Docents and Dealers

I’ve been telling a lot of stories recently, mainly in my role as docent at the 1677 Whipple House here in Ipswich. Most of our visitors know next to nothing about antiques, even less about seventeenth-century timber-framed houses and not much more about seventeenth-century history. But they do come with a vague sense that there is something interesting there, they come expecting to be interested, even if they don’t quite know by what. I enjoy talking with them.

The house itself interests them, the furniture and objects inside it interest them, but what interests them most are the stories that the house and its furnishings tell about the people who lived there.

Take the open hearth in the hall (or “kitchen” – the name of the room was gradually changing from “hall” to “kitchen” at about the time the house was built). Everyone loves a huge hearth, it just fires up (to coin a phrase) their imagination. Ours is furnished with a rather haphazard collection of cooking pots and tools, in which three-legged cauldrons are over-represented, but it’s perfectly good enough to tell stories of people cooking. The cauldrons tell us that stews and potages comprised most of the diet – roasts were for special occasions only. We explain that there would be a wood fire always burning at the back of the hearth, and that the housewife would rake out small piles of hot embers in front of it, different sized piles for different types of cooking and different sizes of cauldron – she could control the heat just like turning the control knobs on a modern stove. Our women visitors in particular nod understandingly at this.

But – here we pause and lower our voices a little – remember that women had long, floor-length skirts, and imagine moving between these piles of hot embers tending to the pots. Burning, we tell them, was the second most common cause of premature death for women, we don’t need to explain what the first was, as every woman knows that already.

“But why didn’t they wear shorter skirts for cooking?” It’s often a bright 12-year-old that asks this question. “Because the Puritans had very strict dress codes for men and women, based upon modesty and morality. Puritan societies were run by men, and it was more important to them that their wives should keep their ankles modestly hidden than that they should reduce the risk of being burnt alive.” You can see the young girls thinking about that.

Then we ask them to look up. Just above the hearth is the huge summer beam running the length of the hall. We explain how it ties the ends of the timber frame together and bears the weight of the second floor. But we also ask them to think about the chamfer running along the two lower edges. This was partly a decorative touch, we explain, appropriate to a house of this status, but, more importantly, it was a fire prevention device. The corner that has been cut away would have been the driest part of the beam, it would have caught fire first and the fire would have run along it for the whole length of the room.

Next we point to just inside the front door, where two fire buckets are hanging. Just as we’re required to have fire extinguishers in our homes, they had to have fire buckets, and if there was a fire in town, everyone would rush to it with their buckets.

Now, are stories about cooking and women and fire in early America likely to turn people into antiques collectors? An impossible question to answer, but at least, when I show our visitors out of the Whipple House door, they are very grateful; they do seem to recognize that the past is both interesting and relevant and they enjoy the stories it tells them. Perhaps most importantly of all, they can see a bit of themselves in the people who lived here 350 years ago. Are there parallels between museum-goers and docents, and customers and antiques dealers? I know that my experience as a dealer is helpful when I’m a docent, and I hope that my experience as a docent will help my conversations with clients as a dealer.

The Whipple House is not set up as a museum, where people can wander at their own pace, lingering over this and ignoring that. We don’t have all our objects securely out of reach, we don’t have teach-yourself wall labels – we want it to feel as though visitors are walking into someone’s house, albeit 350 years ago.

So we docents bear a lot of responsibility. For security, of course, but that’s not my point here. When we bring out the stories that are quietly written in the objects on display, we are showing visitors how they can re-connect to their past. In a recent New York Times (3/8/09) article, Michael Kimmelman wrote, “Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings.”

So when a docent shows that small heaps of embers pulled out from a wood fire are like the temperature controls on a modern stove, she is helping visitors recognize something that gives them their bearings. The recognition that technology has changed dramatically, but that the cook in seventeenth-century Ipswich had the same needs as the cook today, is, when you come to think of it, quite a profound recognition. It “gives us our bearings” in the literal sense, for it sheds a tiny but revealing light on where we’ve come from and the direction in which we’re heading. If today’s housewife sees a bit of herself in that early Colonial housewife, she’s found a sort of root that’s not readily available in our increasingly rootless society.

We docents, then, are not just educating people about the local past, we’re teaching them how to look. In the same article, Kimmelman tells us that “the art historian T. J. Clark, who during the 1970s and ’80s pioneered a kind of analysis that rejected old-school connoisseurship in favor of art in the context of social and political affairs, has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.”

“Slow looking.” I like that concept. The digital camera, where every image is flash-quick, seduces us into believing that quantity is what counts, and the faster we click, the greater the quantity. Fast clicking, fast looking gives us the surface only. Our minds bounce off one surface and skid haphazardly to the next. Slow looking, that’s what we docents teach.

Kimmelman’s article germinated when he sat in the Louvre for a couple of hours watching people look at art. He was astonished at how rapidly they moved, “almost nobody … paused before any object for as long as a full minute.” What they did was take photographs instead, as though the camera memory chip substituted for their own minds.

I’m not sure that any of our objects could stand up to several months of scrutiny like a painting by Poussin, but we can certainly show that the slower you look, the more you see; and the more you see, the more you recognize; and the more you recognize the more satisfaction you feel. Sure, visiting museums has always been about self-improvement, prissy though that sounds. But people really do feel satisfied and happy when they realize that they’ve seen qualities in an object that they would have missed if we docents hadn’t helped them to look slowly.

Art museums, such as the Louvre, are focused on the aesthetic beauty of their objects, the quality that enables them to transcend the limitations of everyday life and acquire universality. Our little museum in the Whipple House is exactly the opposite, and, in my opinion, all the better for it. It is a museum of everyday life, albeit in the seventeenth century, and most visitors can connect more readily with the familiar than the universal. What we find best helps visitors enjoy the satisfaction of slow looking is the humanness of the objects and, of course, of the house itself. The objects are telling stories about people, and thus, in a satisfyingly familiar way, about the visitors themselves. People love that.

So when I hang my docent’s hat on the back of the door and become a dealer again, I take with me some of the lessons my museum visitors have taught me. It’s the human quality of antiques that first engages people, the story of everyday life that is written into their form and the signs of use they have acquired over the years. The aesthetic beauty of an object comes later, after more slow looking, maybe after, hopefully, they’ve bought it and taken it home.

Many people in an antiques show are like the visitors Kimmelman observed in the Louvre: they rush past, hardly looking at anything. When they do pause in front of something, however, I shall now put on my docent’s hat before I approach them. I have to be careful, because if I’m not, I chase them right out of the booth. They don’t want me to talk to them because they think that I’ll come out with a high-powered sales spiel. But if I can engage them as a docent rather than a dealer, I might be able to help them experience the connection between their lives and the lives of all the people who have used whatever it is they’re looking at. It won’t result in a sale (OK, it might) but if it helps them see that antiques and ordinary people are not living on different planets, then I might have taken a small step toward bringing a new customer into our marketplace. At its core, our business is personal and human-centered. So are antiques. If we’re to rebuild our customer-base after this recession has decimated it, we’re going to do it one person at a time.

So, dealers, show promoters and auctioneers, do support your local museum with your time or your money or both. It may be doing more to ignite the love of antiques in new people than you think.

John Fiske