Charles Ray Double Handle Basket with Lid and Signed on Bottom, Nantucket circa 1870
InformationRare and important double swing handle oval shaped Nantucket Lightship basket removable lid and Signed on Bottom "Charles Ray" and numbered and priced "120 $1.30", Nantucket circa 1870. The basket has oak ribs and rattan weavers.
The top removes and has a flat weave with a narrow oval mahogany wood plaque on the top. Both the top and bottom border of the top is thin mahogany strip nailed through the top, oak rib and bottom border. The base of the basket has a similar construction as the top although the width of the mahogany bad is wider and is nailed through the base through the rib and into a narrower band on the inside of the rim. (FA1250)
Condition: The basket is in excellent condition especially given its and and it has a deep warm patina. There are a few repairs to the wavers.
Note 1: Born on Nantucket, Charles B. Ray (1798-1884) began a career at sea as a young boy and eventually became a well-respected whaling master, commanding five whaling voyages to the Pacific between 1831 and 1851. He retired from the sea to a farm on Nantucket and began making baskets sometime in the 1850s or 1860s. He was prolific, making hundreds of baskets a year, yet his baskets were known for their neatness and beauty. He made many covered examples and claimed to have made 306 baskets in his eightieth year alone.
Ray and his wife, Clarissa Folger, had four children. When his grandson, Clinton “Mitchy” Ray, was seven years old and sick with diphtheria, Ray passed on his knowledge of basket making to the young boy in a shed on Starbuck Lane, where Mitchy later continued his family’s basket tradition until he, himself, died in 1956 at age 85. Charles B. Ray’s basket making career was the beginning of a long history of mentoring basket makers from whom a number of today’s contemporary makers descend.
Note 2: A very similar Charles rare double handle basket with a flat top is illustrated as item # 29 on page 44. This basket is slightly larger. The published example is unsigned as this is the only signed example of a Charles Ray basket. The are some examples that have his initials "CR" and have a number and a price in pencil.
Dimensions: Height to top of rim 5 1/4, Length 10 1/4, Width 7 1/2, Inches
