Snakes in Clay

Right now somewhere in the Carolinas, I believe a potter lovingly is molding a snake onto a ceramic jug or pot. Although he assumes a ready sale for this work of his hands, the artist may be unaware that he is following a tradition almost 500 years old. In fact, this year is the 500th anniversary of the birth of the artisan who early conceived the idea of creating snakes in clay.

His name was Bernard Palissy, French, born in 1510. Shown here, Palissy was a early biologist during a period of great interest in the natural world. Also a potter, he made casts of actual specimens of animals and sea life and reproduced the forms on ceramic platters. Rampant on his dishware are fish, frogs, lizards, crayfish, shellfish, and -- most prominent -- snakes.

Palissy’s pottery developed a cult following in Europe and America during the 1800s. Many potters copied his plates and created ceramics in his “rustic” style. Two Americans were among them. In 1859 Cornwall Kirkpatrick (1814-1890) and his brother Wallace (1828-1896) founded the Anna Pottery in the southern Illinois town of Anna. Although their production included a wide range of ceramic items they have become best known for their snake jugs. Two shown here are among several dozen known specimens.

The traditional view of the Anna Pottery snake jugs has been that they were a temperance artifact and a warning against strong drink. More recent interpretations, with which I am in accord, have a different view. They point out grotesque, sexual and scatological aspects of the jugs, their humor and satirical “over the top” style. Moreover, the Kirkpatricks regularly supplied ceramic jugs and other containers for the whiskey trade. The conclusion is that the Anna snake jugs really are an attack on Victorian values and that the brothers were, like their contemporary Mark Twain, misanthropic humanists.

Whatever their motivation, the Kirkpatricks created snake jugs that fetch tens of thousands of dollars in the rare instances when the ceramics come up for sale. They also inspired generations of future potters to create serpent-featuring jugs, right up to our own time. Shown here are three contemporary examples.

The first is the product of W.A. “Bill” Flowers. Flowers, a North Carolina resident, specializes in ash glazes that impart a “tobacco spit” look to his ceramics. His jug shown here features a single large, smiling snake that seems to be guarding the contents of the jug.
The originator of the second ceramic is Marvin Bailey, a folk potter and artist from South Carolina. He works with salt glazes and often uses color to “dress up” his reptiles. His jug appears to bear the replica of a coral snake.

The third contemporary jug shown here is by a Kansas City artist, who signs his work, “W. Painter.” Known particularly for his mini-jugs, Mr. Painter is a student of earlier potters like the Kirkpatricks and tries to recreate their techniques and motifs. He has given his jug a surface approximating tree bark and looped a thin snake around it that eventually becomes its handle.

The tradition Bernard Palissy began a half millennium ago still is being carried on in small ceramic studios throughout America. For a long time to come we can be assured of viewing snakes in clay. Of Palissy himself, after a lengthy career as a favored potter to royalty, an intemperate outburst led to his being thrown into the Bastille. Although the French king offered Palissy freedom if he would recant, he refused and died in a dungeon cell in 1889 at the age of 80.

H. L. Mencken and Monticello Rye

Known widely as the “Sage of Baltimore”, H.L. Mencken was the most influential American commentator of the first third of the 20th Century and a man of strong opinions, pro and con, about almost everything. One of his strongly positive views was of Maryland rye whiskey. Of those, the brand name that most often came first to his mind -- it was his father’s favorite -- was Monticello Rye.

This brand was the original product of Malcolm Crichton, who was born in Illinois, the son of a Scottish-born wholesale grocer, about 1840. Moving to Baltimore, Crichton took over a defunct distillery, rebuilt the facility and began producing a whiskey he called “Monticello Rye.”
The 1880s was one of rapid growth as Monticello Rye rapidly became a popular national brand. Under the slogan, “Its All Whiskey,” ads trumpeted the purity and medicinal value of Crichton’s rye whiskey. Distributors like Loeb-Lion-Felix in New Orleans and Peter Welty in West Virginia featured the brand.”

Mencken contended that a friend “always ate rye bread instead of wheat because rye was the bone and sinew of Maryland whiskey -- the most healthful appetizer yet discovered by man.” This was clear to the Mencken family physician, Dr. Z. K. Wylie. According to Mencken, the good doctor “believed and taught that a shot of Maryland whiskey was the best preventive of pneumonia in the R months.” Mencken’s father Augustus, a cigar manufacturer, was entirely convinced. Moreover, when the senior Mencken sent out for whiskey, he wanted Monticello Pure Rye. His famous son recounted:

“His...bill file shows that on December 27, 1893, he paid Courtney, Fairall & Company, then the favorite fancy grocery fancy grocers of Baltimore, $4 dollars for a gallon of Monticello whiskey...Before every meal, including breakfast, he ducked into the cupboard in the dining-room and poured out a substantial hooker of rye, and when he emerged he was always sucking in a great whiff of air to cool off his tonsils. He regarded this appetizer as necessary to his well-being. He said it was the best medicine he had ever found for toning up the stomach.”

When Malcolm Crichton died in 1890, it appears that none of his four sons were interested or equipped to take on the business. By 1892 M. Crichton & Co. had disappeared from Baltimore city directories. But as often was the case with popular brands, the Monticello name lived on. Thomas G. Carroll & Sons of Baltimore (1872-1919) added “Monticello Whiskey” to its own brands. By 1903 the rye brand was being produced by a new Baltimore-based firm called The Monticello Distilling Co.

Baltimore distilling came to a screeching halt with the coming of Prohibition in 1920. Mencken abhorred it. “The chief argument against Prohibition is that it doesn’t prohibit” he commented. “This is also the chief argument in favor of it.” The author personally responded to the “Great Experiment” by selling his car and using the proceeds to purchase a large stock of “the best wines and liquors I could find.” We can guess Monticello rye was among them. Mencken stored them in a basement vault in his home whose door bore a custom-painted sign emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. The sign said: “This vault is protected by a device releasing chorine gas under 200 pound pressure. Enter at your own risk.”

No one celebrated the end of Prohibition with more gusto than Mencken. A photograph on the front page of the Baltimore Sun showed him downing the first beer to be poured at Baltimore’s Rennert’s Hotel bar in 13 years. “Pretty good. Not bad at all,” the paper quoted him saying. But he complained about paying higher prices for liquor after Repeal. Now, he contended, Monticello Rye cost $3 to $3.50 a quart -- not the $4 a gallon his father had paid.

After Repeal, the brand survived, at least into the 1940’s, the vintage of the Monticello mini-bottle shown here. In 1967, after the deaths of Mencken and his brother left their Hollins Street house empty, Baltimore citizens interested in turning it into a museum found in the cellar numerous full bottles of whiskey and wine, as well as a few empties. There is no written record to reveal if Monticello Rye was among them, but we may be excused for believing so.

Hunting for Hugo Thuemler

In the early 1980s as a collector of ceramic whiskey jugs, I bought a canteen-shaped porcelain bottle advertising Puritan Rye, a whiskey from D. Sachs Company of Louisville, Kentucky. On the base was a round pottery mark for the Thuemler Manufacturing Company. It took me more than 20 years to research this firm and its founder, Hugo Thuemler.

During the hunt I discovered something quite unexpected. Thuemler made only a limited number of whiskey jugs -- perhaps as few as four -- but designed and produced scores of different beer steins and mugs for the American brewing industry. He also created them for root beer makers, fraternal groups, tourist attractions, and conventions. Because the company ceased with Thuemler’s death in 1908, every one of these ceramic drinking vessels legitimately can claim the status of antiques.

Hugo Thuemler was born in 1847, almost certainly in Germany. During his youth German manufacturers had developed a process of transfer printing that allowed more mass production of decorated steins. Exactly when Thuemler arrived in the U.S. is unclear, but he brought with him the Old World knowledge of decorating both pottery and glass.

In 1894 when he was 45 years old, he is recorded as living in Rochester, Pennsylvania, a town not far from Pittsburgh. His occupation then was listed as “salesman.” Four years later an area directory carried a notice for the Thuemler Manufacturing Co., a business that described itself as a “manufacturer of novelties, decorators of china and glassware,” This theme was repeated in its billhead. A number of early Thuemler items carry a Rochester mark.

By 1901 Hugo had relocated his operations to the Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley where he employed a number of skilled decorators. He also maintained a second address, probably a sales office, in Pittsburgh. Subsequently his wares bore a “Pittsburg” (the official spelling for a short time) pottery mark.

Thuemler’s firm filled an evident need for American breweries. In the past decorated advertising mugs and steins had to be ordered from German suppliers with added cost and delay. Hugo’s ceramics, some of them shown here, solved that problem. I am particularly fond of the blue and white stein produced for the Fred Sehring Brewery of Joliet, Illiniois, and the patriotic themes created for Pabst of Milwaukee and the American Brewery of St. Louis. The handle of many steins, like the one from Sprenger Brewing, featured a ceramic portrait of King Gambrinus, the mythical German king who is the unofficial patron of beer and brewing.

Although earlier it appeared that Hugo Thuemler appears to have lived a bachelor’s life, information has come to light in 2015 indicating that he may have had a wife and daughter.  Further, there is some evidence that he kept a residence in Berlin.  In Sewickley, we know he lived at the Elmhurst Inn, a boarding house that originally was a private mansion. According to a newspaper obituary Thuemler died there on September 1, 1908, at the age of 61. Cause of death was listed as “acute indigestion.” After Hugo’s demise, production ceased and all references to the firm disappeared. More than a century later, however, Thuemler items are being avidly collected and prices have risen steadily.

For a decade or more I have kept an ever-growing list of Thuemler products that have come to my attention. It now numbers some 90 marked items and an additional few that are unmarked but may be attributed to Thuemler. The list does not contain prices. Anyone wishing a copy may write me enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope: Jack Sullivan, 4300 Ivanhoe Place, Alexandria VA, 22304.

A Peek at the "Eye of Providence"

Always finding ceramic tiles of interest, I was impelled to buy one recently on a business trip to Armenia. As show here it is dominated by a single eye in a triangle surrounded by blue and gold rays. The ancient Armenian script at the bottom could not be translated by the shop proprietor but she told me that the import of the tile was keeping away the “evil eye.”

Well, yes and no. Actually this image generally is known as the “Eye of Providence,” representing the ability of the Almighty to see and know what is happening in the world, and -- even more important -- what will happen in the future. The roots of this icon go back to ancient Egypt where the eye of Horus, a god of the Sun and Moon, was frequently displayed and known as a “wedjat.” The single “all seeing” eye was, for example, the central element of seven priceless gold, fiance, carnelian and lapis lazuli bracelets found on the mummy of Pharaoh Shoshenq II and shown here.

With the coming of Christianity, the eye came to be surrounded by a triangle, representing the Trinity and generally was depicted with rays of celestial light radiating from it. An excellent example is found on the Aaachen Cathedral in western Germany, the oldest cathedral in northern Europe. Begun in 786, Charlemagne is buried there. The Constitution of France that includes the famous Rights of Man traditionally has radiated at the top a similar eye symbol.

Most notably the Eye of Providence has found its place in the New World as a standard element of the one dollar bill. On the back of the bill are two circles. Together they comprise the Great Seal of the United States. The eye is on top of a pyramid and above it the Latin for “God has favored our undertaking.” It represents the long and somewhat tedious effort by the Continental Congress, immediately following the Declaration of Independence, to create a seal for the new and embattled nation.

The three chosen for the task were are familiar names: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Although these were among the most distinguished Americans, none of them knew anything about heraldry. Led by Franklin, they turned to the artist Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, an expert and collector of all things American. Du Simitiere turned out a sketch, shown here, that no one --except the Big Three -- liked. Note that the eye appears in the design.

Not until years later was a seal approved by Congress. Through the leadership of Franklin, the Eye of Providence became a part of the Great Seal. Over ensuing years its presence there has stirred many interpretations and much speculation about its meaning. A recent movie entitled “National Treasure” starring Nicholas Cage has as major premise that the eye is a key to unlocking secrets about a treasure stash. It is also has been linked to the use of an all-seeing eye in Masonic rituals. Evidence is, however, that the Masons adopted the eye as a symbol only after approval of the Great Seal. Note that the Masonic eye shown here does not include the Trinity triangle.

Through the years the Eye of Providence has found its way into other symbols. For example, it is part of the seal of the State of Colorado. Likewise the seal of the University of Mississippi. Very recently the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) adopted the symbol as its own. That has engendered speculation that this semi-secret agency has adopted George Orwell’s warning that “Big Brother is watching you.”

Certain powerful images survive down through the centuries even as they take on altered uses and new meanings. The Eye of Providence must be counted among them. It surely has proven its durability as a symbol from ancient Egypt to the present times. If in doubt about that, take out a one dollar bill and look at the back.

A Bit of Lubricity Helps the Medicine Go Down

Out of a constant fascination with the advertising messages of the Victorian era, I have determined that the merchandising most likely to feature sexually titillating themes came from the peddlers of bitters. Bitters were mixtures of herbs, roots and tree bark laced with a generous amounts of alcohol that were sold as cures for a wide range of diseases and ailments. At some point the companies that produced them concluded, as many advertisers have today, that “sex sells.”

In that earlier era, 1880s-1900, one that many identify with puritanical mores, these medicine men often appear to have gotten away with lubricious images on their signs, ads, and trade cards that are startling even by today’s standards. We start with a relatively benign image from Brown’s Iron Bitters. It features a winsome young girl displaying a lovely -- and largely bare -- bosom.

More scandalous are the claims made for this product as a “sure cure” for such maladies as malaria, malarial fevers, and “decay in liver, kidneys and bowels.” A tall order for a tonic that likely carried as much alcohol as a bottle of gin and little else of therapeutic value. It was a product of the Brown Chemical Company of Baltimore, Maryland, which trademarked the potion about 1882 and began suing any other patent medicine with “iron” in its name. Ironically, the principal product of Brown Chemical was fertilizer.

The woman advertising Carmeliter Bitters not only is displaying considerable cleavage but has her skirt hitched up as she leans provocatively what appears to be a bar stool. This nostrum was advertised not only as “The Elixir of Life,” but as a remedy for “all kidney and liver complaints.” It was the product of Burhenne & Dorn who did business at 347 Hamburg Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

A card memorializing a meeting of the the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), representing Civil War soldiers was the occasion for Pond’s Bitters to tell a double entendre joke about fighting a battle under a flag, represented by an apron gracing a pretty waitress. As the flip side of the trade card discloses, Pond’s Bitters also included a long list of illnesses it cured, mostly stomach and intestinal ailments, but adding malaria.

The Chicago-based medicine peddler was a particular target of Samuel Hopkins Adams, the journalist whose exposes in Collier’s Magazine in 1905 led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. In the first of his series on “The Great American Fraud” Adams took aim at Pond’s for “trading on public alarm” by running an ad claiming to cure meningitis with one of its nostrums while New York was suffering an epidemic of the disease.

Rex Bitters was the source of two racy trade cards. One shows a rooster in formal dress trailing a similarly fancy costumed hen with the caption, “It looks like a cinch.”
At bottom left is a baby chick singing a popular song of the day: “Meet me tonight in dreamland.” The second Rex trade card leaves nothing to the imagination, showing a doctor leaning against the exposed breasts of a Gibson Girl. The caption “Heart Trouble” is, however, ambiguous as to which of the two figures it refers.

Rex Bitters, a Chicago-produced patent medicine, advertised itself as curing biliousness, malaria, chills and fever, neuralgia, constipation, pain in back, dyspepsia, sick headache, indigestion, sour stomach, and all “affections” of the kidneys and liver. Despite its obvious alcoholic content, the label advised customers to give children a teaspoonful twice a day and at bedtime “if required.” Rex Bitters merchandising emphasized that it had been recognized as a medicine by the Internal Revenue Department which had slapped a special tax on such products to help pay for the Spanish-American War.

The final example is from Lash’s Kidney & Liver Bitters, an outfit that claimed offices and laboratories in both Chicago and San Francisco. It is perhaps the most salacious of the group. Professing to demonstrate the use of the five senses, it portrays a tryst between an attractive, statuesque woman and and suave mustached visitor. The ending does not need further explanation.

Like the other bitters seen here, Lash’s claimed to be a “sure cure” for a wide range of illnesses including malaria --a seeming favorite among the patent medicine crowd -- and assured customers that it was “positively without equal for all diseases arising from a disordered condition of the kidneys and liver.”

In retrospect, if the bitters companies images seem scandalous, they did considerably less harm than did the bitters themselves. Adams, whose muckraking series of articles for Colliers Magazine helped achieve passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, called these so-called “cures” a fraud on the public and even worse, “subtle poisons.” While the Act required a listing of ingredients on the labels of patent medicines, it did not outlaw claims to cure diseases.

The first head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Harvey W. Wylie, in several public statements, however, soon made it known that potions claiming to be cures would be called on to prove those claims. Failure to do so could open them to prosecution for mail fraud. Almost overnight many professed cures were transformed into less aggressive remedies and tonics.

Key words: bitters advertising, Samuel Hopkins Adams

The Art Nouveau Whiskey Jug

Among my favorite artistic movements is “Art Nouveau,” a style that burst into wide popularity about 1890 in Europe and the United States and held sway until snuffed out by the cold winds of World War One three decades later. Characterized by lavish ornamentation with lines reminiscent of twining plan tendrils or ribbons flowing in the wind, Art Nouveau was frequently used in the merchandising of the day, selling everything from bicycles and eggs to cigarette papers, throat lozenges, and -- yes -- whiskey.

An example is the Thomas Rossland scotch whisky jug, displaying a familiar Art Nouveau theme, the “Tree of Life,” with its roots, branches, leaves and some kind of round fruit. This jug recently fetched more than a $1,000 at auction. It was the product of the Doulton Lambeth Pottery , now known as Royal Doulton. Between 1882 and 1914 this British pottery manufacturer issued dozens of whiskies that incorporated highly glazed necks, shoulders, handles and bodies with Art Nouveau themes in a range of rich and colored glazes.

In the United States, by contrast, only a few distillers and whiskey dealers used the decors common to Art Nouveau. Note here a Doulton jug, predominantly brown and yellow with distinctive flowers in a drapery. Below it is an American jug that features similar flowers. It is from “Coronation Brand” and is “Scotch-type Whiskey.”

Thereby hangs a mystery. This jug is part of a series of three, all of which go under the name, Coronation Brand, but with presumably different contents. One of them is labeled “Irish Type Whiskey” and the other “Kornschnapps Style Liquor” -- a German alcoholic beverage. All profess to be “Products of Ohio.” Each reflects the Art Nouveau sensibility in the differing modes of flowing shapes that surround their labels. Two decades of trying to locate the origins of these highly unusual whiskeys has yielded me absolutely no clues.

Nor are there any clues to the potteries that might have made and designed the labels for these jugs. My suspicion is that it was Sherwood Brothers of New Brighton, Pennsylvania. (See my blog of November 2009.) This is the only U.S. pottery in my knowledge with the ability to do wrap around transfers of the good design and sophistication represented by these Art Nouveau containers. Sadly, often Sherwood Brothers did not mark their products.

Whoever made them clearly were taking cues and themes from Doulton jugs, such as the 1900 “Good Luck and Happiness to You” whiskey done in the Art Nouveau style. One final American whiskey jug done in that mode is also from Ohio. It is labeled “Finest Old Sour Mash” and was issued by the R. Brand & Company distillers from Toledo. Many of these Brand jugs carry a mark indicating that they were made in Scotland by the Port Dundas Pottery, second only to Doulton in its ability to create attractive whiskey containers.

As I continue to seek an answer to the puzzle of of these Coronation Brand jugs, it is my hope that through this blog new information may come to light. In the meantime I will treasure looking at these Art Nouveau artifacts on display in my house.

Dr. Seuss Sells "The Sauce"

Last October when I used an anti-Prohibition cartoon by signed Dr. Seuss, it did not occur to me that there was a intriguing back story in the image. I have always been a fan of the Seuss books, from Cat in a Hat to Horton Hears a Hoo and beyond -- books read to my sons when they were tots.

Unknown to me then was that their author, Theodor Seuss Geisel, came from a family of brewers. His grandfather Geisel owned the Kalmbach and Geisel Brewery in Springfield, Mass. In 1894 it was renamed the Highland Brewery and five years later became part of the Springfield Brewery. In 1919, on the very day his father became president of the company, Prohibition was voted and eventually forced the brewery to close. Geisel never forgot the financial loss and trauma this event caused his family.

The 1942 anti-Prohibition cartoon was occasioned by a bill in Congress to lower the draft age that included a rider that would have outlawed the sale of liquor in areas adjacent to military installations. The concern, shared by Ted Geisel, was that there were very few liquor stores in wartime America that were not near some kind of military site. This threat occasioned the cartoon referencing the long dead Prohibition stalwart, Carrie Nation, riding on a characteristically Dr. Seuss camel.

Further research led to the realization that at times during his career Dr. Seuss not only championed strong drink but actually provided advertising materials for beer and whiskey. Before children’s books were a major occupation, Geisel had made a living largely by drawing ads for a number of U.S. companies, initially for an insecticide named “Flit,” made by Standard Oil.

Geisel’s first foray into alcoholic beverages occurred in 1937 when he was commissioned to do a series of ads for Schaefer Beer. A New York City brewery, the F & M Schaefer Company had been founded in 1842 by brothers from Wetzlar, Germany. The brewery survived Prohibition and at one point in the 1950s Schaefer was reputed to be the largest selling beer in the world. Geisel was hired to give a lively image to Schaefer’s bock beer, a dark malty seasonal beverage that typically is available in March and April.

Because “bock” is also the word for goat in German, the brew often is depicted with that image. In keeping with this tradition, Geisel used a typically Seussian-looking mountain goat for his ad. In one illustration, the goat is a trophy animal who is looking enviously off the wall at two glasses of beer passing by. In another, the goat is a waiter carrying a foaming schooner on a tray.

When a small Scotch distillery in 1939 decided to advertise in the U.S. market, it needed a special image that would make its bottles distinctive on the shelves of bars and liquor stories. Given the assignment, Geisel created the “Hankey Bird,” an absurd looking avian with a large beak and wearing a kilt. With the use of a small spring, the figure snapped onto the neck of a bottle of Hankey Bannister Scotch. It was brought instant attention to the whiskey and sales soared.

Noting his distinctive work for Schaefer, in 1942 the Narragansett Brewing Company, located in Cranston, Rhode Island, asked Geisel to undertake an ad campaign for its beer. The president, Rudolph F. Haffenreffer, was a avid collector of Native American artifacts including cigar store Indians. Haffenreffer asked Geisel to weave an Indian theme into his advertising.

Thus was born “Chief Gansett,” a blocky figure wearing beads, carrying a hatchet and boasting a multicolored headdress. Most often this wooden Indian carried a large goblet of beer. The image proved very popular and the Chief appeared on a range of marketing items including trays, bar coasters, and posters as well as appearing in newspaper and magazine ads. In an ad for bock beer, Chief Gansett was depicted riding on an animal that bore a strong resemblance to the goat Geisel earlier had drawn for Schaefer Beer.

Throughout his career Ted Geisel as Dr. Seuss had written and drawn for youngsters. In 1957, however, he published two remarkable books that sent his reputation into the stratosphere, Cat in a Hat and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Thereafter he was able to abandon commercial work entirely to concentrate on children’s literature. While generations forward may be thankful for that, a look back is instructive to the time when Dr. Seuss sold the sauce and a whole lot of other things through his art. Those drawings lovingly have been gathered by Dr. Charles D. Cohen, a Springfield Mass. dentist, in a marvelous book called Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss. It is a must read for any Dr. Seuss aficionado.