Nantucket Baskets
More Nantucket Baskets sold than anyone, worldwide
Rafael Osona Auctions keeps breaking our own record for prices realized for the sale of Nantucket Baskets, including a nest of three Isaac Hamblin ovals, two A.D. Williams miniature covered baskets, a 19th c. feather basket, and an unsigned 19th c. heart embellished open basket that topped the charts, with a hammer price of $115,000. Our galleries have offered more exceptional examples of this unique art form than anyone, worldwide.
Rafael is founding President of the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum where fine examples may be found in their annual exhibits.
Early Baskets – the Lightship Period
Unique to Nantucket in both style and craftsmanship, Nantucket baskets were first made by crewmen aboard the Nantucket lightships. Utilitarian in purpose, early baskets were typically open, with fixed or swing handles. When the Commonwealth banned the making of baskets aboard ship as “moonlighting,” weavers simply moved their basket making from ship to shore, where they began weaving for commercial trade – with prices from 25 to 75 cents each. They’ve passed their craft down to the present day.
Lightship Basket or Friendship Basket
In the late 1940s José Formoso Reyes designed the first covered Friendship Basket. Intended for use as a purse, its hinged cover was woven around a plaque. As a result, the Nantucket Friendship Basket was born, and the demand to own one became and still remains profound.
Since then, today’s men and women who craft Nantucket Baskets have elevated the traditional forms to competitively sophisticated levels. The simple adornments of Friendship Baskets made by Reyes and his peers – topped off with ivory whales, seagulls and maps of Nantucket – have made way for intricacies of style, materials, purpose and design the early weavers would never have imagined, and a once simple craft has been elevated to high art.
Nantucket Basket Makers – Lightship Era
1856 – early 20th c.
Captain Davis Hall, Captain Andrew Sandsbury, Roland Folger, Thomas W. Barralay, William D. Appleton, George W. Ray, Charles F. Ray, Frederick Ray, Joseph Fisher, Charles Sylvia, and Isaac Hamblin.
Post Lightship Era 1900-1940
Mitchy Ray, Fredrick Chadwick, A.D. Williams, William D. Appleton, Ferdinand Sylvaro.
1940-1980
José Formoso Reyes, Sherwin Boyer, Stanley Roop, Stephen Gibbs, John Kittila, John Elder
1980-present
Paul Whitten, Bill and Judy Sayle, Trish and Dick Anderson, Paul Willer, Michael Kane, Nap Plank, Alan Reed, Karol Lindquist, Susan and Karl Ottison, Kathleen Myers, Tim Parsons, Peter Finch, Donna & Dick Cifranic, Terry Sylvia and more
Rafael Osona ~ your reliable source for Nantucket Baskets
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