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拍品專文
This basket decended in the family of the original owner, Mary Ann Dowell Kincheloe who lived in Pleasant Valley near Rectortown, Virginia. Mary Ann Dowell married Harwick Kincheloe of Fauquirer County in 1829, and this basket was likely made about that time, possibly as a wedding gift. A similar basket in the collection of the Lynchburg Museum has a documented history that associates it as a marriage gift.
This basket is one of a group of similarly tooled leather baskets with history of ownership and manufacture in the Richmond area. A basket in the collection of the American Museum of Folk Art (see Hollander, et al., American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York, 2001), p. 178, fig. 146), bears the initials "GF" on its underside as do three other known examples suggesting that bootmaker George Freitag, listed in the city directories, may have been the maker. Other closely related examples have survived with provenance suggesting that they were made by inmates in the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. An example illustrated in Maine Antiques Digest, June 2000, p. 20A, was accompanied by a note that read "The convicts were not furnished with work but were allowed to employ their time to their own benefit, making whatever they could that would sell to visitors... Miss Patterson and I visited the penitentiary, as was common thing among the residents of Richmond, and brought away some of the work. While there I ordered a basket for her."
This basket is one of a group of similarly tooled leather baskets with history of ownership and manufacture in the Richmond area. A basket in the collection of the American Museum of Folk Art (see Hollander, et al., American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York, 2001), p. 178, fig. 146), bears the initials "GF" on its underside as do three other known examples suggesting that bootmaker George Freitag, listed in the city directories, may have been the maker. Other closely related examples have survived with provenance suggesting that they were made by inmates in the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. An example illustrated in Maine Antiques Digest, June 2000, p. 20A, was accompanied by a note that read "The convicts were not furnished with work but were allowed to employ their time to their own benefit, making whatever they could that would sell to visitors... Miss Patterson and I visited the penitentiary, as was common thing among the residents of Richmond, and brought away some of the work. While there I ordered a basket for her."