The Antique Decoy Collector

North American waterfowl decoys are now considered and called Folk art or hunting art.  Decoy collecting is a rather new sub-area under the general industry of antiquing.  An industry you say ?  Yes, I do.  Go down the interstate is Missouri for example and there are so many antique shops with large billboards that it will make your head spin.  Antiquing is BIG business these days.  In the general timeframe of collecting antiques, Decoy collecting is very new.  The first authoritative book was written the the mid 30's and collecting really did not gain many devotees until the 1970's. 

If we are to consider decoy collecting as collecting art, then we must consider the origin of decoys and weather decoys have become art or were originally conceived of as art.  As an example of the art of art, we can conclude that the premier oil painting artists of Europe were out intentionally to make art.  Putting oil paint to canvas is a far cry from making a wood approximation of a duck for luring the wary fowl so that it can become supper.  The decoy collecting and auction industry has become a multi-millions dollar affair that tends to value decoys that are considered "artistic".  Yet, why would a decoys carver make a decoy that was artistic just to simple lure wary waterfowl.  Do the birds admire art ?  Did they sit on a lily pad, sipping cappuccino, pondering their existence and place in the cosmos ?  Maybe the decoy carver had a love affair with the ducks.  They why did he carve "decoys" ?

Why are the highest values put on carving that are the least "decoy" like ?  Maybe we should change the whole artifice and conventions of "decoy" collecting and call it Artistic wood bird collecting.  After all the highest prices seem to go for decoys made to lure people, not ducks !

Contemporary decoy carvers of today make decoys for decoration.  Few hunters use these heavy wood blocks when super lightweight and cheap plastic decoys dominate the waterfowler's world.  Really then - these wood bird carving are not decoys, but in name only.  Collectors don't want waterfowl models that approximate the birds to lure them, but wood birds that look artistic and mimic the real attributes of the ducks.  So what is this outdated term "decoy" still used ? 

Maybe we need categories of wooded carved waterfowl so that real "decoys" can stand up and be counted !  I think some of the so called "great decoy carvers" were not really interested in luring waterfowl.  Or, can any old block of wood be used to lure ducks.  Certainly the ungainly and unlikely silly looking Mason decoys would fill this bill !  Boy, and they go for some high prices, don't they ! 

Even early on, some so called "decoy" carvers were not carving decoys to lure waterfowl, but to entice the "city slickers" that happened to have the disposable income to murder ducks as a fun pastime. This is well documented in the "Ward story" for example.  Wayward nimrods often from large cities would want to buy a decoy to bring back home to help support and show evidence of  their manly place in the food chain.  The same can be said of mounted big-game heads on the wall.   I would assume that today the same type of Joe collects so called "decoys", and by all accounts they still have the disposable income also !  Then also there is the "artistic crowd" that hyperventilates over the fine feathering and exotic paint patterns of the designer decorator decoy.

What is "up" then with the current fetish for the "pretty decoy" that is considered Folk art ?   A real decoy is often an oversized rough approximation of a real duck.  Were the early carvers who carved artistic bird really carving for "arts sake" or maybe they were actually poor attempts at the real thing, to carve a real working DECOY !  A artistically carved decoy in actuality probably would have attracted less waterfowl than a rough approximation of a duck that mimicked the real form and functional attributes of the real bird.  The Wards for example caught on early that a lot more money could be made from the Baltimorons ( this is a lower Easter-shore waterman's expression) then from hunter's that wanted shooting decoys.  So they carved decoys such as the famed "36" model that is a poor working decoy but looks nice on the shelf.

I find the word "decoy" fits in well with the geographical area that used real "decoys" to lure waterfowl.   That is the Upper-Chesapeake bay in the vicinity of the Susquehanna flats, Maryland.  This is where the real "Rambo" style of decoy was born.  These real waterfowl decoys did not put up a pretense of anything "artsy" but were the true Americana "John Wayne" decoys with an attitude.  Made to work from dawn to dusk, these decoys and the men who made them had little time for art.  Along these shores and further south the waterman of the Chesapeake turned the tide of the greatest invasion ever to strike the United States, the almost forgotten war of 1812.  "Oh say, can you see, by the dawns early light".

A  no nonsense decoy manufacturing town, called Havre-de Grace, that sits square on the Susquehanna flats, that at one time almost became the Nations capital, is in fact now considered the "Decoy Capital of the World"  But even here few real working decoys are made as the massive flocks no longer darken the skies and cover the waters. 

by Mike Robinson