Portland Press Herald - July 9, 2001

Ducking Fame No More
He was a modest lighthouse keeper who sold his hand-carved decoys for a pittance. Now his birds are coveted and every self-respecting collector knows his name. It's Gus Wilson.
By Amy Sutherland

Gus Wilson typically sold his decoys for 75 cents a piece to Walker & Evans sporting goods store in Portland - that is if he didn't give them away to friends and neighbors. He carved the birds with Boy Scout knives, which he bought four at a time, during his long hours as keeper of Spring Point Light. He painted them with whatever he had on hand, sometimes even shiny automobile paint, which he then had to sand to take the gloss off.

Wilson died in 1950 in Gray, not long after the collecting market for decoys got started. Just a hair more than a half-century later, he is considered the state's premier decoy maker, and some of his birds bring five figures at auction.

His decoys are in The Shelburne Museum in Vermont, which has the largest collection in the country, as well as the Museum of Folk Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

That's how the story often goes for folk artists. Essentially unknown in their day, paid little if anything for their work, posthumously they become big names among collectors, dealers and curators. There are some exceptions, such as William Prior, an itinerant painter whose paintings were coveted in his day. But most are like Wilson, ordinary people with the urge to make something extraordinary.

At the MFA in Boston, two of Wilson's decoys are currently on display as part of the museum's "American Folk." It's the biggest exhibit of folk art the museum has ever presented, with more than 200 pots, paintings, quilts, wood carvings, chests and weather vanes. The majority of the work was made in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Wilson's two birds, a red-breasted merganser drake and hen, can be found resting on a rounded slice of mirror, the exhibit's duck pond. The hen bows its head, its narrow beak gracefully pointed at its breast. The colors of each decoy have been darkened by time. In the show, Wilson (1864-1950) is in the minority as an artist who lived well into the 20th century. His two birds in the show, though, date from 1910, which is considered his best period, and are done in what is referred to as the Monhegan style. That's a misnomer that stuck.

According to Frank Schmidt, a collector and co-owner of the Maine-based decoy auction house Guyette & Schmidt, Wilson never lived on Monhegan Island, but when his decoys were first being collected they were often unattributed. Even as late as 1985, the Museum of Folk Art printed a photo of a Wilson bird on the cover of a book on its decoy collection but listed the maker as unknown. Collectors assumed the best Maine decoys came from Monhegan Island, and so the term was applied to Wilson's sleek, beautiful birds from the turn-of-the-century, Schmidt says.

Wilson was born in Bass Harbor on Mt. Desert, where he fished for most of his working life. At the age of 50, he became assistant lighthouse keeper of Goose Rocks Station on Fox Island. From there he moved south to Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, then in 1917 he became the assistant keeper at Spring Point, succeeding his brother as keeper in 1931. He retired in 1934.

Wilson had a wide, square forehead and a thick moustache that covered his upper lip. He could read and write at a sixth-grade level. He married three times. He had peculiar habits, according to Fred Anderson, a friend of Wilson's who was interviewed by the Press Herald in 1976, such as driving his car seated in the middle of the front seat. He didn't use a vise, and his knees were covered with scars where he accidentally cut himself while carving. "He was an artist and he carved something of himself into everything," Anderson said in that article.

He made decoys throughout his life, producing an estimated 5,000 birds. His speciality was making decoys appear very lifelike, through the cock of their head or by carving mussels in their mouth as if they were eating. He carved the head separately, setting it into the decoy body so that it could rock back and forth. "Consequently, the natural movement of water would make the head bounce like a real water bird," says Jim Julia, an auctioneer for Guyette and Schmidt who also has his own auction house in Fairfield. "His creations were far better than what was necessary," Julia says. "They were functional things of beauty."

Decoy-making is unique to North America. The European settlers learned the practice from American Indians, who twisted rushes into birdlike shapes. Thousands of individuals and hundreds of factories produced decoys, which had to be durable and inexpensive because they were often lost. Decoys also had to mimic the bird in key ways to attract fowl flying far overhead. So the pose and strategically placed strokes of color were all that was necessary.

Still, some carvers, such as Wilson, went beyond what was necessary. Hunters early on recognized these better-made, more imaginative decoys, and often kept them for their fireplace mantels. These became the first decoy collections. In the 1940s, a few collectors began buying them as folk art. In the 1950s, a few scholarly books were written on decoys.

In the 1970s, a major collection came on the market and spurred the field. Schmidt says the market has never been stronger. A decoy by Captain Osgood, a 19th-century maker who lived in Salem, Mass., went for $1 million at the firm's spring auction in Illinois. Wilson's early birds have been collected since the 1940s, and they still bring the highest prices, $40,000- $50,000, Julia says. The later birds, which are simpler, are considered far less valuable. They can go for $1,000 or less, Julia says. Two later Wilsons will go on the block at Guyette & Schmidt's annual summer decoy auction at Ogunquit's Cliff House on July 26 and 27. When Schmidt first started collecting in the 1970s, Wilson decoys were easy to find. That has changed. What Wilson once delivered by the truckload has become rare and precious.