Carving in Cincinnati.(Books About Antiques)(Book Review)

By 1870 Cincinnati was the number one producer in the United States of an eclectic array of goods: carriages, glycerin, wine, whiskey, plug tobacco, and coffins. It owed these distinctions largely to its situation on the banks of the Ohio River, which allowed it to ship and receive goods at will.

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Between 1868 and sometime in the 1890s Cincinnati was also the birthplace of hand-carved American art furniture that was faithful in conception to the ideals of John Ruskin, the philosopher of the English aesthetic movement. This achievement relied less on the city's riparian site than on the immigration of three vegetarian, Swedenborgian English wood carvers--Benn Pitman, Henry L. Fry, and his son William H. Fry.

By 1851 the Frys were established in Cincinnati as architectural and ornamental carvers. In describing his past Henry Fry painted a grand picture of distinguished commissions executed in England, although in fact no carving has been firmly attributed to him there. He did not, however, mention his years as a carver in Cheltenham at a time in the early 1840s when the town was simmering with social reform movements. Fry was an enthusiastic participant, preaching vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, universal love, and singing as ways to salvation. William Fry inherited all his father's preoccupations as well as a taste for adventure that reportedly caused him to sail around the world, sire ten children by his English wife, serve as a United States government post rider in the West, and as a volunteer in an Indiana regiment during the Civil War.

Benn Pitman's older brother, Sir Isaac Pitman, invented a shorthand system known as phonography that Benn brought to Cincinnati in the 1850s after teaching it throughout Britain. He established the Phonographic Institute in the city and demonstrated the system as a court reporter during the 1850s and 1860s as well as publishing manuals of phonography. His daughter Agnes took a few carving lessons from William Fry, and she and her mother, Jane, both learned wood carving. Pitman drew up the designs and his ladies did the carving, beginning with the interior of the family's two successive Cincinnati houses. In so doing he adhered to the Victorian ideal of the home as a sanctuary for the family. "What a temple of happiness, what a nest of delight ... that home must be which all members of the family assist in building, and adorning," he wrote in 1875. Later he decreed, "First and foremost, the Home, outwardly and inwardly, must be adorned.... To whom shall we look for the adornment of our homes? To girls and women, most assuredly."

True to his conviction, Pitman designed and his second wife, Adelaide Nourse, carved a marvelously elaborate bed for themselves, to which Adelaide's twin sister, Elizabeth, contributed two painted panels representing Morning and Evening flanking the headboard (illustrated above). The carving abounded in motifs from nature including swallows, hydrangeas, azaleas, geraniums, lilies, palmyras, and balloon vines.

The Frys sought to attract women to their wood-carving classes, ...