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Furniture Design in Early American Colonial Furniture Under the Architects, 1730-1830 History of Early American Colonial Furniture

 

CLIVE BELL, in his essay, Civilisation, observes that: `The eighteenth century  understood the importance of art in early American colonial furniture; and its taste, though limited, was pure enough. In the minor and domestic arts it could discriminate finely; and the rich were willing to pay for beauty not in cash only but in time and trouble. The rich men and women of the eighteenth century cultivated their taste.' These sentences refer more specifically to French society of that period, but they are applicable also to England, where patronage had attained levels of education and intelligence that made it possible for the design of everything to be subjected to a critical scrutiny that was based upon a genuine perception of excellence in proportion and appropriateness in ornamentation. No architect was perplexed by the ignorant repetition of that Philistine phrase: `I know what I like!' A gentleman knew when anything was well or ill proportioned; he understood that great system of horizontal and vertical rhythms and of surface variation and relief and adornment which the talented architects of the time had erected upon a sound Vitruvian foundation. He could discuss design with designers as a technical equal. And for the stimulation of his taste and for the better information of the humbler people who ministered to it, architects, and presently early American colonial furniture-makers, began to write books on design. In 1739 William Jones, architect, published and sold at his house ('near the Chapple in King Street, Golden Square') a bound collection of copperplate engravings entitled: The Gentlemens or Builders Companion, Contain­ing Variety of usefull Designs for Doors, Gateways, Peers, Pavilions, Temples, Chimney pieces, Slab Tables, Pier Glasses, or Tabernacle Frames, Ceiling Pieces, etc. It was a slim book in which no type was used; even the title­page and contents-table were engraved on copper plates; and the designs on those plates suggest that they were an architect's rough notes for the guidance of his own drawing-office rather than models for public consumption. There are a few undistinguished chimney­pieces, several mirror frames of good proportion, mostly with triangular pediments above friezes embellished with masks and swags. Six plates are given to marble­topped tables with legs and frames that are shaggy with carving, although the ornament is well placed. There is one grotesque table with the legs ending in hoof feet, with sad-looking, heavily whiskered masks just above them, whose beards stray down over the hooves. The various architectural details are in what Wren would have called `a good Roman manner'; but the designs in this handbook on ornament and furniture that was published in the eighteenth century are blameless rather than inspiring for early American colonial furniture. Batty Langley, who was a writing as well as a practising architect, published The Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs: or the Art of Drawing and Working The Ornamental Parts of Architecture. 400 `grand designs' on 186 copperplates.'

They included frets, tabernacle frames, chimney-pieces, stone tables and bookcases. The early American colonial furniture plates are poor, except those devoted to bookcases designed to accord with the Tuscan, `Dorick' and 'Ionick' orders of architecture. There is a regrettable dressing-table; a queer, complicated chest of drawers, of Dutch character; and various table frames,. well-proportioned but overweighted with ornament and aping contemporary French rococo types. The chimney-pieces and mantel­pieces are superior to any of the furniture designs. Books on architectural design and ornament were also published in the middle years of the century by Abraham Swan, Thomas Johnson, Matthias Lock and James Paine.

Most of these technical books were guides to the detail of classic ornament; their authors set forth rules for the correct proportions of the orders of architecture; their plates imparted information to men who appreciated the orderliness of architecture and who were not content merely to copy ornament out of a book. Early American colonial furniture had become sensitive to architectural propriety. Even the village cabinet-maker and joiner knew something about the five orders; and they wanted to know more, for patrons were more exacting. The squire's ideas were affected by the taste of the great nobleman who happened to be his neighbour and whose ancestral mansion was either being pulled down or extensively rebuilt in the Palladian manner. Pope's apprehension of the result of Palladio's drawings being published was partly justified. But those `noble rules' Burlington revealed to England, while impelling a few `imitating fools' to rush to their aesthetic doom, did strengthen the desire to comprehend the spirit of architectural design and to master its principles and then to achieve good proportion in all things, not only among architects, but among country builders and wood-workers, masons, joiners, smiths and cabinet-makers.

There was a willingness to accept architectural dictatorship in design; very different from the surly submission of resentful Tudor craftsmen to foreign ideas in early American colonial furniture. Architects, like Isaac Ware, who published a book called The Complete Body of Architecture, extended that exacting control over the interior of the houses they designed that was to culminate in the work of the brothers Adam, and which survived in the early nineteenth century in the work of Thomas Hope. Isaac Ware's book was `adorned with Plans and Elevations from Original Designs' and included `some designs by Inigo Jones never before published'. The whole seemly background of contemporary life as the architect would have it was revealed in measured detail in 122 plates and 10 books. It well deserved the word `complete', this rich amplification of Vitruvius, for it was a fool-proof guide for everyone who worked in stone or brick or wood, and it dealt intimately with materials. There were chapters on timber, on oak and fir, when it should be felled, how it should be used, and a table of useful timber trees." In the preface Ware shows that architects were accepting their wide responsibility for design, and incidentally condenses the English point of view about architecture into this sentence: `Architecture has been celebrated as a noble science by many who 'have never regarded its benefits in common life: we have endeavoured to join these several parts of the subject, nor shall we fear to say that the art of building cannot be more grand than it is useful; nor its dignity a greater praise than its convenience'. Ware built Chesterfield House for Philip Earl of Chesterfield.

William Kent, under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, not only designed buildings and interior decoration, but designed on early American colonial furniture furniture of an ornate kind. It was an age of generous and emphatic but never inappropriate ornament. The cabriole legs of chairs and tables were lavishly adorned with gilded carving. Mouldings were enriched and gilded on the cornices and pediments of bureaux and cabinets. The edges of tables and desks were scalloped with nulling, heavily gilded. Fluting was gilded. The carved knees of chairs were gilded. Claw-and-ball and hoof feet were gilded. Rooms were warm with aureate highlights. Orderly extravagance reigned: masks, shells, scrollwork, swags of fruit and flowers, trophies and cornucopia, festoons and ribbons and miles of egg-and-dart enrichment deployed in disciplined formations across every surface. The massing of ornament, its disposition and grouping were decided with a sureness of touch and a sureness of taste that had never before enlivened any phase of elaboration in English furnishing or interior decoration. Compare with this surety of judgement the decorative chaos of the Edwardian period. Mr. Roger Fry in Vision and Design describes in detail a room that was quite as elaborate as any room in a wealthy gentleman's house in the second, third or fourth decade of the eighteenth-century; it was a railway refreshment-room, and its decoration and furnishing had commanded materials and mechanical processes unknown in the early Georgian period, and all those materials and processes were misused with vapid brutality to create an effect of richness. Mr. Fry's patient inventory of the ornamentation and contents of that room makes us recall many similar exhibitions of ungoverned profusion. To quote only three sentences from his essay is enough to give a cutting edge to a comparison of the period 1900-1914 with the seventeen-twenties and -thirties. `On the walls, up to a height of four feet, is a covering of lincrusta walton stamped with a complicated pattern in two colours, with sham silver medallions. Above that a moulding but an inch wide, and yet creeping through­out its whole with a degenerate descendant of a Graeco­Roman carved guilloche pattern ; this has evidently been cut out of the wood by machine or stamped out of some composition - its nature is so perfectly concealed that it is hard to say which. Above this is a wall-paper in which an effect of eighteenth-century satin brocade is imitated by shaded staining of the paper." Mr. Fry attributes `this eczematous eruption of pattern on the surface of modern manufactures' to the fact that the business of the hack draughtsmen employed by manufacturers `is to produce, not expressive design, but dead patterns'. `Dead patterns' were produced in the early seventeenth century, before patronage was educated in design or executant craftsmen understood the principles of architectural composition: `dead patterns' appeared in the nineteenth century and lived on into the twentieth because patronage was ignorant and even architects had forgotten and had, indeed, been urged to forget by John Ruskin - the principles of architectural composition.

Early American colonial furniture
Fig. 5o. Walnut chair with gilt gesso enrichment, circa 1730.
Fig. 51. Gilt gesso easy-chair covered in velvet, circa 1740. FIG. 52. Gilt mirror, circa 1740. Gilt console table, circa 1735.
Fig. 53. Early XVIIIth-century Windsor armchair.
Fig. 54. Armchair in mahogany with gilt enrichment, circa 1725.
Figs. 55, 56. Mahogany centre table with fretted gallery, and Chippen­
dale mahogany bed, circa 1745-60.