Art: The Useful & Agreeable

When the carpenters and joiners of Waltham, Mass, whittled out wooden models for L. W. Gushing & Sons’ custom-made weather vanes, they had no pretensions of being artists. If they added an occasional creative or imaginative touch to these practical instruments, they were merely trying, as one craftsman put it, to “blend the useful and the agreeable.”

From the wood carvings other craftsmen made cast-iron molds, and in these the copper weather vanes were hammered out. Gushing & Sons shipped them to all parts of New England to become the crowning touches on new barns, village churches and town halls. For barns, the vanes were shaped like horses, cows and oxen; for churches, there were finny pickerel and proud, plumed cocks; and for public buildings, spread-winged eagles, mythical Columbias and grasshoppers (similar to the glassy-eyed insect atop Faneuil Hall, which has been showing Bostonians which way the wind blows since 1749).

For more than half a century Gushing vanes pirouetted in the wind. Finally, in the 19203, the work of Waltham’s anonymous craftsmen was discovered by folk-art collectors. Edith Gregor Halpert, founder of Manhattan’s Downtown Gallery, busily stripped the New England skyline of more than a hundred vanes, sold them to museums. Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art sent some abroad in an exhibition of American folk art. Seeing the show in Paris, Pablo Picasso exclaimed: “Cocks have always been seen, but never as well as in American weather vanes.”

The Gushing firm has long been out of business, but Collector Halpert knew that some of the old iron molds must still be around. She searched for ten years up and down New England, finally, last year, found a jumble of 350 Gushing molds in the yard of a Chelsea (Mass.) junkman. Last week in New York’s Associated American Artists Galleries, 16 new vanes shaped from the old molds were on exhibition. Considering that they were meant to be seen atop a high perch, the figures were remarkably graceful close up. Almost all were strictly realistic, but they had many touches of humor or pride. One was a soaring steed with flying mane, another a chubby Gabriel blowing a horn.

A limited number of each vane (an average of 20) will be reproduced for collectors at prices up to $500 (price in the 1850s: about $60). After that, Antique Hunter Halpert will donate the molds to a museum, and folk sculpture of weather vanes is likely to become as extinct as figurehead carving for clipper ships.