AFA Summer 2021

2021 Antiques & Fine Art 59 This remarkably detailed piece was mounted on the top of the Manor Crescent Building on Bedford Street in Lexington, Massachusetts, which served as a gas station and grocery store. Automobiles were still very much a novelty in 1910. This vane’s presence atop a gas station would have represented a striking addition to the local landscape. The complexity of the vane’s design and workmanship would have been invisible to the naked eye, however, in its perch above the building. W. A. Snow Iron Works manufactured stable fixtures, cow barn fittings, wrought-iron fences, outdoor seating, and more, including weathervanes. The 1894 catalog only devotes twenty of its 148 pages to vanes. Even so, the company continued to innovate. In addition to the standard racehorses, cows, roosters, banners, and scrolls, a company broadside published around 1910 includes an early touring car and driver, seen here, and a sulky with pneumatic tires. Fig. 11: The Blériot XI Monoplane, Artist unidentified, from the Poland Spring House, Poland Spring, Maine, ca. 1909–14. Copper, 10 x 57¼ x 55 in. Collection of Michael and Patricia Del Castello. Photograph by Michael Lynberg. Louis Blériot was a pioneering French aviator and engineer. This singular American weathervane is a carefully observed representation of the small, fragile monoplane that Blériot flew on July 25, 1909 for the first-ever airplane crossing of the English Channel. The fete electrified the world and made the pilot an international celebrity. The vane was probably made on commission for the Poland Spring House hotel in Poland Spring, Maine, where it was placed not long after Blériot’s epic flight. This vane is a unique sculpture, unparalleled in its scale and level of detail. Nothing else remotely like it is known. Fig. 10: Touring Car and Driver, W. A. Snow Iron Works, Boston, Massachusetts, ca. 1910. Molded copper with traces of gilt. H. from bottom of wheels 18 in. Collection of Susan and Jerry Lauren. Photograph by Adam Reich.

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