AFA Autumn 2021

Antiques & Fine Art 61 2021 The study of American military artistically engraved powder horns took a great leap forward with Bill Guthman’s 1993 catalogue and exhibition Drums A’ beating, Trumpet’s Sounding , hosted by the Concord Museum in 1994. With rigorous connoisseurship Guthman was able to trace an artistic lineage that, remarkably, may have originated in Concord, then flourished in the forts manned for King George’s War (1744– 1748), the French and Indian War (1754–1763), and the Siege of Boston (1775–1776). This line is perhaps most clearly seen in the work of professional horn engravers who, for a few shillings, could embellish a horn, but can also be discerned in the work of many who seem not to have been professionals. The Concord Fig. 2: Detail of Stephan Parks’ larger horn (2007.266). Fig. 2a: Detail of Stephan Parks’ larger horn showing a Doe, nursing “Fan”, and other animals (2007.266). Photograph by Gavin Ashworth. A recent reinstallation of the Concord Museum’s collection of objects associated with April 19, 1775, the first battle of the Revolutionary War, has brought renewed attention to the museum’s powder horns. Made of cow horn trimmed, scraped, and fitted with a fixed wooden plug at one end and a removable stopper at the other, powder horns were a ubiquitous element in the kit of the colonial citizen-soldiers who provided support for the professional soldiers (Regulars) fighting Great Britain’s dynastic and imperial wars in the New World. Militia service was required of all adult males in the British colonies, and in contrast to the regular army, militiamen armed and equipped themselves. The powder horns, then, were personal items, and no regulation prohibited their embellishment. Over the second half of the eighteenth century the decoration of military powder horns in America developed into a distinctive art form, then all but disappeared.