Sometime early in the century, a customer came into a Chicago tavern owned by Lynn Horn’s grandparents and left behind a curious handmade gift. It was a meticulously crafted miniature saloon scene. Thumb-size figures of men, cut out of wood and painted, sat before a bar playing cards and drinking pints of whiskey. Above the bar was a sign written in German, which translates as the legend, “One who does not have love, beer, wine, women and song, he stays a poor gent his life long.”
The scene was detailed down to the tiny playing cards in the men’s hands. It also offered a good-humored challenge to the viewer to “find the missing man.” One of the poker players is absent from the game, but upon closer inspection, there he is down a stairwell sitting in a privy. Most remarkable is that the entire diorama is installed inside a seltzer bottle no more than 18 inches high.
The bottle’s creator signed his name and address in pencil: “Carl Worner, maker, 205 S. Des Plaines.” According to the story passed from Horn’s grandparents, Polish immigrants who owned taverns in Bucktown and on the Northwest Side, the man offered the bottle as payback on a bar tab. For years they displayed the unusual bottle prominently at one of their taverns. The bars and Horn’s grandparents since have passed on and little else is known about the man or his gift.
Horn, who now lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., recently inherited the bottle from her parents, and last year embarked on her own search for the missing man she knew only by a scrawled signature. Worner’s identity has been a mystery as puzzling as how he managed to stuff everything inside the narrow-necked bottle.
“It’s like a quest,” Horn says. “I’m not going to give up until I find him.”
Horn, who was born on Chicago’s North Side, has long treasured the bottle.
“It’s a connection to my past,” she says. “It’s a connection to Chicago. I think of the ’20s and ’30s and stories about people going after work and sitting in the bars.”
In hopes of learning something about the bottle’s origins, Horn took the bottle to the “Antiques Roadshow” when the PBS television series visited Los Angeles in August. There she was told by an appraiser that wallpaper used in the bottle dated it to the 1920s. Horn got on the Internet and soon found that her one-of-a-kind bottle wasn’t the only one of its kind.
It turns out the bottle is a form of folk art, a cousin to the more well-known ship in a bottle. Bottles like Horn’s are most commonly known as “whimsy bottles” and sometimes, for obvious reasons, “puzzle bottles.”
Hundreds of bottles created by a variety of hands are circulating through the collecting world, and they range in complexity from extremely primitive and childlike to highly intricate and exquisitely detailed. They get their name from the folk art term “whimsy,” which describes any sort of a carved wooden piece that has no real purpose other than to entertain. The whimsy bottle assemblages are typically carved from wood and sometimes painted and complemented with pieces of fabric or assorted found objects.
Bottles fall into half a dozen thematic categories. Some have single objects inside, such as carved chairs or other pieces of furniture, beautifully carved cedar fans with Scandinavian-style detailing and wooden “niddy-noddies” used for yarn winding. Others contain elaborate scenes, such as a huge three-tiered coal-mining tableau or a passenger-filled trolley on tracks. About half express religious themes. Jesus on the cross is a popular one, and many depict the tools of his carpentry profession–such as saws, rulers and hammers. Other bottles offer memorials or Valentines to loved ones, patriotic expressions from a war, and affiliations with Masonic ritual.
While the authorship of most of the bottles has been lost to time, a few bottle artists signed their pieces, and others have such unique styles that collectors and dealers have been able to identify their works.
Eventually Horn learned that her bottle was done by a star of the whimsy world. Carl Worner (or Charles or Carl Warner, as he sometimes spelled his name) has been identified as the maker of more than a dozen bottles from about the turn of the century to 1922. He obviously thought highly of his abilities: One bottle owned by a collector in Cleveland is signed “Chas. Warner, the master whittler/New York San Francisco Honolulu 1901.” Most of his works are known as “bar bottles” or “find the missing man” bottles because he specialized in scenes of taverns and occasionally other commercial sites such as bakeries, tobacco shops and butcher shops, and many of them had patrons missing from the picture.
The bottle tradition may have floated over the ocean, so to speak, from European immigrants who brought their craft with them. There are bottles from France dating to the 18th Century, but the earliest bottles show up in the United States in the 1880s and continue through the 1940s. Many of the bottles have been found in coal-mining regions of Ohio and Pennsylvania, so some collectors believe they may have been the work of miners.
Other bottles have been traced to veterans’ retirement homes and hospitals, and one series of bottles, all of which contain carved wooden chairs, come from an Independent Order of Odd Fellows home near Kansas City, Mo. The unusual art form may have been taught in craft classes or possibly detailed in craft books.
What’s apparent is that the bottles must have been done by people who had a lot of free time on their hands.
One collector who has tried to put some of the pieces together is Susan Jones. She has been collecting bottles since 1990 and now lives in Cary, N.C. Jones was introduced to the bottles by her brother, Tom Deupree, a longtime folk-art dealer in Connecticut, and she has specialized in religious-oriented whimsies.
“I think once I bought my first one I knew I was hooked,” she says. As Jones became more intrigued, she set up her own Web site in 1997 to document whimsy bottles (or “Folk Art in Bottles,” as her site calls them) that she and others own, including photographs and descriptions. Without any definitive book on the subject, her Web site serves as the most comprehensive look at whimsies.
Jones says she continues to hope that someone will step forward who remembers his or her father or grandfather making these kinds of bottles. She’d like to try to get inside the head of their creators. “I want to find out about the people who made them, and why they made them,” she says. “Who would stuff this stuff inside a bottle?”
The whimsy collecting world is a small universe. Dealers count about half a dozen serious collectors who have assembled more than 50 or so bottles.
They’re extremely scarce, and even well-connected, eagle-eyed dealers find half a dozen each year. Chicagoan Mike Williams has been collecting bottles for a decade, and he says he’s yet to find a whimsy in the city. He now has one of the largest collections in the country, with about 75 bottles arranged on shelves in the living room of his Arts and Crafts-style home in West Rogers Park. He saw his first one at the Sandwich Antiques Market, and paid about $70 for it.
“It just really captured my imagination,” he says. “I had no idea these things even existed.”
Prices for simple bottles, containing a chair or a yarn-winder, start around $150, and highly elaborate large bottles have fetched thousands of dollars. Condition and workmanship boosts the price, and the more “stuff” that’s crammed into a bottle the higher the interest level of collectors.
For them, the obvious appeal is that, while there are some general categories, no two bottles will ever be exactly alike.
Jones and others are determined to illuminate some of the details of Worner’s life because he left something of a trail. So far they’ve come up with only a sketchy time line and a lot of speculation. His first known bottle was a saloon bottle dated 1901 near Baltimore. He later shows up outside St. Louis and then Chicago, where he did the bottle for Horn’s grandparents and another for the owners of the Neubauer saloon. His address in an area of SRO hotels and warehouses on the Near West Side suggests he may have been a transient. After about 1922, no one seems to know what became of the man.
But Worner’s bottles even have shown up in a couple of museums. A saloon bottle from 1914 is part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, and another–a bottle that was supposedly given to bar owners in Granite City, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis–is held in Springfield in the Illinois State Museum.
According to the donors, who owned the H.C. Meyer Saloon, Worner was a hobo or “knight of the road” who showed up at the bar around 1912 and requested an empty bottle and a cigar box. He quickly went to work on creating a bar bottle and offered it in exchange for a few drinks.
Like tramp art, whimsies seem to inspire myths when facts are absent.
Were they done by itinerants with little training or skilled craftsman working in studios?
Jones wonders if there were teachers going around to veterans homes teaching this craft. “There are certain traditions and patterns that are repeated over and over again,” she says. “Yard-winders and chairs and photograph bottles that can’t possibly be made by the same person . . .Somebody is passing this craft around, and old men’s homes make some sense.”
What’s clear is that the bottles offered a highly personal expression, although it’s not always easy to know what they were trying to communicate.
Bonnie Grossman, the owner of The Ames Gallery in Berkeley, Calif., has been trading whimsies for about 25 years, and did a show in 1996 titled “Whimsies and Whatnots: An Exhibition of Minor Mysteries.” “I think it’s interesting that people in confinement have created something that’s in confinement,” she says.
Whether they were done as a kind of art therapy or an antidote for the loneliness left from giving up the drink, part of their appeal seems to be dissecting the bottles for clues about the people who made them. They carry messages in a bottle from another time.
To learn more about whimsy bottles visit the following Web sites: sdjones.net/index.html, where Susan Jones has a catalog of her collection, as well as photographs of other pieces and links to related topics; and the National Museum of American Art’s site, nmaa-ryder.si.edu (click on “Collections & Exhibitions” and search for artist “Carl Warner”).
HOW DOES IT GET IN THERE?
Despite their infinite variety, whimsy bottles all raise the head-scratching question of how elaborate handmade constructions were installed inside a bottle with a neck no wider than a finger or two.
Although the bottles seem to have a Houdini-style magic to them, the trick is probably something far simpler. They seem so mysterious in the late 20th Century because few people today have the time or inclination to labor for the many days it must have taken to complete these bottles. In Germany, the bottles are fittingly known as geduldflaschen (geh DULT flah shen) or “patience bottles.”
“There wasn’t TV and radio at night, so depending upon whether you were on the East Coast or on a ship in the middle of nowhere, 6 or 7 (o’clock) rolls around and you’ve got three hours before you’re going to go to bed,” says Chicago dealer Aron Packer. “I’m still dumbfounded. It’s like looking at a magic trick, and until someone shows you how they did it, you can’t figure it out.”
Most experienced dealers and collectors, who have spent considerable time puzzling over how their bottles were made, believe they were assembled piecemeal inside the bottle. (No cheating by breaking apart bottles and regluing them.) Nearly everyone who has handled these bottles says they’d never have the patience themselves to make a whimsy of their own. Even trying to make some repairs has proven a trying task.
But after years of studying bottles, Indiana art dealer Rod Lich says he’s pretty confident he knows how the bottles were made. He’s never found a broken string or wire inside a bottle that might have suggested how pieces were manipulated into place. He suggests that a bottle’s contents were likely constructed and then assembled outside the bottle as a dry run to see that everything fit together. Then the pieces were dropped one by one into the bottle, and slowly, carefully assembled using long tweezers-like tools used by watch- or clockmakers, and glued together.
“It’s really just the intricate craft of making a toy or making a clock work but applied to a folk art carving,” Lich says.
But Lich has remained stumped by how the stoppers were installed. Many bottles have beautifully carved stoppers with long stems that drop into the bottle. And where the stem enters the bottles, there’s often a cross piece that prevents anyone from entering the bottle again.
“That’s the puzzle of the puzzle bottle,” he says.
