 Hi everybody, welcome to Barn's Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Quarren, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barn Foundation. Today I'm going to talk to you about this chest on the north wall of Room 2. Let's take a closer look. So this is a Pennsylvania-German chest and it's known as a black unicorn chest. It gets its name from these two black unicorns at the center. We've discussed a few different pieces of furniture by Pennsylvania Germans and some Pennsylvania German art as well, but this furniture really is meant to be a utilitarian functional object. It's beautifully decorated as you can see, but it was really used and it wasn't meant to be a showpiece that only was looked at. It had its function and we see that those signs of the function and kind of some of the wear on the lid where they would have been opening it daily. And then also this wear right here where maybe they were using it as a seat to put their shoes on in the morning. So this chest is a little bit different. It comes from Berks County in Pennsylvania, in particular a township known as Bern, which was named after the city in Switzerland. So Berks County was settled primarily by German-speaking Swiss and German immigrants. In the early 18th century, the county was actually incorporated in 1752. So this type of chest, like I said, comes from a particular township. And as we've seen with a lot of Pennsylvania German furniture, it was often painted and that paint was often meant to mimic something that could have been applied with wood. We also have some work, some of them in the collection, which actually do use applied wood fronts to show these arches, but this one is entirely done with paint. So the painted areas in these arches were intricately planned out. They would not have been done, most likely done freehand. They would have been with the use of a template or a design and that's because the materials that they were using would have dried quickly. So these so-called black unicorn chests were also decorated with usually with three painted arches, a very in color, but this one is using white in the center. And they were often decorated with this sawtooth border, this zigzag pattern around the edges of the archway. And they appear to simulate wood inlay and that was very popular in Berks County. The rearing unicorns themselves at the center, where the chest gets its name from, were likely borrowed from the British coat of arms, which features a rearing lion and unicorn. But also the Pennsylvania state coat of arms, which first appeared in 1778, also featured two rearing horses. The design of the two black unicorns also appears on furniture made in Switzerland. And its use on these chests could reflect the Swiss ancestry of the makers themselves or could be a mixture of all three. So they're using designs which they were already familiar with, but also incorporating something from the new world like the British coat of arms and then the new Pennsylvania state coat of arms. The unicorn itself also was a traditional German sign of purity, so a symbol of purity. It's been determined that there were eight different makers and four different decorators of this type of chest. There are around 40 or so that are known in still in existence. Our chest is consistent of a particular type of construction and it indicates a shop or an artisan who was active in the township of Bern between 1778 and 1787. The chest is constructed entirely of pine and it has a lid which has applied molding on the front and the sides of the lid and it's flush with the top of the lid. You can see this molding applied right here with wood pins and it ends in a butt joint right here. So butt joint is its 90 degree angle different from a miter joint which would have been the kind of diagonal 45 degree angle. As I mentioned, the decorator would very carefully plan out this design. When we look at the group of black unicorn chests together, this use of planned design becomes very apparent and it shows that there were around four different decorators. Overall similarities in their form and design really indicate that they were working in very close proximity to one another and that they were probably aware of each other's work and knew of it. Some of them even appear to have been using the same templates or designs or patterns and this indicates that there was probably a relationship between them so an apprentice and a master craftsman or perhaps a son and father. So two decorators who were working with one another for a period of time but maybe then separated their ways and became craftsmen in another own right. The fact that there were eight different makers of furniture so the ones who were constructing the actual chest box but only four decorators indicates that some may have been decorating the decorated by the makers themselves but also that they could have been specialists in the painting of furniture specifically for something like this and that they were respected in their field and they would have just finished the painting after the construction was finished and that they were the finishers of these blanket chests. The two side arches feature this vased floral flowers right here. These four flower with these fully folded design right here and then the central larger flower. They look pretty much identical to one another when we look at them. They're very symmetrical. They show really well that this artist was planning out the design, was using a template or a pattern. At the top you can see the paint has worn but you can also see these similar kind of vase-like patterns as well and then this central star-like design. When we look at this as a whole, we see once again that this type of Pennsylvania German chest is a product of their immigration to America. It's retaining some of the customs like the chest itself and its overall design from where they came from but it's creating something new in their new location, one that paraphrases its antecedent and it utilizes paint to create some of the more elaborate wood, parquetry or intarsia or inlay seen on their European counterparts but they're creating it with paint and they're using materials which they would have found in the United States in their new home like Pine. So that's it for today's Barnes Takeout. I hope you enjoy listening. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Thank you.