The letter was in response to an earlier story describing the pyrography work being done in New York City by J. William Fosdick.

Fosdick, a muralist and craftsman, began etching into wood using a highly flammable liquid, naphtha, and a saturated sponge, employing bellows while working alongside a device looking much like today’s water heaters. The process was dangerous, emitted noxious fumes and fatigued the artist “working at the bellows.”

But, as they say, Thum had a better idea.

“I have used an electric cautery for years in my work and I have found it more convenient and manageable than the bellows can possibly be,” Thum writes. “It is far safer, is portable, does away with all need of hoods over the work and all that. It leaves the artist entirely untrammeled by his tools.”

Pyrographic work by Fosdick (1858-1937) was often published in design magazines and even collected by art museums. And, despite Thum’s apparent appreciation of his work, the Fosdick’s accolade as “the Father of Wood Etching” may be misplaced.

In an 1891 letter to art promoter and friend Charles Kurtz, found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Thum writes about her “fire writing” and her new invention.

“We have all seen “Poker Pictures” exhibited from time to time at expositions and county fairs along with watermelon seed landscapes, quilts made by aged ladies without glasses, portraits painted by boys of nine without instruction, and other works of art produced under disadvantageous circumstances of youth or age or paucity of material or tool.

“And so it has happened that burnt wood work has summered in popular estimation … But this can now be all changed by the intervention of electricity … This fire etching can be more certain and as individual as acid etching. The fine gradations of tint from the natural hue of the wood, through the scorched surface, to the brown or black charred line are enough in the hands of knowledge for very decorative results.”

It was somewhat after Thum’s letter that Fosdick began talking about his thermo-pyrography tool for the first time, asserts pyrographer Kathleen M. Garvey Menendez, curator of the E-Museum of Pyrography.

“It wasn’t until February 1892 that J. Wm. Fosdick was talking about his thermo-pyrography tool in an interview with the New York Times,” Menendez writes.

Today, pyrography is still being created and sold, as evidenced by the Menendez emuseum.

However, art collectors and those interested in pyrography can only speculate about a Patty Thum piece.

“There were undoubtedly works by her that must have gone somewhere during her lifetime or at least following her demise,” Menendez opines. “It occurs to me that they may well be signed by her as she signed her paintings, but it also quite possible that she only initialed them the way she did on the drawing in her 1894 letter to the editor. After all, she referred to the art form as fire drawing. It is possible that people have some of her works and don’t know they are by Patty Thum.”

Eric C. Rodenberg