This chamber of curiosities has a second-period format, with an age-of-reason feel. Here similar items are grouped together and displayed in a manner which adheres to modern taxonomic notions. Along the south wall, items of natural history and science are displayed, and the minerals are presented by mineralogical family, the shells by genus within family, etc. The facing wall includes man-made materials, textiles, ethnographic artifacts, boxes and tools, also presented in a logical manner. As discussed in chapter 2, first-period wunderkammern would have more of a helter-skelter feel.

You first encounter a reasonably large mineral collection consisting of about 1500 of the world’s 4000 known minerals. The silicates are segregated from the sulfides and sulfates, etc. Some minerals are represented by beautifully-formed crystals, such as tourmaline and aquamarine. The specimens tend to be relatively small sized…fist size or smaller due to the space constraint. The extra-terrestrial section includes a meteorite found in Namibia and a piece of the Challenger space shuttle found in the Bahamas.

Two sections are dedicated to shells. You’ll note the drawers below are filled with specimens as well. This collection also includes about 1500 specimens, including some of the great rarities like the golden cowries, worn by Tahiti Chieftains as the emblem of their authority, and the imperial slit shell, traditionally thought to become automatically the property of the Emperor of Japan whenever recovered from the sea.

The next section displays a collection of US patent models from the period 1836 to 1880. This section represents science and technology, a typical wunderkammer theme. In the US, patent applications were normally submitted with a working model demonstrating the invention. To save space the Patent Office required these to be no bigger than a foot in any dimension. If the application was granted, the patent number was sequentially assigned –patent #1 was issued July,13,1836–and the model was put on display open to the general public at the Patent Office in Washington, DC. This was a very popular tourist site in the 19th century.

Nonetheless, the Patent Office ended the patent model after 45 years. Crammed with over 200,000 of these models, and believing better quality patents would be written if the inventors relied only on their words and diagrams, the Patent Office no longer accepted models with the applications after 1880. Twice fires raged through the collection destroying many of them, and finally the Patent Office sold off the remaining patent models in the 1940’s. The collection illustrated here consists of several hundred of them, including one issued September,22,1836, patent # 30, the model with lowest patent number in private hands. (Numbers 1-29 are in the Smithsonian.)

Here are a variety of wood working tools, drills, planes, hammers, saws, etc, through out the ages. Examples of the ax here date from as early as 4000BC and continue through Minoan Crete, 2000BC, through Roman, medieval, and to the 17th through 19th centuries. There are stone-age examples as well, from prehistory through American Indian to modern-day New Guinea. It’s fun to trace the evolution of such a simple and necessary item throughout history.

In the next section, see all the variety the simple idea of the box congers up. These examples date from the 17th to 19th centuries, represent all cultures, and are executed in all materials, from straw to gold.

This next section displays ancient and ethnographic material. The top two shelves are Asian, the next, Mesoamerican, the next classical Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and the last three shelves, Native American. Some connections are unexpected. For instance, all the glass beads here, those from 18th century China, 19th century Sumatra and Africa, those from 19th century Aleutian Islands, and those from 19th century American plains Indians were all made in the small Italian city of Venice. Venice had the world-wide monopoly in glass bead making from the renaissance through the 19th century, a monopoly it maintained by forbidding , on pain of death, its glass bead workers from leaving the city.

A collection of textiles includes a number of American quilts as well as 16th through 18th century needle works. Not shown are other collections of bronze-age implements, glass bottles from Roman to the 19th century, birds’ eggs from 19th century collections, butterflies, and so on.

This last section shows two unrelated collections, one of 19th century American enameled granite ware or agate ware (a cheap decorative surface put on common cookware to brighten up the day of the common man) and one of items decorated with feathers (from exotic feather headdresses from the jungles of Peru and New Guinea, to a pre-Columbian c 800AD cotton and feather pouch–top shelf, left–to fans and ladies hats from the Roaring 20’s.) These two materials contrast sharply, one being cheap, plentiful (at least at the time of manufacture), and indestructibly utilitarian, the other being rare, exotic and fragile. Yet when juxtaposed next to each other, a certain tension is created which adds drama to the presentation. This intentional juxtaposition is what the first-period wunderkammernists strived for. Moreover, alternating the two kinds of items was specifically recommended by Samuel Quiccheburg in his important treatise on wunderkammern, published in 1565, considered the definitive manual for marvels and curiosities.

This wunderkammer, I am assured, helps the owner celebrate on a daily basis what a great world it is, brings him much pleasure, and improves his mind. Do you know of any private curiosity cabinets, large or small which perform the same service for their owners? Please email me if you do at funstonantiques.com.