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Furniture Early American Colonial Furniture Design Under Fashion 1660-1730 History of Early American Colonial Furniture

Much could be written about the influence of courtesans upon early American colonial furniture design. The phases of elaboration in furnishing that have generally followed the domination of a European king by a mistress or series of mistresses, might suggest that ostentation is symptomatic of moral laxity; but actually there may be an economic explanation of the phenomenon. `Put not your trust in Princes' favours' has been one of the guiding precepts of beautiful, accomplished and unprincipled women who have studied the exploitation of a monarch, while `get what you can while the getting is good' is a policy that naturally arises from a realistic consideration of the transitory nature of royal affections. Everything, therefore, that could bear costly and expensive decoration upon its surface was demanded by the uncrowned queens of Europe. Cabinets inlaid and embossed with silver and gold. Exquisite carving, heavily gilded. Plate. Jewels of course. Rich fabrics. Everything that sparkled and glittered and was loaded down with the evidence of wealth appealed to. the taste of people who were collecting precious material as fast as they could, material which could easily be turned into money; gauds that would also impress the whole world with the fact that His Gracious Majesty was really taking the most energetic delight in honouring the recipient.

Charles II encouraged many foreign fashions both in furniture design and in ornament. His mistresses encouraged elaboration. Within twenty years of the Restoration, the clean, austere early American colonial furniture forms that emerged during the Puritan period had disappeared from the fashionable town houses. They survived in the country. But in London new forms multiplied and they were embellished with everything that could symbolize the lascivious preoccupations of Court taste. It was in such malleable branches of design as furniture-making that Carolina ideas in early American colonial furniture found their most luxurious expression.

In architecture a fine orderliness was emerging and Inigo Jones's successor, Sir Christopher Wren, was completing the education of the English in architectural design. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that the form of furniture began to reflect in wood the nobility that was being achieved in stone. Before that harmony was attained there was a florid interval during which furniture was made which had something of the stiffness of line, something of the sturdy uprightness that were common in Puritan times. But those stern, staunch frames were bedecked in a manner which created a strange unseemliness of effect, as though a Presbyterian elder had put on fancy dress.

A Charles II interior showing a daybed with a cane seat and an elaborately carved under-frame and back.There is a wing settee with scroll front legs which begin to suggest the cabriole formthat developed a quarter of a century later. The settings of this furniture shows the growing influence of architectural design although it had not yet affected the form of furniture.

Early American colonial furniture chairs retained purity of form, but the simple turning and tentative decoration of the sixteen-forties and fifties became more emphatic. Chair-legs and the vertical members of the back were now linked with elaborately carved horizontal framing. The stretchers that tied the legs together were either twisted with the barley-sugar twist or carved with various decorative motifs. (These heavy twists would be carved by country craftsmen, not turned: turning on the legs of tables and cabinet­stands would taper delicately from the foot upwards. See Plates VII and VIII, which show this tapering, and Plate VI, which shows the hand-carved barley-sugar twist.) The chair-seat would be filled with a yielding net of elegantly interlaced canework. The back would be partly filled with the same material, and this cane panel would be flanked by carved uprights, surmounted by a crested top rail. This cresting was frequently com­posed of amorini, those voluptuously, chubby little cupids that fluttered about in pairs all over the furniture of this period.

Early American colonial furniture single chairs and armchairs were becoming more ornate. Oak was discarded by the fashionable makers, and walnut was used, a sleek, golden brown wood that gave to the form of chairs and tables greater riches of colour and marking than had hitherto been known.

Comfort was now being seriously studied, and the apparatus of comfort was always related to the source of heat in rooms. Visible heat has guided all English ideas of comfort, so that they are now, even in this age of central heating and electricity, still focussed upon the fireplace. The business of conserving the heat of a fireside and providing protection from draughts has been taken very seriously by every maker of furniture in England. When the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries refers to the comfort of homes and inns, the chimney-corner, the fireside circle, and the generous depth of inn kitchen fireplaces, flanked by settles, are described in affectionate detail. The high­backed settle was probably the earliest attempt to secure for those who were warming their feet by the fire some guarantee of immunity from partial freezing; for draughts have apparently always plagued the English and American houses and chill winds have whistled under doors and through window-frames for centuries. The high-backed settle was a severe seat, uncushioned, though acknowledging the existence of the human form in the gentle rake of the back, which rose high above the heads of those leaning against it. (The seats in the third-class compartments of old-fashioned railways preserved the primitive features of the early settle in their archaic purity.) The early American colonial furniture flanking settles of a sixteenth- or seven­teenth-century inn or parlour fireplace extended like wings, concentrating the heat, and their ends were partially enclosed by shaped draught-excluders. It was this form of ear-protecting device that was adopted by the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century furniture­makers for that great triumph of comfort, the wing chair.

This chair, the grandfather, and the progenitor of everything that claims to be an easy-chair, was suited to the temperament." It gave a touch of individual isolation even in the family circle : it was a three-sided from Holland and from China. Only in the country was there a true national expression of design, and various localities made characteristic types of furniture. For example, the Yorkshire chair was a piece of Puritan early American colonial furniture design, which had turned legs and an open back with carved crescent-shaped cross rails linking the vertical members of the back. (Fig. 2o, page 57.) The Lancashire chair, another local type, was similar in some re­spects to the Yorkshire chair, but instead of having an open back it had a solid panel with a semicircle of carved cresting above. Sometimes that solid panel would be carved in low relief. (Fig. 19, page 57.) A few other localities produced chair types.

Fig. 29. Settee with walnut frame covered in velvet, c. 1685-90
Fig. 30. Walnut single chair with cane seat, c.1670.
Fig. 31, 32, 33, 34. Walnut chairs and settee, c. 1690.
Fig. 35. Walnut easy-chair covered in needlework, early XVIIIth-century.
Fig. 36, 37. Walnut settee and chair, c. 1710.