American Furniture, Folk & Decorative Arts

to their daughter Clara Bremer Borchers (1885-1977);

to her daughter Edna Clara Borchers Lutjemeyer (1917-1992);

thence by descent to the present owner.

One bottle features a galloping horse to one side, above which hangs a name banner for Charles Bramar. The other side shows a clipper ship at sea, along with the date 1883. The second bottle is identified to Maggie Bramar and dated 1883, with an elaborate bouquet of flowers held in an urn on one side and a pair of yellow birds perched around their nest of eggs on the other. The central designs of each bottle are offset by Clemens’s characteristic oscillating lines and colorful bands of geometric decoration.

According to family history, Charles and Margaret “Maggie” Heye Bremer (variably spelled Bramar or Braemoer in genealogical records) acquired this pair of sweetheart bottles in 1883, either on the occasion of their marriage in February or the birth of their first child, Charles, later that same year. The Bremer family lived on a farm in Otoe County, Nebraska, where both were active members of the Lutheran church.

Maggie’s father, Gerhard Heinrich “Henry” Heye (1836-1904) was a respected and wealthy Otoe County landowner, who served as County Commissioner for several terms during the 1870s. He married Maggie’s mother, Mary Dorothea Oelke Heye (1832-1908), in 1856 in Clayton County, Iowa, and by 1870, the couple had moved to Otoe County. Mary’s family immigrated from Hanover, Germany to Iowa in 1857, and her father and brothers soon established a prominent and prosperous farm, comprising 340 acres of land with a “tasteful and commodious dwelling, which is one of the handsomest in the Precinct, with good barns and outhouses, corn-cribs, sheds, etc., and everything appertaining to the modern rural estate.” [1]

Clayton County encompasses McGregor, Iowa, the hometown of Andrew Clemens. Though Mary and Henry had left Clayton County by the time Clemens’s work began to garner attention, her mother and several of her eleven siblings remained in the area, so it is likely that the Heyes returned to Iowa to visit or at least stayed in contact with family there as Clemens began to establish his practice.

Though the exact circumstances of the commission may never be known with certainty, the existence of another Heye family bottle now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum suggests the following theory: familiar with his work from their time in Clayton County, Henry and Mary Heye commissioned at least three sand bottles from Andrew Clemens in 1883, one as a keepsake for Mary and the other two as a gift for their newlywed daughter Maggie and her husband Charles [2]. The Mary bottle at the Smithsonian and the Maggie bottle offered here are nearly the same on the obverse—Clemens employed urns with identical flower bouquets and patriotic bicolor lettering for the recipients’ names. By contrast, the reverse of the Mary bottle features a spread-winged eagle with an American flag, one of Clemens’s more established motifs, while the nesting scene of the Maggie bottle was undoubtedly a special order. The domestic symbolism extended well wishes for the new young Bremer family, with possible reference to German folk art traditions marked by the use of birds, flowers, and colorful decoration.

By the 1880s, Andrew Clemens’s work had begun to garner significant publicity, including descriptions published in the North Iowa Times of other sand bottles depicting a horse and birds, providing iconographical context for the Bremer bottles. In 1881, an article detailed a “bottle of the Pictured Rock sand in an artistic style that commands the admiration of all who have examined it. . . It is the old, familiar farm scene. . . [with] fowls partaking of their evening meal, the ever present old hen with her brood of infant chicks. The scene is characterized in sand in a manner so life like that one would exclaim in admiration of its beauty.”[3] Later, in 1882, the same periodical reported that “Hon. James N. Carlile has a jar which contains a perfect picture of his horse ‘Eagle Bird’. . . and other designs which show the master skill of the workman.”[4] Though technically capable of rendering a more detailed and lifelike horse, as seen in the Eagle Bird example, here Clemens executed a simplified, stylized profile view of a solid black stallion in motion, likely derived from widely circulated imagery of champion trotter Black Hawk (1833-1856), sire of 1,722 foals, including storied harness racer Ethan Allen (1849-1876). Black Hawk was featured in several Currier and Ives prints, which served as models for a popular form of trotting horse weathervane. The general repute of Clemens would have made one of his “rock sand works” a fitting gift, particularly for former residents of Clayton County.

Rarer, however, were paired or “sweetheart” bottles, for which there is little known precedent. Two extant sets survive, although both postdate the Bremer bottles: one pair is identified to Ernest and Katherine Silzer Weltje of Dubuque, Iowa in 1884, while the second is identified to Henry and Helen Wimmler Reinken, of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who were engaged at the time of the bottles’ commission and married in 1889. The Bremer bottles were most certainly an extraordinary and treasured gift, executed masterfully and with painstaking attention to detail.

[1] Portrait and Biographical Album of Otoe and Cass Counties, Nebraska. Chicago, IL: Chapman Brothers, 1889.

[2] The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired The Mary Heye Bottle in 2021 as a gift from the estate of Mary Brashier, a granddaughter of Mary Heye (2021.69).

[3] North Iowa Times, March 9, 1881, in Roy Sucholeiki’s The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015.

[4] North Iowa Times, September 17, 1882, in Roy Sucholeiki’s The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015.