Tramp Art: Showpieces from the Scrap Heap
From yesterday’s discards they are today’s vagabond glories.
Odds are you have not heard of tramp art.
You may fall hard for its character and intriguing history, according to one article.
Part of the allure of this distinctive decorative art is its heritage, says Hanne Klein.
The original craftsmen often rode railway cards to create and sell their pieces, according to records.
The tramp art heyday started around the 1860s, probably in Germany, and lasted to roughly the early 1900s, although there are also Depression-era pieces in some collections, says research.
Pieces range from small frames to ornaments to major furniture, anything that these artists could build from scrap lumber and then notch and layer into intricate, often magical designs, says photographer Natalie Caudill.
Dallas, TX resident Mary Cates, interior designer, shop owner, and avid tramp art collector, says she knows what it can do for a room.
In her own home she has pieces on walls and tables throughout starting with a wall of picture frames in the entry hall, moving to a box topped with a mirror on a living-room desk, and extending to an intricately carved mirror that cover a bathroom medicine cabinet.
The most common items were the simplest to make: picture frames, doll furniture, and boxes used for everything from jewelry to clocks, said Jimmy Allen, a “picker.”
But some people went beyond that to “spectacular forms,” according to him.
Today’s prices range from around $100 into the thousands, according to Su Ellen Compton, an antiques dealer and interior designer.
As Cates, who has been collecting for at least 12 years, comments, you know that “these things were made for someone.”
Half the fun of adding tramp art to your life is the thrill of the hunt, said Charles Wyly, a Dallas philanthropist.
Bill Carmichael, who wrote a book on tramp art, said the pieces have a tradition of being despised by antique dealers.
“Loosely speaking tramp art is a colloquialism employed by many antique collectors to describe the odd-looking ‘dust catchers’ or ‘gaudy junk’ which professional vagabonds, hobos, gentlemen of leisure, prisoners, and just plain down-and-out bums carved out of bits and pieces of spare wood and gave to housewives in exchange for food and lodging,” he said.
