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00:42Good morning.
00:44This is the day that God has made.
00:51Look at this room.
00:54Over 2,000 people are gathered here.
00:58More than one rabbi and more than one priest and not a few Muslims.
01:04What a cross-section of religions and races and cultures and national origins.
01:11The United States of America is the most religious country in the West.
01:15More than three-quarters of its people believe in some kind of Judeo-Christian God.
01:20Moreover, it's the only society in the world where new religions, cults, sects and therapies,
01:27all based upon Christianity, are being invented every day.
01:30And no powerful person is more powerful than you.
01:34Religious fervour goes back a long way in America.
01:36The ministry that built this high-tech megachurch dates back to the 17th century.
01:42It was the early religious missions that played a vital role in the artistic and cultural development of America.
01:59What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men?
02:05They looked behind them and there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a gulf
02:10to separate them from the civil parts of the world.
02:13What could sustain them now but the spirit of God and His grace?
02:22So wrote William Bradford after he and his fellow pilgrims landed in 1620 at Plymouth, fleeing religious persecution in England.
02:33How of the?
02:34That might miss, presently?
02:37Shall O.
02:39Peep, me I shall not laugh.
02:43In brass he folds, he down doth make me lie.
02:49He gently leads me, quiet waters by.
02:54He doth return my soul for his name said.
03:00Impass of justice leads me quiet lie
03:06It is now no time to pamper the flesh
03:09Live at ease, snatch, catch, scrape and pill and hoard up
03:14But rather to open the doors, the chests and vessels
03:19And say, brother, neighbour, friend, what want ye?
03:28All the year round, tourists come in droves
03:31To this late 20th century reconstruction of the first Plymouth colony
03:35After all, the ancestry of about 15 million Americans today
03:40Began in, or perhaps behind, the lost originals of these primitive huts
03:46Here it is always 1627, seven years after the Mayflower arrived
03:53Nothing remains of the original Plymouth
03:55And this is an elaborate facsimile built on the coast nearby
03:58Historically, ecologically and technically accurate
04:01Down to the last sheep and shoelace and saw pit
04:05The Pilgrims were the most radical wing of 17th century English Puritanism
04:09They were, in effect, the Protestants' Protestants
04:12They regarded mainstream Anglicanism as just as impure
04:16And hopelessly corrupt as the Church of Rome
04:18And they wanted to make a fresh start on a clean slate
04:22Over here in the New World
04:26Almighty Jehovah
04:27We pray that thou wilt look down upon us this day
04:29And hear the prayer of thy faithful, O Lord
04:32Thou hast oft brought us many blessings here in this wilderness
04:35From our first coming into this land, O Lord
04:38Thou hast brought us out of this wilderness
04:42You have a well-made house
04:44You have delicious food
04:45You have silverware and books and pottery
04:48And everything that domestic life requires
04:51Except it seems one thing
04:52I don't see any pictures here
04:54Why is that?
04:55We are not like those Dutchmen
04:56Having lived in Leiden
04:58I can assure you, sir, you might find there
05:00Fine paintings upon the walls of a man's house
05:03It is a great fashion
05:04I think it is no great ill
05:06Though I must say
05:08I am well contented
05:09With the more simpler life we have in this place
05:12But in particular you don't have any pictures
05:14Of what, uh
05:15Of the kind that a Catholic might have
05:18Pictures of Jesus
05:19And the saints
05:20The shrines and relics
05:22This is all a great superstition unto mankind
05:25And much of the work of the devil
05:27Blinding men with things of man's art
05:30And keeping man from the proper reverence unto God
05:48The first colonists in the 17th century
05:50Saw the unexplored land as a blank slate
05:53On which they could write their designs
05:55And find their chance to create utopia
05:59And their visions of what such a place might mean
06:01Have left indelible traces
06:03On the identity of modern America
06:11The wilderness was untamed
06:13They were right about that
06:14But it was not no man's land
06:16To about 12 million American Indians
06:19It was home
06:20And the first big cultural collision
06:23Between colonist and native
06:24Took place here
06:26In the desert tablelands of the southwest
06:30Charged with the hunger for conquest
06:32Just 50 years after Columbus
06:34The Spaniards marched north
06:36To what would be known as New Mexico
06:42The Spaniards thought they would find infinite gold
06:45As Cortes and his conquistadores
06:46Had in old Mexico
06:48They hoped that paradise was here for the taking
06:50They'd heard talk of golden cities
06:53The seven cities of Cibola
06:54But instead
06:55They found tribal Indians
06:57Living in multi-story villages
06:59The Pueblo Indians
07:00They had pottery
07:02But not gold
07:05The Spanish never did find gold
07:08But on their wild goose chase
07:10After non-existent treasure
07:11They at last arrived at the foot of Sky City
07:14The ancient city of Acoma
07:18One bemused Spaniard called it
07:21The greatest stronghold ever seen in the world
07:26With its 2,000 dwellings
07:28This is the oldest continuously populated city
07:31In North America
07:32The Acomas had lived here for a thousand years
07:35Before the Spanish arrived
07:37For them it was a sacred place
07:40But not for the invaders
07:44In 1599
07:45The Spanish massacred most of the Acomas
07:48And sold the rest into slavery
07:50Yet the Acomas built up their community again
07:53And their descendants were persuaded
07:55By the Franciscan missionaries
07:56To build an immense shrine on the rock
07:59To their god
07:59The Catholic god
08:05The church of San Esteban
08:07Was finished by the 1720s
08:09By then
08:09It was by far the largest mission church
08:11In all of New Mexico
08:13With its immense
08:14Cyclopean walls
08:15Ten feet thick at the base
08:16And its 150 foot long nave
08:19All of it entailing something like
08:2120,000 tonnes
08:22Of rock and clay
08:24Every ounce of which
08:25Had to be brought up
08:26From the valley floor
08:26Below on people's backs
08:28Because there wasn't any loose fill
08:29On top of the mesa
08:34Indian labour
08:35Spanish techniques
08:37The basic unit of San Esteban
08:39Is the mud brick
08:40The adobe
08:41A simple technology
08:43Which the Spaniards
08:44Had brought with them
08:45From the old world
08:50Because the adobe
08:51Is only dried mud
08:52The rain melts it
08:54And it is in constant need of repair
08:56The repeated coats of mud
08:58Produce singular organic forms
09:00That are the signature
09:02Of the adobe style
09:03As in this church
09:04At Ranchoster Taos
09:13Seventy years ago
09:14These fluid shapes
09:15Would inspire the work
09:17Of modernist artists
09:18Like Georgia O'Keeffe
09:24The pure and primal character
09:26Of the southwestern desert
09:27Would draw her
09:29And other artists
09:29From New York
09:30Looking for the primitive
09:32As Gauguin was drawn
09:33To Tahiti
09:39In the magnificent
09:40Fierce mourning
09:41Of New Mexico
09:42Wrote D.H. Lawrence
09:43The old world
09:45Gave way to the new
09:50So bring that adobe brick
09:52On wheels
09:52Over to squeaky clean
09:54Modern New Mexico
09:55Fetishises its cultural past
09:57Founded in 1610
09:59Santa Fe
10:00Is the oldest European city
10:02In North America
10:06But here
10:07The adobe style
10:08Isn't just pervasive
10:09It's mandatory
10:10The law says
10:11You can't build
10:12A chain store
10:13Or a gas station
10:14Unless it's in the manner
10:15Of a 17th century
10:16Mission church
10:18This goes hand in hand
10:20With the artiness
10:21Of the place
10:21Stuffed with every kind
10:23Of pious ethmo kitsch
10:24Displaying its
10:25Multiculti credentials
10:39To see earlier examples
10:41Of artistic fusion
10:42On the southwestern frontier
10:44It's better to go to places
10:46Like the church of San Jose
10:47In Laguna Pueblo
10:50It was built around 1700
10:52And its friars
10:53Embraced Pueblo art
10:57Indian designs
10:59Along the walls
11:00Lead to the florid altar screen
11:02With the sun
11:03The firmament
11:03And the moon on top
11:04Painted in the Indian way
11:06And the blessed trinity
11:08In Spanish style
11:09Below them
11:12On the right
11:13Is St Barbara
11:13Who protected you
11:15From thunder
11:15And gunshot wounds
11:16A useful saint
11:18For Indians to have
11:22In this fusion
11:23Between European
11:24And Native American
11:25Traditions
11:26A rich aesthetic
11:27Rises from cultural
11:29Collision
11:29And this would be
11:31Very much part
11:31Of the story
11:32Of the arts
11:33In a nation
11:33Made of immigrants
11:42The priests
11:43Secured the frontier
11:45Then came Spanish settlers
11:47They built their big
11:49Self-contained farmhouses
11:50Or haciendas
11:51Like fortresses
11:53To withstand attacks
11:54From hostile Indians
11:55Made of adobe
11:57Most of these
11:58Have perished
11:59And this is one
12:00One of the few
12:00That remain
12:01Casa San Ysidro
12:03The early Spanish colonists
12:05Led isolated
12:06And harsh lives
12:07In a culture
12:08Of survival
12:09Propped up
12:10By faith
12:14Today
12:15This is the home
12:16Of Ward Allen
12:17And that was
12:47What was this room?
12:49This happens to be a chapel.
12:51I suppose it seems strange to us nowadays, but in the old Spanish homes, especially if
12:58we're large enough with a large family, they often had their own chapels such as this.
13:03It's very plain, actually, by those that you might find in Mexico or Spain.
13:09But it reflects, I think, the hard life that the settlers had here in New Mexico.
13:15When the colonists, including the missionaries, were here, they were pretty much on their own,
13:20weren't they?
13:21That's true.
13:22And the isolation is what many of us feel has resulted in a rather unique cultural expression
13:30that we find in this area.
13:38The Franciscans encouraged images that were simple and direct, crudely carved, highly coloured,
13:45full of sacrifice and death.
13:50You needed the impact to drive home religious doctrine.
13:53It reaches an extreme in a type of statue made by penitential cults in New Mexico, known
13:59as Doña Sebastiana, death riding in a cart.
14:09This skull-headed crone, wielding her bow and arrow, is Eros reversed.
14:14These death carts are among the most powerful and unnerving sculptures produced in North America.
14:35The Spanish settlers brought to the new world the culture of the old.
14:39But there was a more radical idea to come.
14:42Americans as a new people for whom God had marked out a special role in human history.
14:47This came with another group, English Puritans, who landed on the cold coast of Massachusetts
14:53in the 17th century.
15:09The arrival of the Puritans was a truly mythic event.
15:12Mythic, because it was meant to be.
15:15In the famous phrase of their leader, John Winthrop, they would build a city on a hill, whose
15:21example would shine back across the Atlantic and reform the corrupt old world.
15:25For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
15:34The eyes of all people are upon us.
15:38We shall be made a story and a byword through the world.
15:49Winthrop spoke those words in mid-Atlantic on board the ship Arbella.
15:53He believed his flock had been chosen by God to begin a new phase of human history, a renewal
15:59of the story of Exodus.
16:03These men, and women too, were biblical fundamentalists.
16:07They imagined their leaders as Moses, as Abraham, as elected saints.
16:13They were the first to call themselves Americans, and the society they created has proved absolutely
16:18basic to the way Americans imagine themselves today.
16:28New people, and the beginnings of a new architecture.
16:31The four square old ship meeting house in Hingham could hold the whole community, 700 people.
16:40This is the oldest church in New England.
16:42It's also the last surviving Puritan meeting house.
16:45Its frame was raised by the people of Hingham in three days in the summer of 1681, and it
16:51opened for worship six months later.
16:53It came to be known as the old ship meeting house.
16:57Why the name?
16:58Nobody seems to know, except that people must have been reminded by the great structure of
17:03the roof with its massive timber beams of the inverted hull of a ship, an ark.
17:11There can't be many oaks left in Massachusetts today, big enough to supply the timber for
17:16these huge king post trusses.
17:18This is very pure architecture, as befits its purpose.
17:23How long were the ceremonies here?
17:25They'd be here for six hours on a Sunday, in two sittings, on very hard backs, benches
17:32without backs.
17:34One can see in the mind's eye the women with small children here on their laps, the older
17:43people in the front, all of them centered on the Word.
17:46That's what was happening here.
17:48They came before a pulpit that would often have an eye painted on the front of it, which
17:53was God's omniscient eye watching them.
17:56And this would be the only decoration in the church?
17:58This would be very nearly it.
17:59They stripped away everything else, the stained glass, the stained glass words, all of them
18:05gone.
18:06It's interesting to see the light in this building.
18:08I was struck when I was in Wells Cathedral in England, where the Puritans had smashed the
18:14stained glass windows, and white glass remained, and there was a kind of intensity of that light,
18:20which one sees here.
18:22I think they wanted to see things clearly and directly.
18:26They wanted no intermediaries.
18:28There was a kind of seriousness and urgency about all of this, and it's made America what
18:33it is today.
18:35These Puritans delighted in radical bareness.
18:38They would not tolerate graven images of God or the saints.
18:42Some of them must have felt sorry that New England had no Catholic icons for them to smash.
18:47Yet the Meeting House does have its aesthetic.
18:50It exists to frame the spoken word, to which the visual image must forever defer.
19:11Simple gravestones were their only religious art and their only sculpture.
19:17Puritan society was fixated on death to a degree that modern Americans can hardly imagine.
19:23Today, we sweep death under the carpet.
19:26Then, it held the foreground of social life.
19:36At funerals, whole villages would get drunk, and children were dragged snivelling to the edge of open graves
19:42to teach them that they too would die.
19:45The death's head on the stone reminded you that this world was only an anti-room to a real and
19:51eternal one,
19:52that its realities were insubstantial, its modest achievements all in vain.
20:10The Puritans were at least as superstitious as the Indians, whose beliefs they scorned.
20:16In their world, nothing was accidental.
20:18Good was part of God's plan. Evil was the result of diabolic conspiracy.
20:23They lived in a world of omens and portents.
20:26They were obsessed by witchcraft.
20:29This hysteria started in 1692 during the ministry of Parson Joseph Capon.
20:35His house still stands in the small village of Topsfield.
20:39He was one of the few to try and save those accused as agents of Satan in the famous Salem
20:45witchcraft trials.
20:52Parson Capon tried to remonstrate with the witch hunters at Salem, but he failed and the women were all hanged.
20:59His house in Topsfield still stands and it gives you, with these low ceilings and the heavy beams,
21:05a strong sense of the kind of world that these people were constructing for themselves.
21:11Intimate and close-knit and designed to keep the family in and the wilderness out.
21:18Built in 1683, the Parson Capon house is probably the best surviving example of Jacobean architecture in America.
21:26Its brick chimney was a sign of affluence for the times.
21:31The door is double thickness, clinched with nails against Indian attack.
21:35And this hanging finial was one of the few ornamental touches.
21:40The Puritans didn't invent a severe domestic style to reflect a severe ideology.
21:45Many 17th century English houses looked like this.
21:50But in other parts of their culture, we do start to see the faint stirring of something that can be
21:56called American.
21:58Farmer Henry Treat made this chest in 1673 to commemorate his wedding anniversary.
22:05So this is really the sort of earliest form of American furniture, a six-board chest.
22:12The six-board chest is really the dumbest piece of furniture known to man.
22:16It's so simple to make and yet this shows an early emphasis, a kind of yearning to ornament and to
22:21embellish,
22:22even amongst people whose situation in life was very tenuous and insecure.
22:27This was a frontier community on the edge of the wilderness.
22:30It's one of the earliest pieces of American furniture and the earliest piece of Connecticut furniture
22:35with its date carved right on the front.
22:37From the days when the West was in the East?
22:39When the West was in the East, right.
22:41Well, when you first see it, it looks like it's just about one notch up the evolutionary scale from a
22:45packing case, but what...
22:46It's pretty much, I mean, it's simple.
22:48You know, this is no backwoods Michelangelo here.
22:51It's pretty dumb carving, essentially, but it works and it creates quite an elaborate effect
22:56to an otherwise remarkably simple piece of furniture.
23:00There seems to have been this kind of love-hate relationship with nature.
23:05One imagines the Puritans as sort of 17th century Daniel Boones at home in the wilderness.
23:12A truer picture is that they probably hated the wilderness.
23:15It was an oppressive presence on all sides of them.
23:18And when they were in their domestic environments, in their homes,
23:20they wanted evidence of control, of order, and of artifice.
23:25So that they took wood and rendered it colorful, carved, decorative, and even mathematically structured.
23:43The only kind of painting the Puritans encouraged was portraiture.
23:47How did they see themselves?
23:49This is the only known Puritan self-portrait.
23:53It's a Boston mariner in the 1680s, Captain Thomas Smith.
23:57The lace at his throat tells you he is well off.
24:00The skull that he accepts is impending death.
24:03Under the skull, the poem reads,
24:06Why, why should I the world be minding,
24:09Therein a world of evils finding,
24:11Then farewell world?
24:14Such portraits were made as a record,
24:16To commemorate a person's social place,
24:19To honor his memory after death,
24:21And to remind you of the transience of life.
24:25Some Puritan effigies, to put it mildly,
24:28Lack the zing and suppleness of European portraiture.
24:31They're awkward shades of virtue.
24:34Or else, they're an index to wealth.
24:37These are the Freaks,
24:39A pair of New England yuppies in the 1670s.
24:43Mrs Thomas Freak holds her baby, Mary.
24:46The nameless painter has done them
24:48In an old-fashioned Elizabethan style,
24:51Flat and formal,
24:52But with every detail of lace and jewellery carefully listed.
24:56She's a trophy wife,
24:57And her minxy little face radiates delight in her status.
25:02Her husband, John Freak,
25:05A rich young Boston merchant,
25:06Is just as grandly kitted out with his lace and gloves.
25:10Money was a sign of God's approval,
25:12So why not show it off?
25:14Thus, the Puritans left the first portraits
25:17Of individual Americans.
25:24For we must consider,
25:27We shall be as the city upon a hill.
25:32It is a mistake to think of the Puritans as conservatives.
25:36The truth is very nearly the opposite.
25:38They invented the idea of American newness,
25:41Imagined as the sign of a special history.
25:44Newness underwrote the American Revolution,
25:47And it was the root of the long-lasting belief
25:49That Americans are a special case.
25:54But they believed in freedom for themselves,
25:56Not for others.
25:58They were not very tolerant or democratic.
26:00The legacy of those admirable traits
26:03Came more from other settlers,
26:05Who arrived in what is now Pennsylvania.
26:20This is a meeting of Quakers.
26:23No sermon, no singing.
26:25They wait patiently for the inner spirit to reveal itself.
26:32I feel much blessed
26:34To be in this room
26:37With seekers
26:41We have peace
26:43We have beautiful surroundings
26:46Comfort
26:51The Friends settled in Pennsylvania in 1682.
26:55They hoped to create a haven from religious persecution,
26:58Not just for themselves,
27:00But for all Protestants.
27:04Quakers distrusted the arts,
27:06But their ideal of a pluralist society
27:09Shows in the works of one of their few painters,
27:11Edward Hicks.
27:13In his numerous versions of the peaceable kingdom,
27:15Hicks showed the biblical prophecy
27:18That the lamb and the leopard
27:19Will lie down with the kid
27:20And a little child shall lead them.
27:23In the background,
27:24The colony's founder, William Penn
27:26Is signing a treaty with the Delaware Indians.
27:30Tolerance really mattered to the Quakers
27:32As it didn't to the Puritans.
27:44William Penn made Pennsylvania a haven
27:46For any and every Christian sect
27:49That wanted to create a new life in America.
28:00They came from Switzerland, Germany and France
28:03As well as England.
28:05They were Mennonites, Hutterites, Moravians and Amish.
28:12The Amish especially have stuck to their traditions
28:15Rejecting worldliness and modernity.
28:17Indeed, they shunned the lens of the camera.
28:33The less messianic migrants,
28:36Known to their conservative neighbours as the gay Dutch,
28:39Brought with them the bright, heraldic designs
28:42Of German folk art.
28:54There was no desire to express anything through the art.
28:57It was simply to decorate something
28:59That they were going to use.
29:01Pennsylvania German folk art
29:02Has to be seen as a copycat art.
29:04They imitated a great deal.
29:06They copied designs from anything they saw.
29:08And you know, one of the designs
29:10That came into Pennsylvania German folk art
29:12Is the unicorn.
29:13And a lot of ink has been wasted
29:15On the subject of its symbolic meaning.
29:18In fact, if you look at it very carefully
29:20It's simply a unicorn taken off of British design elements
29:24Coats of arms.
29:25It's from the lion on the unicorn.
29:27Precisely!
29:29You can even find the lion as well.
29:30I know a piece of Frachter
29:31That has two unicorns facing each other
29:33And down underneath it two lions facing each other.
29:36They disassembled the original
29:37And reassembled it to match the Pennsylvania German fetish
29:40For symmetry.
29:41Like Norman.
29:42Norman, he likes to quilt.
29:44Sometimes it's a symbolism
29:46Big amount.
29:47Of all the folk arts
29:48One flourished especially among the German migrants
29:51And was the work of women.
29:53It was the quilt.
29:56A lot of these ideas came from Germany.
30:00My parents died when I was very small
30:05But I lived with my uncle and aunt
30:06And the aunt was a great quilter.
30:09She did a lot of quilting
30:10And so of course I had to learn how to quilt.
30:13And I do enjoy it.
30:15The quilts that have attracted the most attention
30:18Were made by the wives and daughters of the Amish.
30:39They're grandly abstract.
30:41You can't look at these Lancaster quilts and think,
30:44How cute.
30:45You may think,
30:46How modern.
30:47But no.
30:48To the Amish,
30:49Newness was and is anathema.
30:52Nevertheless,
30:53The work of these Amish women
30:54Was as much a part of the story
30:56Of high aesthetic effort in America
30:58As any painting or sculpture.
31:00They refute the idea
31:02That folk art is just innocent social bird song.
31:21Today the popularity and price of these quilts
31:25And of Pennsylvania German folk art in general
31:28Just grows and grows.
31:29It reminds modern Americans of their roots
31:32Real or imaginary
31:33In a simpler pre-industrial time.
31:3646 and 50
31:3746, 50
31:38Now 4700
31:40394, 195
31:41Americans couldn't bear to live in such a world
31:44But they like to be reminded of it.
31:46The great example of this
31:47Is in the work of the Shakers.
31:50Everyone wants Shaker objects
31:52But very few want to lead the Shaker life.
31:56And the number is 182
31:58Right there.
31:59Oh brethren ain't you happy
32:02Oh brethren ain't you happy
32:04Oh brethren ain't you happy
32:06Oh brethren ain't you happy
32:07Bowers of the Lamb
32:08Sing on dance on
32:10Bowers of Emmanuel
32:11Sing on dance on
32:14Bowers of the Lamb
32:35Bowers of Emmanuel
32:38Sing on dance on
32:40Bowers of Emmanuel
32:42Sing on dance on
32:44Bowers of Emmanuel
32:45Bowers of Emmanuel
32:57Bowers of Emmanuel
32:58Sing on dance on
32:59Bowers of Emmanuel
33:03They believed in complete sexual equality
33:06And hope to restore the primitive Christian church on American soil
33:10with its stress on community, celibacy, and the indwelling spirit of Christ.
33:15Unlike the Amish, the Shakers did believe in innovation.
33:19They invented the washing machine, the flat broom, and stay-pressed clothes, among other things,
33:24because labour-saving devices left you more time to pray.
33:28They embraced the new, they equated it with piety, and they sought it in design.
33:37I think that in order to explain why, and I say this with modesty,
33:42why the Shakers have made such beautiful, beautiful things,
33:45is due to the mottos that we have been given to live by.
33:50The first, of course, is hands to work and hearts to God.
33:54And this is literally lived out in Shaker communities.
33:57And the other is, do all of your work as though you were going to live a thousand years,
34:01and yet as though you were going to die tomorrow.
34:03And when I go through the museum, which I still do occasionally,
34:06and I see these beautiful, beautiful things that are there,
34:09I think, when people made these things, they didn't make them,
34:13thinking they were going to be in a museum.
34:15They didn't make them and put them in a museum.
34:16They made them so well, and they made them well,
34:19because they integrated their religion into it.
34:22I'm convinced that religion and work has gone,
34:25and hopefully continues to go, hand-in-hand with Shaker arts, crafts.
34:30I'm glad I am a Shaker.
34:32I'm glad I am a Shaker.
34:34I'm glad I am a Shaker.
34:37People talk about a Shaker style, but really, I guess,
34:40the fundamental question is use, isn't it?
34:42It's what the thing is used for that dictates how it's going to look.
34:45Exactly.
34:46Form, indeed, does follow function for a Shaker.
34:49And so we have many, many things here that have really stood the test of time for several reasons.
34:55One, A, they were made well, and second of all, they've always been used well.
34:59And although the pieces in our museum, like this tailor's bunk...
35:02Tailor's bunk?
35:03Bunk.
35:04What, this is where tailor slept on it?
35:06Well, no, actually, it's just good old Maine country terms.
35:09It's spelled B-E-N-C-H, but it's pronounced bunk.
35:13And this is a piece that is designed for tailoring on, cutting out all of your clothing and cloth.
35:19And there's no way of improving on the design.
35:20No.
35:21It's as simple as it can be.
35:22Nice, large, cutting surface and ample storage underneath.
35:27The schools like the Bauhaus and then modern Danish that pick up on it, too,
35:32also saw that lightness, the elegant design, really, that was inherent.
35:37Just that finding down of proportions.
35:38Exactly.
35:39I mean, you have the most perfect example of that is a chair that came from the Enfield, New Hampshire
35:43community.
35:44Literally so light that it can be picked up with one finger.
35:49What does that weigh?
35:51Probably about five pounds.
35:52Five pounds.
35:54And it's set back, again, it's totally refined, flame finials.
35:57These were really the finest chairs that were ever produced in any of the shaker communities.
36:01Something that adds to that overall effect, too, was that they came the seats.
36:05So you had even more air playing through.
36:07Even more transparency.
36:08Exactly.
36:09And a lot stronger than it looks.
36:10Very much so.
36:12Someone over 200 pounds would not have a problem sitting in this chair or harming it.
36:15Well, I'm not going to try it, but...
36:17Take my word.
36:18Also something else, when we talked about inventions, this was a very practical shaker invention,
36:23and you talk about form and function.
36:25People always are going to sit back in their chairs, no matter how you try not to.
36:29So what are these?
36:30So these are called tilters, ball and sockets.
36:33And it allows you to, indeed, tilt.
36:36And as you tilt, you see the chair does not actually move.
36:39Oh, yes.
36:39So you're not going to destroy the chair, the floor.
36:41So it's not going to skip forward, yeah.
36:42And, yeah, probably you also won't go down with it.
36:47We will sustain the structure, God's great and glorious plan, which he had mercy.
36:57These people have sustained the structure, kept intact their utopian vision of religious community.
37:03But the broad currents of American history rose around such ideas, isolating them.
37:09Their new Jerusalem of no mine or thine, no masters or servants,
37:13was the exact opposite of what by then had been created down south in Virginia.
37:38Here in Virginia, the Middleburg hunt keeps alive quite different English traditions.
37:45This was the outcome of another migration.
37:47The world of transplanted squirearchy, the Perseys, Throgmortons, Wyatts and Spencers,
37:54mostly second sons or dispossessed gentry,
37:57the royalist cavaliers who had lost out to the Puritans in England's civil war.
38:04They wanted to recreate aristocratic privilege in America.
38:08They brought indentured servants and later African slaves.
38:13The top of the pyramid had to import its base.
38:22This is Mount Airy, seat of the Talow family.
38:26Mrs. Talow's forebears came here in the 1680s.
38:38But you never really lost your family, never really lost its feelings of contact with England, did it?
38:43No, indeed, we're all Anglophiles.
38:45Right now.
38:46What does the sort of idea of England, the mental picture of England, what does it mean to you?
38:52It means a great deal to me because my grandmother taught me more about England than she did about America.
38:58Really?
38:58I could recite the Kings of England and never did learn the President of the United States.
39:02Oh, for shame.
39:03Yeah.
39:04No.
39:05I loved England.
39:07But did you ever live there?
39:08No.
39:08I've only been there twice.
39:10Yeah.
39:18Early Virginia was a fantasy, so Walter Raleigh promoted it as a Garden of Eden, which aristocrats could colonise without
39:25having to lift a finger.
39:27Floundering through the salt marshes in embroidered doublets and silken hoes, both his expeditions ended in disaster.
39:41Finally, in 1607, a kind of settlement did take hold in Jamestown.
39:46It was an anarchic dump where men died of starvation, swab fever and dysentery.
39:54This sickly colony was saved by a harsh doctor, Governor William Berkeley.
40:00He arrived in 1642 and set about re-establishing the aristocratic order of power and patronage.
40:07He recruited royalist refugees desperate to leave Puritan England.
40:24These distressed cavaliers, as they were called, turned into the colonial oligarchy of Virginia.
40:29They were its first families.
40:31They were enticed here with free land and spectacular promises of privilege.
40:37They planted tobacco, or the sotweed, as they called it.
40:40But they got rich.
40:42One of the richest of all these clans was the Carters, who ended up owning scores of plantations.
40:47And this was one of them.
40:49It's called Shirley.
40:57Originally, this front drive used to be the back entrance, and visitors came to Shirley up the James River.
41:04When you first see it, you think of the homes of the English Georgian gentry.
41:09It started in 1723, a brick box with English Palladian porticos and pediments, topped off with a mansard roof built
41:18by French Huguenot carpenters.
41:21An odd hybrid, which stares across the river with great assurance.
41:35Places like this weren't big by English standards, but in Virginia they were very grand indeed.
41:40The flying staircase framed a hall where formal dancers were held.
41:48Virginians entertained lavishly, and one royal governor congratulated himself that there were no bad dancers in his administration.
42:01After the ball, they would retire to this parlour to gamble and gossip, and perhaps to congratulate their late governor,
42:08Berkeley, for banning free schools and printing presses.
42:12The Puritans had passionately believed in general education.
42:15The Southern Cavaliers were against it.
42:18It might disturb the hierarchy of class, at whose peak stood men like the patriarch of Shirley, Robert Carter, known
42:26as King Carter.
42:27He was the richest man in the colony.
42:30He owned a third of a million acres, and set up his very own church, Christ Church.
42:39This is one of the most elegant, classical buildings of the early 18th century in America, but nobody knows its
42:45architect's name.
42:47Its detail is perfect, right up to that massive, slightly flared hip roof, cushioned on its cornice.
43:00Inside, it's just as good.
43:02The plan is a stubby cross with the altar at one end, and the light washing over those white barrel
43:08-vaulted ceilings gives it an almost Venetian effect,
43:11whose calm is emphasised by the thin, dark cornice line.
43:19The sermons from this pulpit, unlike Puritan ones, were mercifully short.
43:26This is where the Carters came to worship.
43:29The sides of its pews are the highest of any church in America, and this served a double purpose.
43:35First, it enabled the Carters to concentrate without distraction upon the word of the Lord coming from the pulpit up
43:41there.
43:42But secondly, it stopped the lower orders from peering in on them.
43:47This society of deference and hierarchy was scoffed at back home by the English.
43:52They saw through this wannabe aristocracy and its pretensions, and indeed, the way Virginians pictured themselves was largely a fantasy.
44:07In a painting by Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, one of the sons of this oligarchy, Henry Darnell III,
44:14is put in an idealised garden landscape, probably copied from some European print.
44:19All of it is fiction.
44:21No American property ever looked like this.
44:24The image records the defiant, illusory desire of this colonial gentry to imagine themselves as a full extension of English
44:33culture.
44:34A young slave gazes at Darnell with submissive adoration like a favourite dog.
44:40This genteel surface of hierarchy was stretched over a fabric of brutality supported by slave labour.
44:50At Mount Airy, Mrs. Talow's ancestor, John Talow, owned 380 slaves, the largest gang in the colony.
44:58In the dining room, there hangs a portrait of the master by John Wollaston.
45:04I don't think John Talow up there sat on a veranda and drank too many juleps.
45:08Yeah, he looks pretty tough, actually.
45:10He looks like a very...
45:11Well, I think he was a very busy person.
45:12He looks like a very self-possessed man.
45:14He's all dressed up now, but I don't think he was too dressed up all the time when he was
45:18riding over his places.
45:20I would imagine not.
45:21He had to tell people what to do and how to do it.
45:23Somebody had to have some brains.
45:26And so some Virginians could pursue their ideas of freedom in this newfound land.
45:32Realising freedom, however you defined it, was the basic desire of all these early colonies.
45:38And after religion, the second freedom was the liberty to create wealth.
45:43And culture followed money, as it always does.
45:54As the colonies grew, they grew rich, through technology, through trade.
46:00In the 18th century, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania swelled in foodstuffs, metals, tea from China, slaves from Africa, rum from the
46:09Caribbean.
46:10Wealth and worldliness.
46:14But most of the material culture remained steadfastly English in appearance.
46:19While the colonies started to pull away from England, cultural independence didn't come in a rush.
46:26It was gradual, and signs of it appear by the 1760s like small portents.
46:49The first American art that began to lift into real originality was furniture,
46:54like this great bureau table in mahogany made by John Townsend in Newport around 1765.
47:02It's meant as an image of material splendor, but it's completely unlike anything in the existing English pattern books.
47:07It doesn't look or feel like English furniture.
47:10The big difference is in what's called the block front, which is basically the stack of drawers sawn from great
47:18solid blanks of mahogany, bulging out at you.
47:21This is why it commands space with the kind of authority that it does.
47:25It's almost architectural, and the block front style, as it was called, celebrates really the immense abundance of the American
47:34forests, the forests of the new world.
47:36This is the delayed Baroque that Puritanism suppressed, rich as architecture, arriving in the middle 18th century, but better late
47:44than never.
47:47Painting was slower to evolve, but in the Bermuda Group, a portrait of Bishop George Barclay and his family,
47:54John Smybert showed how American art might begin to detach itself from its stiff early colonial conventions.
48:01It manages to set figures in a natural way in space, unifying them with light and air.
48:09On the left, a friend takes down the bishop's words of wisdom, for Barclay was a strong believer in American
48:15destiny, and had written,
48:17There shall be sung another golden age, the rise of empire and the arts, not such as Europe breeds in
48:25her decay, such as she bred when fresh and young.
48:41By the end of the 1760s, in the east of America, the tide of religious zeal had end.
48:47But the desire for liberty, which had brought so many diverse colonists to these shores, remained.
48:53It was so strong that it was a wonder to Europeans, one of whom, a visiting Frenchman named St. John
48:59de Cravecoeur, posed a famous question.
49:02Who then, he asked, is this American, this new man?
49:45Packing a punch on BBC4, America season continues with boxing legend Muhammad Ali, a ringside seat tomorrow night from 10.
49:54But next tonight, another story of art, the lost surrealist, Leonora Carrington.
50:13The lost surrealist, Leonora Carrington, the lost surrealist, Leonora Carrington, the lost surrealist, Leonora Carrington.
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