The Magazine Antiques

By Steve Oney  |  

In the foyer of a handsome Los Angeles house hang half a dozen handmade nineteenth-century game boards (backgammon, checkers, Chinese checkers, and Parcheesi, among others), the bright colors and well-used wooden surfaces of which convey something many history texts do not: the vividness and vitality of everyday American life at the turn of the last century. On the shelves of a facing alcove stands an army of small, idiosyncratically carved figures that evoke still more of the nation’s past: a blue-coated soldier keeps company with a cowboy-boot-clad Indian agent, while several black whirligigs commune with a group of white whirligigs. Striking as all this is, the showstopper is a mounted sheaf of seven heart-in-hand staffs at the rear of the room (see Fig. 2). Members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows used the shafts—each the length of a fireplace implement and topped by an open wooden palm adorned with a hand-painted red heart—in their lodge ceremonies. At once beautiful and mysterious, they bear out the point of view at work here: these are artifacts that enchant and instruct.

Everything my wife and I have gives us a sense of pleasure,” the collector says as he leads me through the house. “Everything has a story. Who did it? Why did they do it? We’re always learning.”

Although there are certainly more authoritative collections of American folk art, few have been as joyfully put together as this one. “My clients have let their hearts guide them,” says Michael J. Ogle, proprietor of Los Angeles’s American Garage, an antiques shop specializing in Americana. For more than fifteen years Ogle and his wife, Diana Douglas, have helped this couple acquire most of their collection. Ogle has joined us on our walk through the house. “I know super collectors who buy million-dollar pieces because they want the definitive object,” he says, “but that’s not what motivates these clients. They buy things they fall in love with.”
Nothing better speaks to the sense of romance that animates the couple than their house, which they purchased in 2004 as much to serve as a gallery for their collection as a place to live. Situated in an historic Los Angeles neighborhood (Cecil B. DeMille lived down the street), the 1934 colonial revival by the architect Wallace Neff (1895–1982) is itself a wonderful example of Americana. In a city where great houses are typically Spanish revival haciendas or sleek modernist icons, this sturdy but stylish two-story clapboarded jewel is as heartland as it gets.

Almost everything in the collection—from the grand to the utilitarian—is a work of early American folk art. In the spacious light-filled living room, an oversized blue-on-blue Pennsylvania step-back cupboard of about 1860 stands against the main wall. It may once have served a humble purpose, but it plays like a piece of sculpture here (see Fig. 4). So, too, do the several small nineteenth-century tables with painted graining. Although the owners have integrated paintings into the room, among them Edmund C. Coates’s View of Hudson Highlands from Fort Putnam, above West Point and A View of Mount Tom on the Connecticut River by Thomas Chambers (both c. 1840), it is the decorative arts that really dazzle. A painted, wooden double-sided clock from the 1860s that served as a watchmaker’s sign features the original cast-iron hanging ring (Fig. 8). A late nineteenth-century sheet-iron horse weathervane attributed to the W. A. Snow Company catches its equine subject in full-muscled stride. When the collector first saw it, he exclaimed, “That’s what I want over my fireplace so people will know what this house is all about” (see Fig. 7).

With some three hundred objects arrayed around the house, the merely diverting and the truly significant must coexist. Even so, several pieces stand out. The “R.W. Clark Blacksmith” sign in the dining room is one (Fig. 9). Adorned on the front side by a fierce white stallion and on the reverse by a buckboard, the sign looks very much as it must have when Clark, a Massachusetts and then Wisconsin blacksmith active in the 1860s, used it to advertise his handiwork. It also boasts an impeccable provenance, having once belonged to the great collector of Americana Roger Bacon (1904–1982). “It really is one of the cornerstones of this collection,” Ogle says.

Equally noteworthy is a grouping of four oil-on-canvas portraits of about 1845, also in the dining room (Fig. 11). Attributed to William W. Kennedy, a New Hampshire-born artist who worked in New England and Baltimore, the paintings depict a sea captain, his olive-skinned dark-eyed wife, and two sons—the older with a smart stickpin in his cravat, the younger holding flowers. “They came out of a Baltimore estate, and when we first saw them they weren’t for sale,” the collector explains. “But Diana said, ‘You have to have them.’ It’s rare to find four portraits of a family together. Most groupings are broken up. I love to look at them and think about their lives. The mother looks Spanish to me. I think the captain met her while abroad. One son is a daddy’s boy, the other a mother’s boy.” This, of course, is speculation, but with folk portraiture the precise truth about the subjects depicted is not always the main point.

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