Designed to be mounted atop a barn, this impressive weathervane was carved from a single piece of pine and finished on both sides. Half-round balls pinned with nails serve as eyes. It was originally painted dark green, touches of which can be seen where its later coat of red has worn. Exhibited widely before the Addison purchased it from Edith Gregor Halpert’s The Downtown Gallery in 1947, it was also illustrated in the Index of Design, an influential collection of watercolor images of folk art created by the Works Progress Administration from 1935–1942.

It is fitting to acknowledge Halpert’s own contributions to the collection of and appreciation for folk art. In 1929, three years after opening The Downtown Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village to focus on early modernist art, Halpert launched the American Folk Art Gallery in the same building. Her own early interestin folk art was fostered by her association with collector and gallerist Hamilton Easter Field, who filled his houses in New York and Ogunquit with folk art, and encouraged collecting by younger artists, among them, Robert Laurent, whose sculpture is in the following gallery. She also was well acquainted with the expansive collection of Elie and Violet Nadelman, which she saw both in their house and their museum and which she pronounced as “fantastic.”