Ultram

In 1897 Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) delivered a lecture to the American

Philosophical Society in Philadelphia entitled "The Survival of the Mediaeval Art of Illuminative Writing among Pennsylvania Germans." He described a "rude, lidless paint-box, fastened with wooden pegs" that was presented to him as a paint box used by teachers at Pennsylvania's German schools to paint fraktur in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. (1) The term fraktur describes a popular German typeface developed in the sixteenth century and characterized by "fractured," or broken, letter shapes. (2) By 1897 fraktur also described the decorated paper objects made by the Pennsylvania Germans and other German settlers in the United States. These works often tied family, religion, and community together, functioning as family registers, marriage and death records, birth and baptismal certificates (see Pls. III, IV), and hymn-tune note-books. Other common forms are student rewards of merit (see Pls. XI, XIa), student writing samples (see Pls. VI, VII), bookplates, love letters (see Pl. VIII), poems, personal greetings, illuminated songbooks, and title pages. (3) Although the decorative motifs on fraktur were subject to local and regional variations, common ones include tulips, lotuses, birds, angels, trumpets, hearts, garlands, trees, banners, and wreaths (see Pls. IV, VII). (4) The manuscripts were written in iron gall ink and decorated with watercolor paints (composed of dry pigments and a gum binder) and sometimes embellished by cutwork (see Pl. VIII). While early fraktur tend to be hand-lettered, some later examples were printed, and many combined both. The art of making fraktur was practiced by Pennsylvania German schoolmasters in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, although not all fraktur artists were schoolmasters and not all schoolmasters were fraktur artists. (5) Fraktur were also produced by scriveners (professional penmen), artists, and possibly by stonemasons. (6)

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Mercer's 1897 lecture and subsequent publication of it in the American Philosophical Society Proceedings made him the first scholar of non-German descent to study Pennsylvania German fraktur. He also appears to be the first scholar to approach these works as material culture, recognizing the historical and artistic value of their texts and images and seeking to identify the materials and methods used to prepare them. Mercer identified the "primitive tools" of the fraktur artist as being "goose-quill pens, and brushes made of the hair of the domestic cat ... home-mixed inks and paints of the master once liquified in whisky, and that the varnish was composed of the gum of the cherry tree diluted in water." (7) Although Mercer never exactly identified his source for this information, his statements are reasonable, and his writings on this subject have had a profound effect on the perceptions of subsequent scholars about the brightly colored watercolors used to illuminate fraktur. Donald A. Shelley noted that "in most cases we may assume that the merest essentials were available" and that "the implements of the local Pennsylvania craftsmen were no doubt limited." (8) He went on to propose that the colors were "neutral earth colors" and that cherry tree gum or gum arabic may be responsible for the glossiness of some of the colors. (9) In 1947 Russell Wieder Gilbert stated that the early German teachers trained as fraktur artists could "illustrate the letters with homemade paints. Vegetable, plant, and berry dyes were probably used." (10)

The Pennsylvania German and fraktur collections at the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, have their origins in the 1920s with the first acquisitions by Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969). (11) His passionate collecting of the arts of the Pennsylvania Germans in the countryside near Winterthur led to his being named vice president of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society in 1937. Between 1937 and 1940 du Pont's interest in Pennsylvania German culture increased, and he moved many of his fraktur from his Southampton, New York, residence, Chestertown House, to Winterthur, where he created six rooms devoted to the Pennsylvania German arts. In 1951, in the former wine cellar, du Pont created the Fraktur Room (Pl. V) with late eighteenth-century woodwork from the house built for David Hottenstein in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, in 1783. This room was in du Pont's words a "background" for his fraktur and something that he had been "dreaming about for years." (12) There are currently eight rooms at Winterthur dedicated to the arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, all containing fraktur.

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The materials used to prepare a work of art can be identified by chemical or instrumental analysis of the elements or compounds present. One year before Mercer presented his lecture on fraktur, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) became the first scientist to x-ray a painting. (13) By the early decades of the twentieth century several scientists had positions at American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (14) Today scientific research departments are found in more than a dozen museums and academic or government conservation laboratories in the United States. (15)

When Henry Francis du Pont opened the Winterthur Museum to the public in 1951, he envisioned it as a setting for scholarship in early American decorative arts. However, a formal scientific laboratory was not established until 1969 when du Pont decided to include one in the museum's new Louise du Pont Crowninshield Research Building. (16) Victor F. Hanson, a physicist retired from the DuPont company, established what is now the Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory with the development of an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer for the nondestructive analysis of museum objects. In such an analysis the high energy of the X-ray beam directed at a picture causes the color it meets to emit fluorescent X-rays, which can be used to identify the elements that comprise the color. (17) As a result, X-ray fluorescence data can be used to distinguish between a copper-based and a chromium-based green pigment, for example. This is critical for the assignment of an eighteenth-century date to an object such as a fraktur, since chromium-based green pigments were not introduced until 1809. (18)

In the mid-1970s the Winterthur paper conservator John Krill and the Winterthur scientist Janice H. Carlson began to question the prevailing wisdom regarding the materials used by Pennsylvania German fraktur artists, so they turned to X-ray fluorescence to study the pigments. They analyzed sixteen fraktur and two paint boxes from the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which are thought to have been used by fraktur painters. Their findings revealed that the Pennsylvania German fraktur artists had ready access to modern and imported pigments during the eighteenth century. Nine of the fraktur tested had blue areas with elements suggesting Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment containing iron that was in common use in Europe by the middle of the eighteenth century. Three of the fraktur studied contained chrome yellow, a synthetic lead chromate pigment that became commercially available only after 1816. (19)

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The two paint boxes were found to contain Prussian blue, chrome yellow, vermilion (a red mercury sulfide pigment), and red earth. (20) The identification of synthetic pigments in Winterthur's fraktur and in the Mercer Museum paint boxes contradicts the suggestions of Mercer, Gilbert, and Shelley that fraktur artists only used earth, plant, and berry-based pigments.

While the fraktur painters may have mixed their colors from pigments and a binder, the pigments themselves were made from materials that were not produced locally, but rather commercial products purchased as powders or cakes. (21) A March 29, 1764, advertisement in the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Journal, or Weekly Advertiser notes that James Peters, a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chemist and druggist, had for sale

Peters further notes that these materials are "just imported in the last vessels at Philadelphia, from London." Additional evidence for the commercial availability of pigments in Pennsylvania during this period is found in an 1843 trade card of Osborne and Company of Philadelphia who supplied their own "superfine water colours in cakes" to "booksellers, druggists, and country storekeepers." (23)

Carlson and Krill's study identified thirteen pigments on sixteen fraktur that define a typical fraktur palette, but it could not identify the binder using X-ray fluorescence alone. Mercer suggested cherry tree gum, but gum arabic has also been proposed. Gum arabic is a water soluble gum exuded by acacia trees found in tropical and subtropical regions, with the majority coming from sub-Saharan Africa. (24) Cherry or other fruit tree gums would have been available locally. The distinction is clearly significant to the debate about whether homegrown materials or commercial products were used for creating fraktur. The identification of the gum binder may also help to address the question of how fraktur artists purchased their pigments. The use of a locally available binder such as cherry gum would help to confirm Mercer's statement that the pigments were obtained as powders and home-mixed (this view is supported by the contents of the Mercer Museum's fraktur paint boxes, in which powdered pigments are found in glass bottles and vials). (25) However, that Pennsylvania German fraktur artists could have had access to imported pigments and binders is suggested by Peters's advertisement cited above, which lists "gums," "balsams," and "extracts" among the imported materials received in Philadelphia.

A second question that remains to be addressed is the nature of the pigment mixtures the artists used, in particular in areas that appear red but contain mercury and lead, suggesting the presence of vermilion with red lead (a lead oxide) or lead white (a lead carbonate). A third unanswered question is the exact composition of the copper-based green pigments they used. Carlson's X-ray fluorescence data revealed that the predominant green used contained copper: However, this instrument cannot distinguish between the various copper-based greens, such as verdigris, malachite, and copper resinate. Brown discoloration apparent in certain areas (see Pls. X, Xa) suggests verdigris as the original colorant, since this pigment is known to decompose to dark copper compounds (probably copper oxides and sulfides) in the presence of heat and moisture. (26) However, many copper-based pigments are subject to instability, and so further analysis is required. (27)

In conjunction with Winterthur's exhibition Making Fancy: Materials and Methods in Pennsylvania German Fraktur, the museum's scientists analyzed many fraktur in the collection that were not included in the 1978 study, using a broader range of instrumental analysis: Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (FTIR), gas chromatography--mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and Raman spectroscopy. These tests yield more complex data than X-ray fluorescence. FTIR, for example, can identify classes of organic compounds (distinguishing gums from waxes, oils, and resins, for example, but cannot differentiate cherry gum from gum arabic) and a large number of inorganic and organic pigments. The three copper-containing pigments in question--malachite (a copper carbonate hydroxide), verdigris (a basic copper acetate), and copper resinate (a translucent green copper salt formed from the reaction of verdigris with a resin)--all absorb infrared radiation differently. Consequently, the green pigment used by fraktur artists should be identifiable by FTIR.

One drawback to using FTIR on art objects is that it is most effective on a small paint sample (see Pl. IX). This is problematic because museum scientists are bound by the Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, which requires analyses that are either totally nondestructive or as minimally destructive as possible. (28) Thus the FTIRs at Winterthur are equipped with a microscope so that microgram-sized samples (one millionth of a gram) are sufficient.

GC-MS, like FTIR, is used to identify the organic compounds that make up a paint's binding medium. It is more specific than FTIR, and it allows the museum scientist to distinguish between different types of oils (such as linseed oil versus poppy-seed or walnut oil), waxes (such as beeswax versus spermaceti or carnauba wax), and gums (such as cherry gum versus gum arabic or tragacanth). This makes GC-MS the ideal technique for identifying the gum binding medium used in fraktur: It requires a small sample for analysis--on the order of a milligram (a thousandth of a gram), which is approximately the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

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Raman spectroscopy is used to identify certain pigments, such as vermilion and red lead, that are not detectable with FTIR. The Raman spectrometer at Winterthur can be used without removing any paint from the object. Raman was an ideal technique for examining whether the lead found in conjunction with vermilion on some of Winterthur's fraktur in the 1978 study could be identified with red lead or white lead.

The recent study of fraktur in the Winterthur collection included X-ray fluorescence of thirty-nine works (see Pl. II). Eleven of these were subject to further analysis using FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, and GC-MS. Seventeen of the fraktur analyzed contained mercury in red areas (suggesting vermilion), and sixteen of them also had lead in the pigment. Raman analyses of two of these areas revealed that the lead exists as red lead. This substantiates an 1807 artists' manual that states: "It is common, perhaps general, for dealers to sophisticate vermilion with red lead." (29) Vermilion was relatively expensive and red lead cheap and abundant.

Nineteen fraktur contained blue colorants with high amounts of iron, which suggests the presence of Prussian blue, a synthetic blue colorant first made in Berlin about 1710, corroborating the characterization of Prussian blue in the earlier study. However, iron may be present from a variety of sources, (30) so FTIR was used as a complementary technique to confirm the presence of Prussian blue. The chemical bonds in Prussian blue produce a unique spectrum with FTIR analysis that can be easily distinguished from all other pigments. FTIR analysis of one blue colorant confirmed the identification of Prussian blue, while in another sample it identified indigo, a blue vegetable dye used since antiquity. This is the first time we have identified indigo on a painted Pennsylvania German work (including fraktur, painted wooden objects, and furniture), although it was undoubtedly used by the Pennsylvania Germans as a textile dye.

The identification of organic yellow colorants on four fraktur was pursued with FTIR and Raman spectroscopy. All were identified as gamboge, a yellow gum resin that is an exudate from the Garcinia tree found in India, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (31) Its use further strengthens the impression that fraktur artists had access to a wide variety of imported products. Of the fraktur with an inorganic yellow colorant, two were identified as chrome yellow, one as yellow ocher, and four as orpiment. Yellow ocher and orpiment have been used as pigments since antiquity, but chrome yellow is a synthetic color that was not commercially available until 1816. The two fraktur on which it was found were dated 1802-1825 and 1790-1820, which suggests that fraktur painters had access to new pigments soon after their introduction and that these works should be redated to later than 1816.

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FTIR was also very helpful in answering the long-standing question about the exact composition of the green pigments containing copper. Verdigris was positively identified in seven of the eight fraktur sampled by this technique. It is the first definite identification of this pigment in Pennsylvania German fraktur. An interesting secondary finding from the analysis is that, unlike other colorants, verdigris appears in some cases to have been mixed with an oil and/or a protein binding medium--perhaps egg--as opposed to a gum. FTIR analysis of one noncopper containing green sample revealed a mixture of two organic colorants, indigo and gamboge. A similar combination of indigo and gamboge was found in an early nineteenth-century English paint box watercolor cake labeled "Prussian green." (32) X-ray fluorescence identified a third source of green in two of the fraktur analyzed. The large amounts of both copper and arsenic detected suggests the presence of emerald green, a copper acetoarsenide compound first made in Germany in 1814. This conclusion is consistent with the date of about 1850 given to the fraktur, based on the internal evidence of the birthdates.

Finally, GC-MS was recently used to characterize the nature of the binder. Plant gums are composed primarily of sugar molecules, and two of the primary sugars found in cherry gum are not found in gum arabic, whereas one sugar found in gum arabic is not present in cherry gum. (33) Preliminary GC-MS analyses have resulted in the positive identification of gum arabic in two fraktur. While there is more work to be done on binding agents, our recent work, together with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documentary evidence, reveals the Pennsylvania German fraktur artist to be a sophisticated consumer of the latest imported artists' materials, including plant gums and resins from sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The persistent vision of the local German schoolmaster painting with berry dyes and colored earths bound in cherry gum, romantic as it may be, must now be abandoned.

An exhibition entitled Making Fancy: Materials and Methods in Pennsylvania German Fraktur opens at the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, on September 10 and may be seen there until January 8, 2006.

We would like to thank W. Christian Petersen for contributing his GC-MS expertise to this project, and John Krill, Betty Fiske, and Anne Verplanck for many helpful discussions about fraktur. We are also grateful to Maruta Skelton and Kate Duffy for many of the X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy analyses of fraktur carried out in the 1980s and 1990s.

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(1) Henry C. Mercer, "The Survival of the Mediaeval Art of Illuminative Writing Among Pennsylvania Germans." This lecture was published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 26, no. 156 (December 1897), pp. 423-432; and reprinted in Bucks County Fraktur, ed. Cory M. Amsler (Pennsylvania German Society, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and Bucks County Historical Society, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 2001), quoted p. 6.

(2) Frank H. Sommer, "German Language Books, Periodicals, and Manuscripts," in Scott T. Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins, Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, vol. 17 (W. W. Norton, New York, for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, 1983), pp. 290-291. See also Paul Conner and Jill Roberts, Pennsylvania German Fraktur and Printed Broadsides: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress (Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., 1988), p. 9.

(3) Mary Jane Lederach Hershey, This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836 (Good Books, Intercourse, Pennsylvania, 2003), p. 47; and Terry A. McNealy and Cory M. Amsler, "Pennsylvania-German Schools in Bucks County," in Bucks County Fraktur, p. 8.

(4) Hershey, This Teaching I Present, pp. 53-56; and Donald A. Shelley, The Fraktur-Writings or Illuminated Manuscripts of the Pennsylvania Germans, Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, vol. 23 (1958-1959) (Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1961), pp. 82, 83.

(5) McNealy and Amsler, "Pennsylvania-German Schools," p. 80.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Mercer, "The Survival of the Mediaeval Art of Illuminative Writing," p. 6.

(8) Shelley, Fraktur-Writings, p. 71.

(9) Ibid., pp. 74, 77.

(10) Russell Wieder Gilbert, A Picture of the Pennsylvania Germans, Pennsylvania History Studies, vol. 1 (1947) (Pennsylvania Historical Association, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1971), pp. 6-7.

(11) Scott T. Swank, "Henry Francis du Pont and Pennsylvania German Folk Art," in Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, pp. 77-101.

(12) Quoted ibid., p. 95. See also Betty Fiske and Anne A. Verplanck, "Vernacular art at Winterthur," The Magazine ANTIQUES, vol. 161, no. 1 (January 2002), pp. 194-199.

(13) Manfred R. Schreiner, "X-rays in Art and Archaeology--History, Present State and Perspectives," Fifty-second Annual Denver X-ray Conference Presentation, Denver, Colorado, August 4-8, 2003.

(14) Hermes Knauer, "Arms and Armor and Objects Conservation at the Met," unpublished lecture delivered at the Winterthur Museum on May 14, 2004; and Kathryn Brush, Vastly More Than Brick and Mortar: Reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s (Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003), pp. 59-60.

(15) Museum scientists (typically chemists) work with curators and conservators to answer questions about a work's authenticity, provenance, method of manufacture, and state of preservation. They also identify prior restorations; develop new techniques for nondestructive or minimally destructive analysis of works of art; and conduct research into historical technologies, artists' materials, and the development of new conservation methods and materials.

(16) Janice H. Carlson, "Analysis of British and American Pewter by X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy," Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 12 (1977), pp. 65-86.

(17) For more about X-ray fluorescence and the other instrumental analysis techniques, see Douglas A. Skoog and James J. Leary, Principles of Instrumental Analysis, 4th ed. (Saunders College Publishers, Fort Worth, 1992), p. 363.

(18) Rosamond D. Harley, Artists' Pigments c. 1600-1835: A Study in English Documentary Sources (American Elsevier Publishing Company, New York, 1970), p. 78.

(19) Hermann Kuhn and Mary Curran, "Chrome Yellow and Other Chromate Pigments," in Artists' Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, ed. Robert L. Feller (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 1986), vol, 1, p. 188.

(20) Janice H. Carlson and John Krill, "Pigment Analysis of Early American Watercolors and Fraktur," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, vol. 18, no. 1 (1978), p. 28. This article (which can be accessed at http://aic.stanford.edu/jaic/) contains a comprehensive list of all pigments found in the fraktur tested at Winterthur up to that time.

(21) Ibid., pp. 19-32.

(22) Quoted ibid., p. 23.

(23) Ibid., p. 30.

(24) Rutherford J. Gettens and George L. Stout, Painting Materials: A Short Encyclopaedia (Dover Publications, New York, 1966), p. 27.

(25) Mercer, "The Survival of the Mediaeval Art of Illuminative Writing," p. 6.

(26) Hermann Kuhn, "Verdigris and Copper Resinate," in Artists' Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, ed. Ashok Roy (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 1993), vol. 2, pp. 132-137.

(27) David A. Scott, Copper and Bronze in Art: Corrosion, Colorants, Conservation (Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2002), pp. 110, 262, 265, and 314.

(28) The code of ethics and guidelines is published on the Web site of the American Institute for Conservation (http://aic.stanford.edu).

(29) Leslie Carlyle, The Artists' Assistant: Oil Painting Instructions Manuals ... (Archetype Publications, London, 2001), pp. 510-511.

(30) Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials, pp. 149-151.

(31) John Winter, "Gamboge," in Artists Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol. 3, ed. Elisabeth West FitzHugh (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 1997), vol. 3, p. 143.

(32) The paint box is in the Winterthur Museum. Prussian green is also a name used for a green pigment prepared in a similar way to Prussian blue. See Harley, Artists' Pigments, 1600-1835, p. 81.

(33) John S. Mills and Raymond White, The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects, 2nd ed. (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford and Boston, 1994), p. 77.

JENNIFER L. MASS is the senior scientist and head of the Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory of Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, and a member of the faculty of the Winterthur/University of Delaware program in art conservation.

CATHERINE R. MATSEN is the assistant scientist at the Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory of Winterthur and an instructor in the Winterthur/University of Delaware program in art conservation.

JANICE H. CARLSON is the senior scientist emeritus in the Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory of Winterthur Museum's scientific department.

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