Inside Decoys from Shelburne Museum

Black Duck 1952-192.57

This hollow decoy has a two part body with a flat bottom board, measuring about 2 cm in thickness. Two lead weights are attached to the underside. The front weight is tear drop-shaped and the rear one is rounder, but oval in shape. Each is attached with two screws. The head is carved from a single piece of wood and is held with nails to the body. The eyes are glass. No maker's mark is evident.

Both the bottom board and the head are attached to the body with cut nails. These are spaced more closely than the nails in the decoys made by Albert Laing, most likely because the nails in the Holmes-made bodies would be underwater and a tighter seal would be required. Similar to the decoys made by Laing, the adhesive is x-ray opaque, suggesting that a heavy metal such as lead white has been added and a metal collar supports the glass. By adjusting the contrast in the posterior-anterior view, we get a better view of the glass headed eyes and the fasteners within the neck. The shanks on the eyes are threaded, much like the ones on the Black Duck by Albert Laing, 1952-192.46.

The lateral view shows that the hollow inside the body is quite even and squared. This is even more evident in the coronal view computed tomography slices. CT also reveals that the body is made of a softwood, most likely white pine, and that the grain of the wood is continuous from the upper part of the body to the baseboard. This suggests that Holmes carved the body as one piece, sliced off the bottom board, hollowed the top half, and then glued and nailed the bottom board back into place. Chitwood suggests that Holmes used this technique early in his career when he was imitating decoys made by Albert Laing (Chitwood 1987, 34).

Looking at the CT slices in 2D orthogonal multiplanar reformatting (MPR) format, one can glean some information about the tools used by Holmes to hollow out the upper section of the body. In the sagittal and coronal views, the tool used to cut away wood leaves behind a sharp point, while in the axial view, the tool clears a 1 inch diameter circle, with one side of the outer edge digging in deeper than the rest of the circumference. This suggests use of a center bit to bore the hollow.   

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