Elias Alexander Vogler’s Anatomical Studies on Ivory: Expanding the Miniature

By Esme Krohn

I felt a little bad about the hours I spend on TikTok when I saw the scrupulously detailed anatomical studies by Elias Alexander Vogler at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina [Figs. 1-4].¹ In addition to being a talented artist, Vogler was the mayor of Salem, North Carolina for two terms, an entrepreneur, an architect, and a community leader in the Moravian Church [Fig. 5]. If he were alive today, Vogler’s devotion to multiple activities and interests might be described as a “grindset.” Born to silversmith John Vogler [Fig. 6] and his wife Christina in 1825, Vogler was deeply embedded in Moravian culture. He grew up in the tightly-knit community of Salem and was educated at a Moravian school in Lititz, Pennsylvania. It was there that he learned the art of miniature painting. He shared his father’s finesse in the manual arts and attention to detail, showcased in a pair of silver teaspoons made by John and now in the Winterthur collection [Figs. 7 and 8].

I was drawn to these jewel-like paintings made by Elias Vogler because I am currently researching my master’s thesis about ivory memorandum books. People from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries used thin ivory tablets as erasable writing surfaces to instantaneously capture notes about their day or jot down reminders of future events. These prosthetic aids to human memory give us a unique glimpse into not only what people did in the past, but how they thought. They allow us to better understand the ways people structured and comprehended the world around them as they captured these thoughts in a tactile object.² Vogler reused pages from one of these ivory notebooks for his paintings. Like many thrifty artists in generations following him, Vogler used the materials available around him to develop his artistic practice. I have encountered many nineteenth-century ivory calendars almost identical to the one Vogler used in my research. They are a few inches high, printed with the days of the week from Monday through Saturday in block capitals and often bearing faint notes in shorthand, indecipherable now that the mind that birthed them is long gone [Fig. 9]. “MONDAY,” “WEDNESDAY,” and “SATURDAY” become Dada-esque non sequiturs in Vogler’s reuse of these pages, the words floating unconnected from the fleshy watercolor renderings of human features below them. The order that these headings promise is disrupted by a piercing blue eye or lost in the crevices of an ear. If you look closely, you can almost see Vogler, the eager young artist bent over these gravestone-shaped slabs, stealing a few hours away from his busy schedule; Dr. Frankenstein bringing severed body parts to life with a pinpoint brush.

Works Cited

City of Winston-Salem. “Elias A. Vogler.” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://www.cityofws.org/1162/Elias-A-Vogler

Find a Grave. “Elias Alexander Volger.” Entry created February 4, 2010. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/47578899/elias-alexander-vogler.

Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission. “John Vogler House.” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://www.cityofws.org/DocumentCenter/View/3838/052—John-Vogler-House-PDF?bidId=.

Love, Nathan. “The Men Who Built Salem: A Biographical Look at the Builders of the North Carolina Moravian Town.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 37 (2016): 199-317. https://www.mesdajournal.org/2016/the-men-who-built-salem-a-biographical-look-at-the-builders-of-the-north-carolina-moravian-town/.

Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. “Anatomical Studies.” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://mesda.org/item/collections/anatomical-studies/1002/

Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2004): 379–419. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844198.

Taylor, Gwynne S. and William Turner. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for St. Phillip’s Moravian Church in Salem.” December 1990. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY2125.pdf.

1. If you want to see these miniatures for yourself, you can find them in the Old Salem gallery space downstairs at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. ↩︎
2. See Peter Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2004): 413, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844198. ↩︎