THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502030223
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Olde Towne Journal
SOURCE: Alan Flanders
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
Let's face it, the February doldrums have arrived.
Short, dark, dreary days that seem to last but a few hours are the norm. Super Bowl XXIX is in the record books. And by now you've probably watched enough of the O.J. Simpson trial to pass the bar exam.
If you're suffering from cabin fever, a definite sign of the February doldrums, there are two sure-fire cures just minutes away. They're guaranteed to please anyone interested in history and things nautical.
Drive to the Peninsula and catch the Mariners' Museum's exhibit of one of the world's most prolific marine artists, Antonio Jacobsen. Entitled, ``Painted Ships on Painted Oceans,'' it's a good dose of 80 marine masterpieces that capture America's 19th-century era of sail and steam.
Or drive to Colonial Williamsburg for a tour of the DeWitt Wallace Gallery's ``Tools: Working Wood in 18th-Century America.'' Located at Francis Street and S. Henry Street, near Merchants Square, the exhibition, which includes over 1,500 18th- and early 19th-century tools, focuses on some of America's most outstanding Colonial craftsmen including Duncan Phyfe, Thomas and Warren Nixon, and Benjamin Seaton.
Both exhibits offer far more than just another rented, out-of-town, traveling show. Instead they offer a glimpse into the timeless beauty of 18th- and 19th-century craftsmanship when ship carpenters and furniture makers alike turned wood into works of timeless art and elegant function.
The graceful and timeless beauty of furniture from the workshops of the Dominys, Hays and Bucktrouts blends perfectly with the marine architecture of Antonio Jacobsen's schooners, steamers and yachts.
Both exhibits, though distinctly different as their contents are, share one strong theme - American craftsmanship at its best.
The DeWitt Wallace show establishes not only the utility of American woodworking tools and their products, but the quality that went into making them as it highlights the careers of Colonial tool makers such as Francis Nicholson, Samuel Caruthers and John Butler. Their tools seem to speak over the centuries with a prose that carries the very essence of Colonial carpentry: Adze, bench planes, brace and bit, brad awl, calipers, dado, drawknife, gimlet and gauge, levels and plumbs, mortise-and-tenon.
Most of these artisans served triple purposes. As house carpenters, they gave the colonials a place of shelter; as furniture makers, they decorated home interiors; and as shipwrights they opened America's horizons to the sea.
Touring the Antonio Jacobsen exhibit is as close to going to sea as you get through the medium of oil and canvas. His ships are painted in such detail and his seascapes are so vivid with varying shades of color and action that some who have seen them swear they hear seagulls and the wash of waves against the hulls of ships during the tour.
When asked, Mariners' Museum staff categorically denied any hidden sound effects behind the gallery curtains, explaining that it's just the general effect Jacobsen managed to capture in his paintings.
Emigrating from Copenhagen, Denmark, to New York in 1873, the 23-year old Jacobsen began a marine-artist career that would produce more than 6,000 ship portraits covering 1873-1919.
Fortunately for maritime historians and art lovers alike, everything afloat seemed to capture Jacobsen's attention. Not only do ocean liners and warships appear on his canvas, but so do tugboats and working pilot boats.
Throughout his art, Jacobsen maintained the highest attention to detail and accuracy that make them a book of maritime history that you can walk through instead of read. In his sailing portraits, each plank and line are revealed, each reef point included. In his steamship portraits, every porthole and deck, every stack, and pennant are there.
Jacobsen's works are not just yacht club board room pictures. Often his scenes are storm-tossed with turbulent oceans so natural with their angry tents of green, they seem hardly possible without a camera.
He came to Hampton Roads for the Jamestown Exposition in 1907 and painted portraits of the Great White Fleet as it readied for its around the world voyage. The area's ferry boats and Old Dominion Line steamers, which ran from Portsmouth and Norfolk to Baltimore, also became favorite subjects.
Fighting off the doldrums is a lot easier if you invest a little time and make the effort to see both exhibits. But like any good medicine, there's a shelf life for both exhibits.
The Williamsburg exhibit runs through June. The Mariners' Museum exhibit continues until June 25. ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of THE MARINERS' MUSEUM
A Mariners' Museum exhibit features the work of Antonio Jacobsen,
``Painted Ships on Painted Oceans.''
by CNB