#featursday

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A Frackelton Feathursday

This sweet chromolithograph of a parrot and a cockatiel surrounded by a bevy of little birds is from Tried by Fire: A Work on China-painting, a highly popular book during its time by noted Milwaukee artist and ceramics painter Susan Stuart Frackelton (1848-1932), originally published in New York by D. Appleton & Company in 1886. Our copy is an 1892 printing. The image is an illustration for instructions on how to achieve these colors for the birds through the layering of glazes on ceramics.

Frackelton was a student of Milwaukee's pioneering artist Henry Vianden (1814-1899). In 1883 she founded the Frackelton China and Decorating Works, a very successful business for painted ceramics and painting instruction. She held several patents, including for Frackelton's Dry Colors and a home kiln machine, and she founded the National League of Mineral Painters, a predecessor organization to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The Milwaukee County Historical Society notes that:

Her innovation in [pottery, china painting, and book illumination] helped elevate American decorative arts to a standard of excellence and, at the same time, dispelled any myths about women being unable to rise above the rank of an amateur artist. . . . she used her talents as an artist and entrepreneur to break through the bonds of traditional gender roles, both in the art world and society. . . .

Today, she is particularly well-known in Milwaukee for the co-called "Frackelton Manuscript," a 100-page illuminated manuscript titled Voices of Friends Concerning John Plankinton, produced between 1910-1913 by Frackelton and her daughter and now housed in the Milwaukee Public Library's Richard and Lucille Krug Rare Books Room. 

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Selections from American ornithology v.08, by Alexander Wilson, 1814.

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A Milwaukee Illustrator’s Feathursday

This week we present a few original watercolor drawings of birds by Milwaukee illustrator Susan Estelle Kwas from two one-of-a-kind books we recently acquired. The first and last illustrations are from her 2017 book The Secret Life of Poor Joanna Todd, which offers imaginative illustrative responses to three chapters in Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs. The chapters concern remembrances of Joanna Todd, “one o' your peculiar persons,” who after being jilted by her fiance becomes a hermit on a tiny, remote island off the Maine coast. Her former neighbors refer to her as “Poor Joanna,” but Kwas imagines the full and rich life she actually lives through thirteen, almost-wordless illustrations she created while on retreat at the Golden Apple Art Residency in Harrington, Maine. 

The other illustrations are from Kwas’s 2015 book A Collaborative Drawing Book, in which she responds directly to the drawings of an 1890s Milwaukee artist named Fred Foss. Kwas writes:

This book is a collaboration between two artists living in the same city one hundred and seventeen years apart. I found Fred Foss’ copy book in a local antique shop . . . . I was charmed by his sketches and doodles and decided to pair them with sketches from my own sketchbook. His are in pencil and my images are in pencil and watercolor. When I rebound the book, I preserved the orientation of each page.

Click on Susan’s titles to see more imagery from these books on her website.

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