Anthropology, Art, and Folklore

In the great age of museum institutionalization between 1875 and 1925, museums competed to form collections in newly defined object categories. Yet museums were uncertain about what to collect, as the boundaries between art and anthropology and between art and craft were fluid and contested. As a case study, this article traces the tortured fate of a large collection of folk pottery assembled by New York art patron Emily de Forest (1851–1942). After assembling her private collection, Mrs. de Forest encountered difficulties in donating it to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After becoming part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it finally found a home at the Pennsylvania State Museum of Anthropology. Emily de Forest represents an initial movement in the estheticization of ethnic and folk crafts, an appropriation that has since led to the establishment of specifically defined museums of folk art and craft.

An Easter Prayer, 1859

Carla L. Peterson describes her own experience of seeing one of Dave’s pots on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and interprets the Easter imagery in the incised poem, “Good for lard—or holding fresh meats.” Peterson conducts a thorough biblical exegesis of the inscription in connection with the Gospel of John’s account of the graveclothes left behind by the resurrected Jesus and with the figure Peterson names as the other prophet implied within it. Peterson ends by proposing Passover as another religious touchstone for Dave the Potter and thus ascribing a radical ecumenicalism to him and his jar, which is ultimately argued to be Dave the Potter’s Easter service.