NATIONAL PARK SERVICE The Most Splendid Carpet

Trophies

To the twentieth century reader, perhaps the most puzzling part of the article in Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser of 1791 is its reference to the use of "marine and land trophies." The trophy descended to the 18th century from Greek and Roman antiquity in two forms. The original definition in ancient times was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a structure erected (originally on the field of battle) as a memorial of a victory in war, consisting of arms or other spoils taken from the enemy, hung upon a tree, pillar, etc., and dedicated to some divinity."

In the eighteenth century, however, under the influence of French designers such as Pierre Ranson and the engraver Jean Charles Delafosse, the word trophy came to apply to any ornamental or symbolic group of objects, such as musical instruments or carpenter's tools, which suggested a particular idea or mood. Such trophies were used as wall or ceiling decoration in an ornamental, typically symbolic manner; an increased taste for richness of effect allowed musical trophies to show the function of the room in which they occurred and architectural instruments were sometimes used to decorate a fireplace surround or overmantel in the home of a gentleman interested in the art, or who had perhaps himself dabbled in design. If used at all in English exterior architecture, military trophies predominated. In an age of little exterior ornamentation, decorations were often absent altogether or were restricted to geometric elements such as decorative brickwork. In imitation of classical buildings, however, statuary of classical warriors, gods, or emperors sometimes appeared atop the roof line. Here trophies were also used, showing the family arms and crests, symbolic of the importance of the name. From 1723, when the great baroque architect John Vanbrugh used trophies at Grunsthorpe, to the later years of the eighteenth century, when Robert Adam designed the Drury Lane Theatre Royal, the formula was a standard of English Palladianism.

FIGURE 32: Trofeo di Ottaviano Augusto," engraved plate from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Trofei Di Ottaviano Augusto Innalati Per La Vittoria..., Pl. 12, 1753. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Because interior decoration permitted much freer use of ornament, trophies were more commonly used inside. Military trophies appeared frequently in England in seventeenth and eighteenth century baroque and rococo interiors, an impressive element in a repertoire of numerous decorative motifs. Perhaps the most ornate of English trophy carving was done at Ham House, in 1638, on the staircase paneling. After 1758, Robert Adam used trophies in his designs for interior wall panels. The famous gilded trophies at Syon House are perhaps the most impressive trophy panels ever executed in England, and are very close to the Roman prototype as it appears in the Piranesi engraving.

Military trophies also occurred in furniture, such as Chippendale's rococo picture frames, chimney pieces, and pedestals, familiar to Americans through Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director. But trophies of any sort were little used in American architecture and decoration. One documented example of American use of military trophies in architecture is the Triumphal Arch which Charles Bullfinch designed for George Washington's post-inaugural tour to Boston in 1790. For this structure, which was torn down after Washington's departure, Bullfinch used, in Washington's own words, "a trophy, composed of the Arms of the United States, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and our French Allies, crowned with a wreath of Laurel," an engraving of which appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine of January 1790. [21]

FIGURE 33: Staircase at Ham House, London, c. 1640, incorporating carved armorial trophies. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

FIGURE 34: Trophy panel at Osterley Park, London; stucco, designed by Robert Adam, c. 1768. This trophy and the gilded ones at Syon House were derived from "Tropheo di Ottaviano Augusto" (figure 32). Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

FIGURE 35: Detail of the façade of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, from Pl. VI, Vol. II, No. V of Robert and James Adam, Works in Architecture, 1779. Courtesy of The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum Libraries.

What, then, was the inspiration for the "marine and land trophies" of the Senate carpet? Military trophies were not commonly used in America, and apparently had little meaning for Americans. Moreover, one could imagine that the Senators would not have reacted kindly to a suggestion of military might, when in 1791 the whole thrust of American thinking was towards progress in the peaceful fields of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. A glance at the second type of trophy, the non-military, which came into vogue in the eighteenth century, provides a better answer.

Unknown to ancient designers, the idea of a purely ornamental use for trophies composed of other than warlike objects may have come ultimately from the Palladian classical revival in seventeenth century Italy. Palladio certainly employed hunting trophies, and trophies of the arts, interwoven with allegorical figures and grotesques in the Villa Emo at Vicenza about 1564. French designers such as Jacques Huquier and Pierre and Jean Lepautre engraved trophies of flowers and fruits along with a profusion of military trophies, for use by sculptors and plaster workers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and Jean Lepautre's works on ornament were available in England.

FIGURE 36: "View of the Triumphal Arch and Colonnade, Erected in Boston ... 1789," engraved plate from the Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 1. Courtesy of the Bostonian Society, Old State House, Boston.

It was not until just before mid-eighteenth century, however, with the advent of the rococo style, that the use of non-military trophies became popular. The rococo, with its rockery and grottoes, explicitly rejected symmetry in favor of asymmetrical designs with C and S curves, and the ornamentation by comparison to earlier styles seems bizarre and sometimes incongruous. This change in taste brought the "pastoral" trophy into fashion.

As early as 1698, Francois Blondel, in his Cours d' Architecture, codified the use of trophies according to a book of designs he had found by Albrecht Durer, of rustic tools and agricultural implements "arranged very artistically." Following Durer's example, Blondel recommended that architects use not only "trophies of arms or of war, but even trophies of peace: such as the sciences, the arts, amusements, arranging for example several musical instruments, the principal ornaments of balls and of the theater, hunting and fishing equipment and a thousand others, whose beauty consists principally in the choice and disposition of objects, and in the appropriateness of these ornaments to the general design of the building." [22] Resting on this solid source, collections of garden implements or flowers and baskets began to appear on porcelain; by 1770 designers such as Pierre Ranson were publishing engravings of trophies of agricultural implements, fishing nets, and garden tools for use as patterns.

Perhaps the most prolific designer of trophies in France was Jean Charles Delafosse, whose voluminous works include hundreds of purely decorative engravings of hunting and fishing trophies, agricultural implements, flower baskets, and objects symbolic of the visual and performing arts. Delafosse composed a slightly different type of trophy in addition, one with a symbolic purpose, in which a collection of objects would be used to symbolize a city, a nation, the months of the year, or a state of mind such as happiness, much in the same way that Cesare Ripa did in his emblem books with classical figures carrying symbolic "attributes." So popular was the trophy in French decoration that a large number of surviving eighteenth century buildings boast trophy panels today, outstanding examples of which are the beautifully carved panels in Louis XVI's Cabinet de Toilette at Versailles, designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel.

By 1720, non-military trophies were beginning to appear in English decoration, copied by English craftsmen from the profusion of books and engravings of French ornaments, or executed by French craftsmen brought to England for the purpose. Davenport House, in Shropshire, has a trophy of surveying instruments on the Hall chimney piece, dating from 1726. Mawley Hall acquired in 1730 along with the military trophy in its Entrance Hall, a charming staircase with a stair rail shaped like a sea monster, and hung with an assemblage of fishing equipment. Other trophies were carved into the panels on the top landing.

FIGURE 37: Detail of English printed textile, c. 1785-95. Courtesy of The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Gilbert Ask Photograph.

An interesting use of trophies occurs in two English textiles made for the American market between 1785 and 1795. The first is the plate-printed linen-cotton pattern of about 1785 taken from two print sources, "America Lamenting" and "America Presenting at the Altar of Liberty Medallions of Her Illustrious Sons," which has rather robust fishing, hunting and musical trophies wound about the pictorial vignettes. The second English textile was part of a patchwork quilt, and is only a fragment of a scene with vignettes of children playing, surrounded by swags of trophies; one is an assemblage of fishing gear, the other of agricultural implements. These trophies are very close to the designs of Pierre Ranson in inspiration, and an engraving by Ranson of one fishing trophy is nearly close enough to the textile to be called a direct source. The character of these trophies is important for the Senate carpet, because the combination of objects they contain for the first time fits the description of "land and marine." At the left of the patchwork piece appears a detailed and finely drawn fishing trophy which well might be called "marine". In addition there are assemblages of tools for tilling the earth, with wheat and flails for winnowing, a "land" trophy by any standard.

In American design, there were few traditional trophies in the sense of a compact group of symbolic objects like the trophies in the above patchwork piece. No American or English pattern book whose use in America has been confirmed contains this sort of trophy. There was, on the other hand, use of the same types of objects in pictorial form to represent land and sea in American engravings, particularly state seals, membership certificates, map cartouches, and patriotic prints.

FIGURE 38: Detail of cartouche from "A Map of the most Inhabited part of Virginia...," drawn by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, 1751. Independence National Historical Park Collection.

The land and sea juxtaposition too, had its pictorial roots in English tradition. The English royal seal of James II, dated 1687, had "on the one side our Royal effigies on horseback in arms over a landskip of land and sea," a design borrowed by the Governor General of New York for the seal of the province of about the same date. [23] The tradition continued with the 1730 seal of North Carolina, depicting Liberty presenting plenty, in the form of a cornucopia, to George III, while to the right a ship waits off the coast.

That a symbolic meaning for the two elements, land and sea, had been developing may be surmised from the evolution of the Georgia State seal, which first showed them in 1777. Here land is represented by a mansion, fenced, with trees in the yard, above fields and pastures, while to one side a ship under full sail moves up river. The same inspiration led to the 1799 seal, whose obverse bears pasture and trees on one side, with a ship at anchor on the other. Here the Legislature of Georgia put into words the symbolism involved by using the motto "Agriculture and Commerce," around the edge of the seal.

One of the earliest engravings of the land-sea juxtaposition was used by Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry on their Map of Virginia, published in 1751. Here the finely detailed cartouche giving the title of the map includes a drawing meant to show the various facets of Virginia. On the left appears a negro boy serving wine to several merchants or planters, amid a profusion of casks and a barrel of corn. On the right, showing the importance of Virginia's commerce, is a drawing of a harbor and several ships at anchor.

From 1775 on, many patriotic prints show collections of objects to represent land and sea. Usually the sea (commerce) is represented by ships at anchor, waves, sails, collections of oars and casks, and sometimes the caduceus, which represented commerce in earlier English prints. The land, on the other hand, is shown by scenes of pastures and mountains, or groups of agricultural instruments, sheaves of corn, and overflowing cornucopias. The Pennsylvania Magazine, for example, included on the title page of Volume I, 1775 a representation of America surrounded by a landscape at her left hand and a view of a distant ship at sea to her right.

Perhaps the most interesting use of scenes representing land and sea occurs in membership certificates, which generally used the land-sea juxtaposition to represent the American origins of these societies. An early example of this is Abraham Godwin's certificate of the New York Mechanick Society, engraved about 1785, which includes views of land and sea among other vignettes surrounding the copperplate lettering. A very charming example of the use of objects alone to represent land and sea is the much later membership certificate of the Humane Society of Philadelphia, of 1803, whose engraver placed a cornucopia on the left side and a collection of oars and sails on the right side of a framed drawing of three men rescuing a beautiful woman from drowning.

Sometime after 1790, actual trophies began to be used to represent the land-agriculture/sea-commerce concept. The "marine and land trophies" of the Senate carpet almost certainly fell into this category. Designed in America, these trophies must, however, have borrowed heavily from French design in the absence of any American or English pattern books or engravings of this sort of trophy.

This surmise is borne out by the only two documented instances of the use of such trophies in early America known at this writing. The earliest and perhaps better known example is the hand-painted English wallpaper in the Jeremiah Lee Mansion in Marblehead, Massachusetts. These panels contain classical scenes drawn from engravings by Pierre Antoine de Machy, with trompe l'oeil painted surrounds imitating stucco frames. One panel in the entry hall of this house, decorated in the 1760's, contains pastoral trophies based on engravings from the Works of Jean Charles Delafosse, assemblages of agricultural implements used, not to symbolize an idea, but purely decoratively, as ornaments. Another architectural trophy in the hall derives from an engraving by Gabriel Huquier based on a design by another Frenchman, Rene Charpentier. [24] That these wallpapers were based on French design books, rather than English works illustrates two points: first, French and European design, at the middle of the century, was still the springboard for English decorative inspiration, and, secondly, English engravers had not adopted wholesale French pastoral imagery, so that there were few, if any, English engravings of trophies as source material for wallpaper or textile design.

FIGURE 39: Detail of title page, "Juvat in Silvis Habitare," from The Pennsylvania Magazine, Vol. I, printed by Robert Aiken, Philadelphia, 1775. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

FIGURE 40: New York Mechanick Society Membership Certificate, engraved by Abraham Godwin, 1791. Courtesy of The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum.

A later use of land and sea trophies in America re-emphasizes the dependence of English and American designers on French sources. This is the membership certificate of the United States Military Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin's nephew Jonathan Williams in 1803 at West Point. Designed by Louis Simond, a French emigre artist, the certificate bears elegant trophies of fishing equipment and agricultural implements, drawn directly from the repertoire of expression used in French design of pastoral trophies and reminiscent of the English patchwork textile shown above, which was also based on French sources. That these trophies represent the same land and sea juxtaposition is underlined by the associated vignette, showing ships on a river on the left side, while a farmer plows his land on the right.

French ornament books and loose engravings were available in America for reference at the time the Senate carpet was produced. As previously noted, Thomas Jefferson's collection included French engravings. He had left standing orders for many of these when he left Paris in 1789, and they were shipped to him looseleaf as they were published throughout the 1790's. At least one French ornament book was available in Philadelphia, after the Chevalier de la Luzerne sold his "large Book of Prints relative to Architecture and Ornaments" in 1785. Others were presumably available in private collections or for sale in print shops.

Since none of these French sources is identified by name except Francois Blondel's Works, which do not include marine trophies composed of fishing equipment, a problem of choice was involved in those most appropriate to the Senate carpet's reconstruction. Although it was apparent that a French source was the most probable one for the carpet trophies, none could be pinpointed exactly.

The selection narrowed to Pierre Ranson and Charles Delafosse, because they were the most prolific of French trophy designers, and the most popular among English wallpaper and textile manufacturers. Several Aubusson carpets were manufactured in France around 1780 with agricultural trophies in the center in the style of Pierre Ranson, but these were purely decorative motifs, with no symbolic meaning intended. The Delafosse trophies, however, seemed close to the description of the Senate carpet trophies, since they are vertically oriented, and are labeled "agriculture," or "pastoral," according to their intended usage. Moreover, his Works included trophies designed for architectural use as well as for porcelain and textile designs, and one of these volumes may well have been the architecture and ornament book sold by the Chevalier de la Luzerne.

FIGURE 41: Detail from the Humane Society of Philadelphia Membership Certificate, engraving, 1803. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

FIGURE 42: English hand-painted wall paper in the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, Marblehead, Massachusetts. Courtesy of the Marblehead Historical Society. Photograph by Samuel Chamberlain.

FIGURE 43: Detail of trophies of the United States Military Philosophical Society Membership Certificate, engraved by Louis Simond, c. 1803. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

The selection of trophies by Jean Charles Delafosse for the Senate carpet is hypothetical at best, for all the "ifs," and "whethers" cannot hide the fact that the source for the carpet trophies is, ultimately, unknown. But Delafosse was the primary popularizer of trophies, and the one to label them "l'Agriculture" and "le Pesche", we know his trophies appeared in wallpaper used in America and thus that his designs were appreciated here. For these reasons, they seemed appropriate for adaptation and use in the Senate carpet, where they appear in the side compartments prescribed by the Lansdowne carpet design prototype.

FIGURE 44: "Attributs de Peche," engraved plate from Jean Charles Delafosse, Nouvelle Iconologie Historique, Sec. RR: "Cinquieme Livre," Pl. 5, Paris, 1771—. Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress.

FIGURE 45: "La Musique l'Agriculture," engraved plate from Jean Charles Delafosse, Troisieme Partie de Livre Relative a l'Ameublement, Sec. AA, Pl. 2, c. 1770. (Reproduction by Heliogravure by C. Foulard, Paris, 1907.) Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress.