Rare watercolor penmanship example booklet for George Schlotter, Johann Adam Eyer (1755-1837), Johann Adam Eyer Hamilton Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania, 1820

Watercolor and ink on paper, with paper binding

Inscribed (translated from German) on title page, ink: This / penmanship example book/ let belongs to / Georg Schlotter/writing student in the Ha / milton School, written / the 18th March /1820.

Sotheby Parke-Bernet, November 6-8, 1975, lot 994

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 208, fig. 479

Overall condition very good; some minor discoloration appropriate to age and use.
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Both Adam Eyer and his brother Johann Friedrich made tunebooks for their students, although Adam seems to have made far more. Friedrich's work comes from his school terms in Chester and Berks Counties, but to date none has been found from his last appointment at Selinsgrove, Snyder County, where he copublished a printed music book that had a long-lasting impact on Pennsylvania German musicology. Friedrich's tunebook for Daniel Zeller provides the tunes for 120 hymns. Adam also made such booklets for students in Bucks, Chester, Northampton, and Monroe Counties across a six-decade period. Although Esther Gross was a student at a Mennonite school, the seventy-four hymns in Adam's tunebook for her are mostly Lutheran chorales. The artistic relationship of the brothers' work is so obvious that it is often confused. Angels and birds were symbolic of singing to praise God.

Adam Eyer also made penmanship example booklets, two sheets of folded paper sewn in paper covers. The original order of this booklet for Georg Schlotter, which has been rebound, was the title page; what Eyer called the ''ABC blat [page]," with an acrostic text based on the alphabet and large and small letters and numerals; a page with an entire paragraph that is a hymn based on Revelation 3:20; and a fourth page of handwritten admonitions. As rebound, the booklet also contains sheets set for copying, accounts (either actual or, more likely, examples of how to keep them), and a page with an illustration of a man with a sword and horse. Clearly the Pennsylvania German schoolmaster wanted his students to have one foot secure in the world about them and the other ready to step heavenward in time. -F.S.W.