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About the Artist
Armand LaMontagne ranks as one of America's eminent artist/sculptors. His subjects have included President Gerald Ford, General George Patton, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Carl
Yastrzemski, Larry Bird and Bobby Orr. The statues and paintings of Ruth and Williams are on exhibit the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown;
Yastrzemski, Bird and Orr are exhibited in the New England Sports Museum in Boston.
Quote - "obsessive attention to detail is typical of LaMontagne's work. For his much-acclaimed statue of Larry Bird in the New England Sports Museum, for example, he not only carved each individual strand of hair on Bird's head, but gave him an exact replica of an NBA basketball to hold. That meant carefully gouging out 30,000 dimples on the ball's
surface" - BILL VAN SICLEN Providence Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer
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Interesting
Stories About the Artist |
| Fabulous fake The Great Brewster Chair of Armand LaMontagne surfaces again
BYLINE: BILL VAN SICLEN Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer
DATE: 11-16-1997
PUBLICATION: Providence Journal Company
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Sculptor casts Ted Williams in new light
BYLINE: Bill Parrillo
DATE: 02-14-1999
PUBLICATION: Providence Journal Company
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Last month, when Delaware's Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum opened a new exhibit called Deceit, Deception and Discovery, it had two things in mind.
One was to show off some of the biggest bloopers in the history of American museum collecting, including fake pieces of Paul Revere silver and forged documents attributed to George Washington.
The other was to bring visitors up to date on how museums are fighting back, using high-tech testing methods such as x-ray machines and chemical analysis to weed out fakes and expose would-be forgers.
"People love fakes," says Linda Eaton, the Winterthur textile conservator who organized the exhibit. "They love to see the experts get fooled. But we also want them to know that it doesn't happen very often, and that our ability to identify fakes is getting better all the time."
But the exhibit, which continues through January 1999, also serves another purpose: It marks the 20th anniversary of the Great Brewster Chair Hoax, one of the most spectacular antiques hoaxes in history.
And it all started here in Rhode Island.
"What can I say?" says the man who masterminded the hoax, North Scituate sculptor and woodcarver Armand LaMontagne. "I was just a kid, and kids are liable to do some pretty crazy things."
The "crazy thing" that LaMontagne, now 59, did was fake a Great Brewster - a piece of early American furniture so rare that only two examples are known to exist. One is on display at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Mass. The other belongs to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But rarity is only part of the chair's attraction. The original Great Brewster, a massive hunk of American ash supported by sturdy rows of handturned spindles, belonged to William Brewster, Ruling Elder of the Pilgrim church and one of the first leaders of the Plymouth Colony.
According to legend, the chair was made for Brewster by John Alden - the same John Alden who was later immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.
That chair - the one made by John Alden for William Brewster some time between the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and Brewster's death in 1644 - is the one in Plymouth. The other chair - the one owned by the Metropolitan Museum - is a later copy, probably made for another Pilgrim bigwig in imitation of Brewster's original.
Both are considered priceless pieces of American history - as important in their own way as Lincoln's top hat and George Washington's battle sword.
Which is why LaMontagne decided to make another one.
"I figured I might as well start at the top," he says, with a characteristic mix of pride and humor. "Faking a 300-year-old piece of furniture isn't easy. The way I saw it, if I was going to spend all that time faking a chair, it might as well be a Great Brewster."
Since then, both the chair and its maker have become famous.
In addition to the notoriety he gained when he disclosed the hoax in the fall of 1977, LaMontagne has earned a reputation for his lifesized carvings of sports stars such as Larry Bird, Bobby Orr and Ted Williams.
The chair he made, meanwhile, is still owned by the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. It was the Ford Museum that purchased LaMontagne's Great Brewster in 1975, not realizing it was a modern copy.
Though it now spends most of its time in storage (museums are no happier about having their lapses in judgment exposed than politicans), the chair is well known in the antiques and museum fields.
"When we decided to do the show on fakes, it was one of the top items on our list," says Eaton. "It's a legend."
Myth and misinformation
Like most legends, the story of LaMontagne's Great Brewster Chair has acquired a rich patina of myth and misinformation over the years.
"People say all kinds of crazy things," LaMontagne says between sips of coffee in his comfortably rough-hewn studio off Route 101 in North Scituate. "There was a television program on just the other night. They said I threw the chair in Narragansett Bay to age it. That's nutty."
(But not that nutty. As it turns out, LaMontagne did dunk the Brewster Chair in salt water, though it was off the Maine coast and not in Narragansett Bay. And he wasn't trying to age the chair. Instead, he was trying to get rid of the smell of woodsmoke - a smell the chair had picked up while curing in a special Lamontagne-designed "smoke chamber.")
And like many figures of legend, the Pawtucket-born LaMontagne is reluctant to chat about his exploits - at least initially.
"That was a long time ago," he says brusquely.
But after a few more sips of coffee, and a few more jabs at the big fieldstone fireplace that heats his studio during the winter months, LaMontagne is ready to talk.
The road to the Great Brewster Chair Hoax began, he recalls, with an otherwise innocent visit to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.
"The Wadsworth has one of the best collections of early American furniture in the country," he says. "Under normal circumstances, we probably wouldn't have gone. But it was a cold, rainy day and we didn't have anything better to do. So I said to Ray McKeon, a friend of mine who was also interested in Colonial-era furniture, 'Let's take a look.' "
What they found didn't impress them.
"Some of the pieces were in pretty bad shape," he says. "They had boards tacked to the bottom of the seats - stuff that no self-respecting furniture restorer would do."
To get a better look, the two friends got down on the floor and began examining the Wadsworth's storied furniture collection from below.
"They had these signs that said 'Don't touch the furniture,' LaMontagne says with a grin. "But they didn't say we couldn't take a close look at them."
It was at this moment that fate, in the form of a pompous museum official, stumbled in.
"He was leading some kind of museum tour," LaMontage says. "And he turns the corner and here are these two guys in work boots and overalls stretched out on the floor of his museum and criticizing his furniture collection.
"Well, he took one look at us and that was it. He came over and demanded to know who we were and what we were doing. I don't remember all of it anymore, but he really went out of his way to put us in our place. As far as he was concerned, we were just a couple of country bumpkins."
By the time he returned home that night, LaMontagne had already decided to teach the official - and, by extention, all know-it-alls - a lesson. Or as Elder Brewster himself might have put it: Pride goeth before a fall, and great pride goeth before a Great Brewster.
LaMontagne's revenge
Over the next few months, LaMontagne carefully planned and carried out his revenge.
He decided, for example, to make his Great Brewster out of green wood. This meant that as the chair dried it would warp and shrink, thereby simulating the effects of three centuries of age and wear.
He also decided to use American oak for the chair's four main posts, even though the two real Great Brewsters were made entirely of ash.
"One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they try to fake something is to make an exact copy," LaMontagne explains. "That makes it easy to spot. What you have to do is give them something that's almost the same - something that allows for little differences in style, age and technique. In this case, the idea was to convince the experts that there were really three different Great Brewsters made by three different people."
LaMontagne also had to invent a history for the chair - one that would explain what had happened to it over the past 300 years.
"That was the fun part," he confides. "We did things like paint the chair red, because somebody in the early 1800s wanted a little more color in the house. We removed two of the spindles on the lower part of the chair, because somebody liked to lean back and put his feet up."
LaMontagne even went so far as to swab the joints of the chair with a homemade blend of glue, hair and dirt. The result: A do-it-yourself version of three centuries' worth of accumulated dust.
(This obsessive attention to detail is typical of LaMontagne's work. For his much-acclaimed statue of Larry Bird in the New England Sports Museum, for example, he not only carved each individual strand of hair on Bird's head, but gave him an exact replica of an NBA basketball to hold. That meant carefully gouging out 30,000 dimples on the ball's surface.)
Yet even after LaMontagne finished the chair, he still faced a major problem: How to launch such a seemingly important piece of furniture onto the antiques market without arousing suspicion?
Here again he had a plan: He would let one of the most primitive of human emotions - greed - short-circuit the market's normal system of checks and balances.
"I knew a guy up in Maine who did some antiques dealing from time to time," LaMontagne recalls. "I left it with him and told him not to sell it right away. People in the antiques world had to get a look at it, but they had to think that this guy didn't know what it was."
The plan worked like a charm.
"Every now and then, somebody would come in and recognize the chair - but they wouldn't say anything. They'd wait until my friend had left the room, which he did on purpose. Then they'd look it all over. When he got back, they'd say something like, 'If you ever decide to sell that beat-up old chair, give me a call.' They didn't want to quote him a price because he might get suspicious."
A few months after it first surfaced in Maine, LaMontagne's chair was sold. The price? A mere $500.
"Some guy probably thought he'd gotten the bargain of his life," LaMontagne laughs.
Over the next few years, the chair passed through the hands of several prominent antiques dealers, each one believing they had found another Great Brewster - and each one adding a few dollars more to the price.
By the time the Henry Ford Museum bought the chair in 1975, the price had jumped to $9,000.
Exposing the hoax
All that remained now was for LaMontagne to expose the hoax. Ironically, that turned out to be the hardest thing of all.
"I should have taken some pictures," LaMontagne says in retrospect. "It would have been a lot harder for them to dismiss the evidence."
As it was, the evidence that the Ford Museum's Great Brewster Chair was a fake was pretty hard to dismiss. Exhibits A and B, for example, were the two spindles that LaMontagne had removed to make it look like a previous owner had wanted to put his feet up.
There were also the spindle holes in the chair itself, which LaMontagne had made with a modern drill bit. All the experts at the Ford Museum had to do was remove one of the spindles and see for themselves.
But the Ford Museum wasn't about to disassemble its new chair. And it certainly wasn't going to let some crackpot woodcarver from Rhode Island compare his spindles with theirs.
"I can understand their position," says Winterthur's Eaton. "They had just bought this chair that all the experts said was genuine. Then along comes this guy that nobody had ever heard of saying that he made it.
"Plus, they didn't want to compound the problem by taking apart the chair just because some crank said it was a fake. If they did and it turned out to be real, then they'd really have a problem."
Another reason for the museum's reluctance to take LaMontagne seriously, says Eaton, was that his story simply didn't make sense.
"Most fakes are done for money," she says. "The idea that someone would go through all the trouble of faking a Great Brewster Chair just to prove a point was, to put it mildly, hard to accept."
To prove his case, LaMontagne went public - first with a story in the Journal-Bulletin, then with follow-up article in the Ford Museum's hometown newspaper, The Detroit Free Press.
The hoax was revealed.
Mixed feelings
Twenty years later, LaMontagne has mixed feelings about the hoax.
On the one hand, it proved that even a self-taught woodcarver from the backwoods of Rhode Island - "a caveman," as he likes to refer to himself - could fool the world's top antiques experts. On the other hand, it wound up creating a lot of bad feelings and tarnishing a lot of reputations.
"At the time, I really didn't think much about the consequences," says LaMontagne. "My gripe was with the guy at the Wadsworth. Unfortunately, the Ford Museum wound up with the chair."
The hoax has also left a lasting mark on LaMontagne's career. A well-built man with a gruff manner wrapped around a warmly engaging personality, he clearly relishes the attention the hoax has brought him over the years. Yet like most artists, he's more concerned with the present than the past.
"All that chair stuff is ancient history," he complains. Then, pointing to a lifesized carving of Roger Williams he's making for Roger Williams University, he adds: "This is what I'm doing now. Why can't we talk about that?"
As for the Winterthur exhibit, LaMontagne says he was never contacted by the museum.
"This is the first I've heard it," he says, sounding slightly miffed. "I guess I'm still paying for my crime."
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Armand LaMontagne isn't worried this time. No sir. Not one bit.
He knows that when Ted Williams pulls the canvas down from LaMontagne's latest work - a statue of Williams in fishing gear - that Teddy Ballgame is going to like it.
"Ted played baseball for money," LaMontagne, a world-renowned sculptor from Scituate, was saying recently, "but he fished for nothing. And frankly, I'm not sure which he liked more."
The unveiling will be held tomorrow in conjunction with the induction of baseball notables in Williams's Hitters Hall of Fame at the Ted Williams museum in Hernando, Fla., near Tampa.
Scheduled for induction this year are Carl Yastrzemski, Yogi Berra, Al Kaline, Willie Stargell and Sadaharu Oh, the great Japanese home-run hitter. Two pitchers, Steve Carlton and Elroy Face, also will be honored.
But while the theme is baseball, the statue of Williams holding a fishing pole in one hand and an Atlantic salmon in the other, will be as big a hit.
"Ted loved fishing for Atlantic salmon on the Miramichi River (in New Brunswick)," said LaMontagne. "He didn't fish for just any kind of salmon. It had to be the Atlantic salmon. He always felt they were one of the best gamefish in the world."
The statue is bronze and measures seven feet tall from its base to the top of Williams's head. It weighs 750 pounds and was transported by truck to the museum in Florida where it has been on public display the last few days.
"But Ted hasn't seen it because he has been in San Diego for some festivities," said Buzz Heyman, the museum's director. "He won't see it until the unveiling."
The wood replica, from which the bronze was cast, remains in LaMontagne's studio in Scituate. It will be on display in the New England Sports Museum which is scheduled to be opened at a site in Providence later in the year.
Williams, 80, doesn't fish much anymore, having been slowed by a couple of strokes. But he attacked the sport with the same zeal and dedication that he had for hitting a baseball. He often said that one of his goals in life was to be able to walk down any street in America and have people say "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived." The same was true about his fishing.
He was - and is - an expert at tying flies and making his own lures. In the fall, he could be found on the Miramichi the day after the season ended. He spent his winters fishing the Florida keys. And when he fished, he was all business. At the end of every day, he would record his catch in a huge ledger, noting the time of day of the catch, the weather and the temperature of the water.
"It was just his personality," said LaMontagne. "Whatever Ted does, he does the same way - with 100 percent focus. Even when he's just talking, you can feel the energy coming out of him."
LaMontagne first became involved with Williams at the request of Jean Yawkey, widow of Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. It was the mid-1980s and LaMontagne had just finished carving out a life-sized wood statue of Babe Ruth for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The staute was dedicated in 1984 and LaMontagne was back at the Hall the following year to attend the induction of Red Sox broadcaster, Curt Gowdy. He ran into Mrs. Yawkey, who was on the Hall of Fame's board of directors.
"She asked me why there was only one statue in the entire Hall, the one of Babe Ruth," LaMontagne remembers. "And I said something really stupid like 'If you were to boil baseball down to one guy, it would be Babe Ruth.' "
LaMontagne tried to grab the words as they spilled out of his mouth and take them back, but it was too late. Clearly, Mrs. Yawkey did not agree with him.
"She was a gracious lady but she looked me right in the eye and she said 'You know, I knew Babe Ruth. I admired the ball player but I did not like the man' " said LaMontagne. "She was referring to his womanizing, of course."
Jean Yawkey also felt that an injustice had been done. There should be another statue in the Hall. A statue of Red Sox star Ted Williams. Her Teddy.
"He was like a son to her," said LaMontagne. "She was the only one who could get Ted to do anything. No way was he going to sit still for an artist but Mrs. Yawkey told him to do it, so he did it."
Williams visited the studio in the woods of Scituate about five times during five months that it took to complete the project. First, LaMontagne photographed and measured Williams from every angle. At the time, Williams was in his 60s and weighed close to 270 pounds, a far cry from his 195 pounds of his playing days.
"He got his uniform from the Hall and he could only button the top three buttons of the shirt," said LaMontagne. "And forget the trousers. But we took hundreds of photos in my studio of him swinging the bat, full force. He was sore the next day."
With the photos, LaMontagne began carving out Williams's figure from a seven-foot chunk of laminated basswood.
"Every time Ted came up to see how things were going, before leaving he'd always say 'Now remember 'Get me thin! . . . Get me thin!' " said LaMontagne. "He was angry that he had allowed himself to get so heavy. He said even 200 pounds was too much. When he played, he had to be at 195. Those extra five pounds cost him a lot in bat speed."
Williams, of course, was a stickler for detail. And so was LaMontagne, which left Williams impressed. For example, the bat was just the right distance from his shoulder, and his center of gravity was perfect. And LaMontagne noticed from the hundreds of photos that Williams actually choked up on the handle of the bat.
"That's right, I did," Williams told him. "The sluggers of our day didn't choke up but I did."
LaMontagne asked him how much.
"Three-quarters of an inch," Williams responded. "No more. No less."
LaMontagne also measured him, exactly. During his career, Williams maintained that he was 6-foot-4.
"He wasn't," said LaMontagne. "He's actually almost 6-5. Tall guys always try to make themselves shorter, especially if they're thin. When Ted was in high school in San Diego, he weighed 139 pounds. He was like a stick and he always complained that they never picked him first for the local legion team. They always picked these other two guys - and he still remembers their names - because 'they looked like ballplayers and I didn't.' But he told himself 'Well, okay. They'll find out soon enough who can hit.' "
They don't make statues of guys who can't.
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