Painted Shaker Oval Boxes and the Country Painting Tradition

I'm excited to share a small collaboration that's part of my June release: six handcrafted size #3 button boxes, painted by Indiana craftsman Dan Coble and lined inside with Civil War-era newspapers from the Boston Morning Journal. They'll go up for sale on Wednesday, June 3rd at 12:00 noon EST, alongside another special project I've been wrapping up — more on that one in a few days.

Before I get to the boxes themselves, I want to take a minute on the painting tradition behind them. It's a piece of American craft history that anyone who's spent time around early American antiques has likely seen, but may not know much about. Here's a quick peek at where it came from. (Continued Below)

A Country Painting Tradition

Back in the early 1800s, painted furniture and other household items were just about everywhere. Walk into a farmhouse in rural New England or the Mid-Atlantic and the chests, boxes, dressers, walls, and floors would almost all be painted in some way — sometimes in plain colors, oftentimes in patterns.

There were a few reasons for it. Houses back then could be dim places — small windows, oil lamps and candles for evening light — so bright painted surfaces helped brighten the rooms once the natural light started to fade. Paint also let country woodworkers make good use of whatever local lumber was on hand — pine, poplar, or whatever the nearby sawmill was turning out — without the piece looking plain. The paint did most of the visual work, so even a simple wood underneath could end up looking striking once finished. And on top of all that, a painted piece brought a little bit of fancy into a household that couldn't otherwise afford it.

By the 1820s or so, the patterns had gotten pretty wild. Swirled, feathered, striped, fanned. Sometimes they imitated curly maple or some other fancy wood the maker didn't have on hand. Sometimes they didn't look like any tree that ever grew at all.

The methods were simple enough. Usually a colored glaze brushed over a lighter ground coat, then patterns pulled into the wet glaze with rolled putty, leather, cork, or even a feather. Some painters even used candle smoke on a varnish ground to make fanned, radiating patterns. The tools didn't have to be fancy — the eye and the imagination of the painter had to be good.

The tradition peaked between about 1800 and 1850. A lot of it was done by the homeowners themselves, looking to add a little color and personality to the house. Some was done by traveling painters who went house to house with their paints and a few tools, finishing chests, dressers, picture frames, and small boxes for households that wanted some color and pattern beyond what the local cabinetmaker was turning out in raw wood. Most of these painters never signed their work. Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts holds one of the best institutional collections of it, and the American Folk Art Museum put on a whole exhibit a few years back. If you've ever spent time poking around early American country furniture in person, I'm sure you've seen plenty of it.

A Plain Form Meets a Painted Surface

Here's the interesting part though — the Shakers themselves had no part in any of this. They flat-out rejected decorative painting on doctrinal grounds. Their Millennial Laws — basically the internal rule book the communities lived by — laid down what finishes were allowed (flat blues, reds, yellows, greens) and what wasn't (anything they considered “deceitful,” which included veneer and any kind of patterned graining).

Classic Shaker pieces from Mount Lebanon and the other major communities are famously plain — almost severely so. That's a big part of what made the form so admired in the first place, and why it's never gone out of style. A well-known saying often attributed to Shaker philosophy sums it up pretty well: “Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful.” Function first, then quiet beauty in the service of that function. That's the whole design ethic in one sentence.

Meanwhile, many households around the Shaker communities were painting their chests and boxes and dressers and walls and floors in much more decorative fashion. The two surfaces were living next door to each other: disciplined Shaker plainness — form following function — in one room, the exuberant country-painted decoration in the room across the hall.

These six boxes bring both of those surfaces onto a single piece. The box itself is mine — a traditional Shaker oval, built the way I've been building them in Maine since 1993. The interior lining is also mine, papered with authentic 1860s newspapers. The painted finish on the outside is Dan's, done in the country-painting tradition. When I think about how a piece like this might have come together back in the 1800s, I picture the lady of the house buying a plain Shaker oval from the nearby community, bringing it home, and deciding to add her own personal touch — papering the inside, and asking a local painter to decorate the outside. These six are a small homage to that idea: a Shaker form, a country-painted surface, and a paper interior from the era both traditions belonged to. (Continued Below)

Six Size #3 Button Boxes

About the boxes themselves: these are size #3 ovals, just a bit shallower than my standard #3 — often called “button boxes” because they're the right size for holding buttons, needlework notions, and other small household items. Each one was built here in my Embden, Maine workshop, with ash bands and quartersawn Eastern white pine tops and bottoms, milled on-site, bent on my usual forms, and tacked with copper.

From there I packed them up and sent them out to Angola, Indiana, where Dan and Marlene Coble work in early American decorative painting. Dan grew up in Wabash, Indiana, studied at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, and has been working in this tradition for more than forty years. His work has been featured in Fine Furniture magazine and other publications, and he and Marlene show every year at the Artisans Tent at Zoar in Zoar, Ohio.

Back when I used to do shows, Dan and Marlene would be at a lot of the same ones I was at — they're an extremely nice couple doing some awesome, award-winning work. When I asked Dan if he'd paint a few boxes for me, he agreed, and the result is the set you see here. The patterns wrap around the entire box — lid, bottom, and both bands. Each one uses a different combination of color and technique. Every box unique, all by his hand.

The Boston Morning Journal

Inside, each of the six is lined with an original Civil War-era issue of the Boston Morning Journal — most of them from 1862.

The Journal was a Boston daily, founded in 1833 and published until 1917, when it eventually got folded into the Boston Herald. During the war it ran two editions every day — a morning paper and an evening — and sent its own correspondents into the field for the whole war, including a man named Charles Carleton Coffin, who was one of the only American reporters to cover the war from beginning to end, from Bull Run through the fall of Richmond.

All six paper interiors are sealed behind finish coats — you can read them and handle them without any worry of damaging the paper. (Continued Below)

Available Wednesday, June 3rd at 12:00 Noon EST

These six painted boxes (along with numerous other items) will go up for sale on Wednesday, June 3rd at 12:00 noon EST. As always, free U.S. shipping. I'll send out a newsletter the day before with the full list of items that will be available.

If you have questions about the boxes, the paper interiors, the painting tradition, or Dan and Marlene's work, feel free to reach out. I'm always glad to talk about the work!