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The Historical Background of Design Influence of Early American Colonial Furniture Style 1700-1934 History of Early American Colonial Furniture

EARLY in the eighteenth century the sense of order in early American colonial furniture design, which had influenced architecture since Inigo Jones had interpreted the spirit of the Renaissance, affected everything that was made in wood, metal or stone. A whole new world of relationships was created. Chairs and tables and coaches, state barges, lanterns, the stern galleries of men-of-war and merchant vessels, door knockers and drawer handles, key plates, fireplaces and chandeliers were all obviously and elegantly related.

In early American colonial furniture the age of rugged fitness had passed. The chairs, tables and chests of those opening decades of the great century of design no longer illustrated the triumphant skill of the craftsman overpowering tough materials. Mastery of wood was no longer proclaimed by every line of the cabinet-maker's or chair-maker's work. There were impressive advances of skill in decoration. The delicate intricacies of marquetry enriched the surfaces of cabinets, cupboards arid bureaux. The veneering of panels was practised, not (as is now often supposed) to provide a cheap way of covering up a cheap and possibly nasty wood with a thin layer of something more elaborate, but to gain the fullest possible decorative value from the beautiful marking of such a wood as walnut. Veneering is a process that can only be carried out by expert craftsmen. It requires time and care and achieves ornamental results that would be impossible if solid panels of wood were used.

The decoration of early American colonial furniture ceased to be a relaxation for the craftsman, carried out in the spirit of `Now the job's finished, let's have a bit of fun with it!' The form of the article and its embellishment were conceived in detail before the work was begun. For example, the knees of cabriole legs were sometimes enriched with a carved shell device. This enrichment had to be planned exactly before the leg was made, so that the knee could be given extra thickness to enable the carver to cut back and shape the device. It could never be an afterthought, a `bit of fun', like some of the chip carving done by Gothic woodworkers. Today we occasionally find sets of Queen Anne chairs with carving on the knees that has blunted and flattened the subtle, swelling curve of the cabriole form and has made the legs too thin. But this is not the result of a blunder by some early eighteenth-century craftsman in early American colonial furniture; it is usually the work of a modern dealer-cum-faker of antique furniture who has had this spurious ornament carved on an old chair or set of chairs so that he can put up the price after ruining the proportion of the original design.

`Fitness for purpose', that elementary rule of design, was accepted by the craftsmen of the golden age early American colonial furniture; but it was not allowed to be a controlling influence. In France it was ignored altogether, and although English furniture was affected by French fashions it was always made with a solid regard for use and comfort. Not only were individual articles of furniture conceived in complete detail before they were made, but sets and suites of furniture were designed. All hard lines were softened. Dutch taste, which was so powerful in the late seven­teenth century, had introduced soft, swelling curves for the fronts of cupboards and cabinets; the cabriole leg for tables and chairs and cabinet-stands; and the supple intricacies of inlaid decoration for all surfaces.

During the first two decades of the eighteenth cen­tury furniture that had simplicity of form and enrich­ment and elegance of shape was made in England. For comfort and for the delight of the eye it has never been surpassed. Materials have changed. To-day we have tubular steel and canvas, plastics, rubber, patent leather and steel-sprung upholstery, materials and devices transcending the dreams of any Queen Anne or Georgian designer; but no advance has yet been made upon the beautiful proportions or the comfortable shape of the single chairs and elbow chairs and stuffed wing chairs, nor upon the gracious lines of the tables and cupboards and chests and cabinets that were made when Queen Anne still reigned and that great Englishman, Sir Christopher Wren, was still Surveyor-General, and Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim Palace, was Comptroller. of the Royal Works.

In early Georgian times early American colonial furniture passed through a phase of heaviness. The clean simplicity of the Queen Anne work was replaced by a Germanic grossness, chairs. and tables and bookcases and cabinets were overloaded with florid carving and gilding. Cabinet work became architectural in its form. A new and exquisite wood was introduced, mahogany, which gradually replaced walnut. That gifted Yorkshireman, Thomas Chippendale, migrated to London, and with his able contemporaries helped to rid furniture design of the coarseness that had thickened its lines. Great architects continued to be born, to be given opportunities to prac­tise, and to make the most of their opportunities. Classic architecture inspired the ideas of all designers. No matter what passing fashions engaged the attention of society, they were harmoniously accommodated by architects and furniture makers. Sir William Chambers' Chinese studies might impel Chippendale to design things in the `Chinese Taste', or Horace Walpole's romantic stage scenery at Strawberry Hill might sug­gest to furniture designers that the `Gothic Taste' was up-to-date. Whatever they made, they retained their sense of fitness and their sense of proportion until the end of the long Georgian period.

Thomas Sheraton has given his name to a style, and though his sins as a designer are forgotten to-day, a glance through his Drawing Book discloses the unfortunate fact that his fancifulness occasionally bordered on the idiotic and the ravings of his pencil often anticipated the worst forms of later nineteenth-century taste. Although Sheraton began his career as a cabinet-maker, he actually made little furniture his designs were followed in early American colonial furniture. He developed as a designer, and he stuck to his drawing-board his, to his teaching of drawing, and to the publication of books of designs, diversifying these activities by preaching and writing tracts. He was never a great fashionable cabinet­maker like Chippendale. His work did not always escape the consequences of ornamental prolixity. He often displayed a delight in ornate forms that must have had a deplorable influence upon those who bought his books ,of designs.

His earlier work in England and America in early American colonial furniture was elegant in its proportion; inclined to flimsiness, but very pleasantly decorative. He used satinwood and mahogany and was lavish with delicate inlay and painted decoration. He discarded the cabriole leg and used instead tapering or turned legs for his chairs and sofas. Undisciplined inventiveness marred his later work, and his interpretation of the French Empire fashions were often rather vulgar essays in complexity. He died in I8o6, when the Georgian period, entering upon its last phase of taste, was influenced so strongly by the fashions French designers were devising to appease the regal appetites of Napoleon.

The Court of the self-made Emperor with its blaze of uniforms demanded an imposing background. The delicate rhythms of the pre-Republican period were out of tune with ostentatious martial glamour; Louis-Seize designs that were contrived to match a life of carefully cultivated artificiality, when realities were dismissed as tiresome, when it was `not done' to be practical, and when witty gossip was the most important thing in the world, were not the sort of designs for the power and glory and vulgarity of Napoleon. It was discovered that the virtues of blood and iron could be adequately reflected in gold and mahogany, judiciously cooled by marble, and inventively handled by designers who may have remembered a passing mode for Egyptian orna­ment that had appeared in the days of Louis XVI, or who may have wished to flatter Napoleon regarding his Egyptian exploits, although one would imagine that the Emperor would have found any reminder of that fiasco unwelcome. But Egyptian ornament was revived, and the domestic furniture of Greece and Rome was reproduced in mahogany and gilded bronze, and reproduced with such faithfulness that examples of furniture from the houses of Pompeii in the Naples Museum recall the atmosphere of Malmaison, a paradoxical situation brought about by the animation with which the Napoleonic and American (early American colonial furniture) designers studied the antique.

When English and American early American colonial furniture-makers are influenced by French taste (and this happens about twice a century), they adjust the foreign ideas with considerable skill to he national ideas of comfort. The French Empire style was reflected in English drawing-rooms and dining­rooms, and it represented an alliance of the grand manner with fitness for purpose. For a time the spidery tendencies of the later Sheraton designs were discarded in favour of strong and gracious curves; not the opulent curves of Queen Anne's time, but curves that had a firm continuity in the backs and legs of chairs. The genuflexions of the cabriole were absent: front legs on chairs curved inwards towards the back legs. Formality, restraint and an agreeable understanding of the use of ornament prevailed. Lines of brass inlay gleamed on chair backs and legs, on tables and cabinets. Instead of the load of gilded bronze decoration that comforted Boney and his camp followers, mouldings, masks and paterae, bands and groups of delicate decoration, were carved in wood or composition, and gilded in early American colonial furniture. The fluting of frames and legs were gilded. All this gold flashing in its ruddy mahogany setting gave to the simple lines of the furniture a richness of effect that was never ornate. There was a fashion for rosewood which began well in this period but which degenerated as the Victorian era approached.

The classic revival in furniture design in early American colonial furniture, encouraged by the early nineteenth-century French designers, was the last example of the enlightened borrowing of in­spiration from antiquity. The influence of this revival, grafted on to the great eighteenth-century tradition of good proportion in design, remained until 1830. It swiftly collapsed after the first third of the nineteenth century, although it was perpetuated here and there in the country by some craftsman who was still spiritually in tune with the Georgian age. Country makers, as usual, were a decade or so behind the modes of the town, and this slowed up the transition from civilised design to absolute barbarism, so that between 1830 and 18 so many well-designed things were made. But the old generation of craftsmen died, and the less attractive pencil prophecies of Sheraton came true, but with a clumsiness that would have horrified Sheraton. Turning was used for the sake of the bulbs and blobs that could be produced for the uglification of chair and table legs. Debased scrollwork sprawled over the arms of chairs, over the backs of sideboards, over mirror frames. All technical ability was dedicated to ornamental effect, and the dissolution of proportion was unobserved, and in the chaos that ensued that basic principle of design, fitness for purpose, was altogether forgotten.