There See Industry and Wealth Combined

"THERE SEE INDUSTRY AND WEALTH COMBINED" June Sprigg and David Larkin; Photographs by Michael Freeman. Shaker Life, Work, and Art. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1987. 272 pp. Illus. Robert P. Emlen. Shaker Village Views: Illustrated Maps and Landscape Drawings by Shaker Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987. ix+ 198 pp. Illus. Roger L. Emerson The Shakers must be about the best-documented sect among the communal religious utopians of nineteenth-century America. Certainly they left the greatest number of diverse artifacts, buildings and records. Books and articles exist on their communities, religious beliefs, buildings, work, food, art, songs, dress and on the manifold experiences of the Shakers themselves as they lived through millenarian, spiritualist and quietest phases of their movement. Much of this material has appeared since the publication in 1977 of Mary L. Richmond's two volume Shaker Literature: A Bibliography. These books are handsome additions to that literature which will continue to grow because of the museums now thriving at former and still active Shaker settlements in Sabbathday, Maine; Canterbury, New Hampshire; Hancock and Harvard, Massachusetts; Mount Lebanon and Old Chatham, New York; and Shakertown and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Both volumes are nicely designed and well printed on glossy paper which shows their illustrations to advantage. The text by Sprigg and Larkin provides an introduction to the Shakers and their world which is brief, clear and readable, although occasionally a bit repetitive. Those who have read much on Shakerism will find here little that is new save the approximately 200 color photographs by Michael Freeman and the five by others and used with their permission. These were mostly taken at the eight locations listed above, but a few are of objects and manuscripts elsewhere in private collections. These sunny pictures give a somewhat idealized view of their subjects, as they clarify the text 370 Roger L. Emerson and give substance, tone and beauty to the account of people who sought grace in clean designs, as well as in lives dedicated to their communities and to their God. They are also images with a wider relevance, since the Shakers shared objects, techniques and skills, standards and an appreciation for elegant and useful things with the nineteenth-century culture from which many were recruited and to which they all belonged. Freeman's pictures remind this New Englander of just how much the Shakers had in common with the craftsmen and farmers among whom they lived and whose material culture they shared even while refining it. Emlen's book, unlike Shaker Life and Art, is a scholarly study of the forty-one surviving maps and drawings produced by Shakers of their properties and villages from c. I750 to c. 1880, and all reproduced here among the 120 black and white figures, which also include many enlargements of sections of the drawings as well as somewhat analogous works by outsiders. Thirty-seven colored plates give an impression of the charm and liveliness of some of the originals. These stylized drawings generally lack perspective, orientation [they must be turned to be properly viewed] or much attention to landscape but they are meticulous in their detailed rendering of buildings. They provide information on the expansion and growth of settlements and on the Shakers' use of, and changes to, their properties. They thus fulfilled the requirement of Shaker law that ''the temporal progress of each family" (16) and village be recorded. These maps and drawings were useful not only as records, but in planning and for conveying to absent co-religionists, for whom they were copied, the look of distant towns, especially New Lebanon, "The spiritual home of Shakerism" (63). They were not to their makers aesthetic objects for display but they have many of the characteristics of na'ive American depictions of nineteenth-century towns and are rather like some of those drawings in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Occasional details in the Shaker views shed light upon the material prosperity and spiritual lives of the Shakers and sometimes give insight into the lives of the draftsmen, many of whom are identifiable. Emlen's chapters relate these isometric plans and later "limnerlike...