacts is a deep principle, and something that separate us from all other primates. Certain parts of our brain have specific areas that resonate to the features of human-designed products. We can’t get enough of them. It’s almost a compulsion.”

Throughout the ages pottery has had a special attraction for collectors. I am among them. In his book, A Tramp Abroad, American author Mark Twain announced himself as a “bric-a-brac” collector with a yen for ceramics. He said: “I am proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark on the bottom of it as if I had just emptied that jug.”

As Twain implies, there is something very primal about pottery. In the Old Testament Bible, for example, the potter’s art was extolled. Jeremiah, shown here in a medieval statute, in Verse 18: 1-8, was directed by the Lord to visit a potter: The Prophet, shown here in a statue, recounted his experience: “So I went down to the potter’s house; and there he was, working at the wheel. And whenever the vessel he was making came out wrong, as happens with the clay handled by potters, he would start afresh and work it into another vessel, as potters do.” A valuable lesson in pragmatism.

Writing in a more contemporary period the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, shown here, expressed this image of the potter creating from the earth: “No handicraftman’s art can to our art compare; we potters make our pots of what we potters are.” Or as it has been put more humorously: “If it be ashes to ashes and dust to dust; please, potter, handle my kin gently if you must.”

Speaking personally, the jug shape itself is highly attractive. I like to handle the items in my collection, to feel the texture of their surfaces and their roundness. It has been speculated that ceramic vessels that bulge at the bottom and constrict at the top as jugs do subconsciously signify shelter, self-sufficiency and “amplitude.” This may be just a fancier way of expressing the verse that appears on an American mini-jug:

“Nearer brown jug to me,
“ My lips pressed to thee,
“Even though thou art but clay,
“Close by thee I’ll stay.”

Still life artist Dennis J. Grafe once explained why he preferred to paint and draw jugs rather than landscapes. He explained that his purpose was to make his viewers throw off casual observation of their surroundings and really become aware of the distinct qualities of objects. “In the case of a jug,” Mr. Grafe said, “the viewer is exposed several qualities of this object which make it unique....shape, color, texture or weight.” In this view the pleasure derived is appreciating the individuality and authenticity of an item.

Collectable artifacts obviously range far beyond pottery. My collecting friends cherish bottles, vases, tiles, paperweights, watch fobs, match safes, trade cards, model airplanes, books, old toys and hundreds of other items. One only need look at eBay for a day to understand the vast numbers of different artifacts being collected by Americans.

Whatever an individual collects, whether of interest to me or not, I respect the impulse and pride behind the effort. While a particularly fine example of a jug may not be comparable to owning a Rembrandt painting of one, we collectors can be encouraged by the words of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Holmes tells his friend, Dr. Watson: “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.” To which I would add: “Elementary my dear Watson.”

Blacks in Whiskey Ads - 150 Years

The depiction of African-Americans in whiskey merchandising over the past 150 years has reflected societal changes. The trade card “Essence of Old Virginia,” for example, has been dated from 1859, on the eve of the Civil War. It advertises “Wheat Whiskey” of the A.M. Bininger Co. of New York City. The obvious message conveyed is how happy Southern slaves are playing music and dancing for their white masters. The ad surely was scorned by Abolitionists.

The much reproduced Belle of Nelson Whiskey advertisement shows a black female slave serving the nude ladies of a Middle Eastern harem. According to the Library of Congress where an original resides, this image dates from 1883, not long after the end of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. With the future of African-Americans much debated in both South and North, it likely was safer to depict blacks -- and nude women -- in an exotic setting.

In 1900 the Green River Distillery of Owenboro, Kentucky, began using the image of a grizzled black man leading a donkey with a jug of whiskey and an umbrella strapped to the saddle. The image reflected the idea of the faithful, submissive Negro in the South that had come to be accepted as a national myth. Note the details of his face.

The inspiration for this image purportedly was a story told to the distillery founder, John McCulloch, a Kentuckian who had opposed slavery. According to the tale, a lengthy rain storm disrupted liquor supplies arriving at local tavern and it had run dry. Suddenly an African gentleman,braving the gale, appeared in town to deliver Green River Whiskey aboard his mule. Suddenly the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared. The thirsty crowd cheered and celebrated for days. Green River used the image in dozens of ways over the years.

As blacks moved North, generally to fill menial positions, their depiction in service roles such as waiters, porters, or bellhops were common. Note the ad for “Grant ‘63” whiskey from the Spang Distillery of Boston. This image appeared on an ink blotter issued about 1910. There may be some irony as well in the whiskey being named for General Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery in the South.

Extending from 1920 until 1934 National Prohibition meant no whiskey ads. With Repeal, surviving distilleries were quick to resume merchandising. The industry feared that during the hiatus consumers had forgotten how to make and mix drinks. Many distilleries in 1934 and 1935 issued “recipe” books, often with histories attached. One featured Irvin S. Cobb, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who had been a leader in the fight against Prohibition. Cobb, whose reputation and career soon would fall because of his racist views, was featured in a booklet from Frankfurt Distillery and its Paul Jones brand. Among illustrations was one that stereotyped blacks happily mixing drinks for white “gentlemen.” Clearly this was meant to invoke nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” of the pre-bellum South.

The theme of African-Americans as servants of affluent whites carried over into the next decade as exemplified by a Norman Rockwell-drawn 1940’s ad for Cream of Kentucky Bourbon. This brand had used black servants in its ads at least since 1911 and Rockwell obliged with an image that was only fractionally better than the Frankfurt Distillery’s. The waiter clearly is cast in an “Amos and Andy” mode.

The prize for the most racist whiskey ad of them all, however, must go to the Brown-Foreman Distillers of Louisville, Kentucky. Depicted on its 1940’s match cover ad for “Old Polk” brand whiskey is an African-American straight out of a minstrel show. He has thick lips, big feet and a loud wardrobe. This insensitivity when viewed from a 21st Century perspective seems almost unbelievable. Interesting too, distillery advertising of Old Polk Whiskey before Prohibition featured the likeness of former President James K. Polk.

Today when African-Americans are depicted in whiskey ads, of course, the images are entirely different. They are shown enjoying drinks with friends, often with whites present or in family situations. The Nation, including American distillers, has come a long way in the 150 years since Bininger’s dancing colored boy, but obviously it hasn’t been an easy road.

Dogs Playing Poker

I well remember the day about 1947 that my Father brought home a framed picture of dogs playing poker, given to him by a dental supply company. An avid poker player himself, he was captured by the art and probably would have hanged it in a hallway had he not been backed down by my Mother. Little did any of us realize then what a cultural icon the picture and others like it would become in America. Nor at that time did we recognize its pedigree.

“Dogs Playing Poker” refers collectively to a series of oil paintings 
by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, shown here. He was born in 1844 in Antwerp, New York to abolitionist Quaker farmers. Known to friends and family as "Cash,” Coolidge certainly knew how to turn his talent into cash. Although he had no formal training as an artist, his natural aptitude for drawing led him to create cartoons for his local newspaper when still in his early twenties. He gained national attention when he “invented” Comic Foregrounds, life-size painted cutouts into which one's head was placed and photographed, presumably resulting in hilarious effects.

When Coolidge was in his mid-50s, his creative imagination brought him to the attention of Brown & Bigelow, a St. Paul, Minnesota, advertising firm that wanted something new and different in an ad campaign for cigars. He obliged by painting a total of 16 pictures featuring anthropomorphized canines, of which nine showed dogs seated around a card table. The first three shown here are Coolidge’s work.

Like the Elvis or the Last Supper on velvet, Dogs Playing Poker have become derisively well-known in the United States as examples of low brow taste in home decoration. One critic has described Dogs Playing Poker as "indelibly burned into the American collective-schlock subconscious" because the images are so frequently seen.

In the current Disney/Pixar movie “Up,” a brief scene occurs of card-playing dogs. Coolidge’s creations also have had regular contemporary attention on TV programs like “Cheers,” and “The Simpsons.” In one recent episode of “Family Guy,” for example, the town mayor is discovered in the basement of the schoolhouse playing cards with dogs. The references go on and on.

The number of knockoffs of the paintings is also impressive. Shown here last are two contemporary artists’ variations on the Dogs Playing Poker theme. Note that these figures appear more like humans with appended canine heads than actual dogs.

The question remains of why Dogs Playing Poker has remained so popular an American icon for more than a century. My thought is that the incongruity of so animated an creature as a dog keeping a “poker face” like the best Texas Hold’em crowd just plain tickles the funny bones of generation-after-generation of Americans whose taste for wacky comedy never seems to flag.



Coolidge died in 1934 but not before seeing his creations embedded in American popular culture. If, improbably, he had lived to February 2005, he also would have seen two of his original Dogs Playing Poker paintings selling at auction for a whopping $590,400. It proves once again that in this country schlock sometimes can pay off big time.

The Appeals and Perils of Appraisal

From time to time I am asked to look at an artifact, often a whiskey jug, and provide the owner with an idea of its value. It is always a difficult chore for me. Recently, for example, I appraised an item that its owner had just bought and hoped to resell right away. When I gave him my estimate he objected that my quote was the amount he himself had paid --and he obviously wanted to turn a tidy profit on the resale. I wished him luck.

Moreover in my articles and this blog I deliberately shy away from making personal estimates of the monetary value of items being featured. While recognizing the appeals of appraisal, I am ever conscious of the ever present perils.

That was particularly brought home to me a few years ago at the Freer Gallery of Oriental Arts, located on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Once a month curators there provide free appraisals of items of Asian origin brought to them by the public. Among their unspoken motivations is locating a museum quality piece that might then be donated to the Freer.

Having spent almost two decades traveling regularly to Asia, I had a small collection of artifacts that were personal treasures, many of them on prominent display in our home. After waiting four months, the day for my Freer appraisal arrived. Among the items I brought for inspection were the four shown here.

The first inspected was a Chinese blue and white ink stand that I purchased from a shop in Vietnam about 1970. I am fond of the object, finding its slightly skewed designs very attractive. The Freer curator had other ideas. “Where did you get this?,” she demanded. Vietnam, I replied. “Well just look at the second rate work the Chinese were foisting off on their colonies.” I gulped.

From there we went to a cloisonné vase decorated with storks that has been among my prized possessions. “Where did you get this?” she asked. An antique store in Beijing, I replied. “Well, she replied, this is not Chinese. This is Japanese. Shows you how little those Chinese antique dealers know about anything!” I gulped twice.

The third item offered up for inspection was a small wine jug with an attractive glaze that has greeted visitors to our home for many years. I had purchased it in Vietnam assuming it was a vintage Vietnamese ceramic. This object was met with similar disdain. The Freer appraiser identified it as a wine jug made in China, shipped to France where it was filled with wine and then shipped back to Vietnam for French colonial consumption. Another letdown. I was beginning to regard the Freer as the Land of Broken Dreams.

Just before leaving home, however, I had spied a small earthenware vase with a brown glaze, purchased at a flea market in Jakarta, Indonesia, for half a dollar and, for a lark, included it in my haul. It was the final item for appraisal. When the curator came upon it she stopped short: “Where did you get this?” I told her. Examining it carefully under a magnifier, she kept muttering under her breath. Then she called over her fellow curator and they began a low conversation.

When they finished talking, my curator returned: “We think someone is trying to fake a early Chinese glaze.“ “Why would someone do that and then sell the vase to me for fifty cents?” I asked. She ventured no reply. Then it occurred to me that I had seen a second jug with an identical glaze at the market. “When I return to Indonesia would you like me to purchase it for you?” For the first time all day the Freer lady was enthusiastic: “By all means.”

When I returned to Indonesia and visited the same market stall, the second vase had been sold. Back home, however, the little brown vase immediately began occupying a place of special honor in our living room. It has been there ever since -- a subtle reminder of both the appeals and perils of appraisal.

Discovering the Past in Cyberspace

William Gibson, the well-known science fiction writer and the man who first coined the term “cyberspace,” is fascinated with eBay. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Gibson said: “EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which no one ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It is like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.”

The author goes on to say that eBay plus Google can allow an individual in some backwoods town “become the world premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff.” Gibson is dead right. While the archeologists unearth the past shovel by shovel, others of us drag it off the Internet.

For example, take the glass paperweight shown here. It is solid glass with raised letters that say “Remember Ungar’s Hungarian Hunyadi Arpad, Natural Aperient.” It looks as if it might have been made yesterday. A few years ago, coming on this paperweight, its provenance would have almost impossible to decipher. With the help of the Internet, however, today it is possible chart the history of the object with some precision and do it in a relatively short time.

First, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “aparient” as a laxative. Good to know. Second, the Web tells us Hunyadi was the last name of a Hungarian hero known variously as John or Jonas or Jean, and sometimes as Johan Hunniad. A great warrior, in 1441 Hunyadi delivered Serbia from the Ottoman Turks and recovered for his native Hungary the region of Wallachia. In 1450 he vanquished another Turkish army and became renowned throughout Christendom. Returning to Hungary he was made governor of the kingdom. In 1456 a flotilla assembled by Hunyadi destroyed the Ottoman fleet. He died in the same year, a national hero. His tomb, shown defaced, is a place of pilgrimage even today.

Now the story jumps ahead four centuries when a Hungarian named Andreas Saxlehner about 1863 began bottling the waters of a well he owned within the city limits of Budapest. He adopted the name “Hunyadi Janos” for his product and trademarked it in Europe. Business was brisk for this bitter-tasting laxative water and Saxlehner eventually owned 112 wells. He soon was exporting it worldwide, including to the United States. His bottles bore a highly elaborate paper label for bearing Hunyadi’s likeness.

The success of this aperient, however, drew competition. A number of Hungarian springs were tapped and bottled -- and many of them used Hunyadi in their brand name, to the dismay of Saxlehner. Chief among his competitors was Hunyadi Arpad. This laxative water was bottled beginning in 1880 from a Budapest area spring owned by Ignatz Ungar. In his ads Ungar claimed that his product had been legally conceded by the Prime Minister of Hungary to be the best and strongest natural aperient. Saxlehner, asserting the Hunyadi name was proprietary, sued his rival in European courts -- to mixed results. He also financed ads claiming that his was the only genuine Hunyadi water.

Almost inevitably the watery conflict spilled over into the New World. Saxlehner had a partner firm that merchandised his aparient in the U.S. Ignatz Ungar had a brother, Joseph, living in New York who served as his agent. Between 1886 and 1893, according to import figures, 1,395,050 bottles of Hunyadi Arpad were shipped into the U.S. By this time eight other mineral waters with Hunyadi in their name also were being imported from Hungary.

The Saxlehners had had enough. In 1893 they bought out the Ungars and shut their water off. Then they went after their other competition. With their America partners they sued for the exclusive right to use the name Hunyadi in the United States. The case went through the Federal court system and all the way to the Supreme Court where the case was heard in 1898. The Supremes in a lengthy decision upheld a lower court verdict that Hunyadi was a name in general use for aperient water and that it could not be held exclusively. The Saxlehners were charged court costs.

Please recall that we began our quest with just a single glass paperweight. By investigating its origins through Internet sources we 1) learned the meaning of aparient, 2) discovered the exploits of the 15th Century hero John Hunyadi, 3) traced the origins and growth of Hungarian laxative water, and 4) ended with a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. This array of information and images could be assembled only because of the riches available through Google, eBay, and other web sources.

There also is a practical result. Because Hunyadi Arpad was imported here during only the eight years 1886-1894, we can estimate safely that my glass paperweight, despite its utterly pristine and contemporary appearance, is between 106 and 114 years old and a true antique. That also is something important to know.