page_title: Adele Earnest
section_title: Art collection
hierarchical_section_title: Adele Earnest / Art collection
caption_attribution_description: Weathervane of Fame, attributed to Washburne &amp; Co., New York, circa 1890. Exhibited in the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, New York, USA. There were no restrictions on photography in the museum, and this item is old enough so that copyright (if any) has expired.
context_page_description: Adele Earnest was an American folk art collector and historian, noted as an authority on wildfowl decoys.
context_section_description: She worked for a time as Eva LaGalliene's stage manager before moving to Stony Point, New York, where with Cordelia Hamilton, she opened the Stony Point Folk Art Gallery in 1948. The gallery soon became known for its displays of folk sculpture, of which decoys were a particular highlight. Growing from this interest, Earnest in 1965 published The Art of the Decoy: American Bird Carving, among the first books to discuss decoys in a scholarly context. 
  Alongside Hamilton, Marian Willard, Burt Martinson, Albert Bullowa, and Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., she was a founding trustee of the American Folk Art Museum. Instrumental in supporting many of its early programs, she donated numerous works to the collection, including a pair of decoys by Lothrop T. Holmes; also among her gifts was a weathervane depicting the Archangel Gabriel which went on to become a symbol of the institution. 
  In 1984 she published a combination memoir-history of the field of folk art collecting, Folk Art in America: A Personal View. Earnest traced her interest in the art of decoys to a set of three carvings of dovetailed geese which she purchased in 1954; two of these she sold to Stewart Gregory, and one has since been dubbed the Earnest-Gregory dovetailed goose.
caption: Weathervane - American Folk Art Museum, NYC - IMG 5873
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot SD870 IS", "Image Orientation": "0", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image DateTime": "2010:04:09 10:46:27", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "214", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3598", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3327", "EXIF ExposureTime": "2/5", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2010:04:09 10:46:27", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2010:04:09 10:46:27", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "5", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "21/16", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "9107/1000", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2448", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3264", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "2448", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "3264", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3450", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "43520/3", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2448000/169", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "f1095e4ced78fef094ed54863d0c9091"}