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The Patient Art of Buying Early American Colonial Furniture History of Early American Colonial Furniture

 PATIENCE is the chief requirement of those who want to buy early American colonial furniture. If you want genuine old period style furniture, don't imagine that a few superficial tips about the position worm-holes should occupy are sufficient to save you from the gangsters of the antique racket. Worm-eaten wood is often used for patching up some crippled chair or table, or is even used shamelessly side by side with new wood, for that label `restored' can cover practically anything-even a bureau-bookcase built around a single hinge of antique origin. It is just as well to be suspicious, if not outspokenly rude, when you are assured that a piece of early American colonial furniture furniture is `genuine' when you can see the channelling of the galleries made by the larvae of the timber beetle exposed on the surface of the article. The furniture beetle burrows into wood, and its entrances and exits are indicated by little pin­prick holes, and if the wood is badly attacked those holes will emit fine dust when tapped. Only when worm­eaten wood is cut are the internal galleries revealed.

If you have an affection for the shape of things designed in the past, then you should do your buying in the light of your knowledge of design. You will then discover that the `red-hot fake' is seldom a thing of simple beauty and clean line. It is deliberately odd; rare only because it is eccentric; its deceit is overdone; it is intended to cheat a collector rather than to delight a connoisseur of design. It will frequently be described with a cynicism that is perhaps unintentional as a `collector's piece'.

Antique furniture early American colonial furniture of the country-made type is often cheaper to buy than modern furniture; and the large, ornate things of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are practically unsaleable because they are too big for modern rooms and nobody wants them. But some of the chests and cabinets of that period are beautiful, and they languish in hundreds of showrooms. Beware of ye olde shoppes of cathedral cities : the fakes that lurk below the clusters of warming-pans are anything from 5o per cent to 250 per cent dearer than in London, while the genuine antiques, such as they are, are usually overpriced. The last hope of the bargain­hunter lies in suburban second-hand furniture shops, where odd pieces of old furniture sometimes turn up and are sold at the prices asked for the normal rubbish that litters such places. If you are just a casual purchaser of old furniture, or furniture of antique design, and avoid the blinding emotionalism of a hungry collector, your self-esteem may remain unwounded for years; but it may suffer if and when you indulge in the pleasures of modern furnishing. You may even observe a faint flavour of the grave about your treasures then. If they are old you may realise that you are not really their owner: they are owning you for a time. Then you should get some contemporary work to rub shoulders with them. Unless you own enormous rooms and can reproduce therein, with or without antique designs, the dignities of furnishing in the grand manner, you may make with comfortable associations of things old and
new the best of both possible worlds.

The prices of old furniture fluctuate early American colonial furniture so greatly, and any attempt to discuss costs must be hedged about with so many reservations, that little practical guidance in this difficult and disappointing matter can be given. For instance, a large, late sixteenth-century eight-legged table of the type usually misnamed refectory, might have fetched anything between £9oo and £12oo before the 1914-18 war or immediately after it during the peak of the American buying period. Now such a table might fetch £6oo, if it could be sold at all. Several years ago the writer made some notes on the cost of old furniture; not in connection with elaborate examples, `collector's pieces' or `museum pieces'; but concerning the simpler types that have been less tempting to furniture forgers. These notes (from chapter iii of Modern Home Furnishing) ran thus:

`If you look for old country-made early American colonial furniture things you will find that chairs can generally be acquired inexpensively. Even the leather-seated and leather-backed chairs of the Commonwealth are occasionally in the market for a few pounds apiece. But far commoner and far cheaper are the ladder-backed and spindle-backed chairs, rush­seated, and with turned legs and underframing, made in oak, ash, cherrywood and elm. With the wood deeply toned and the rushing well preserved they can be bought for as little as 15s. or £1 : 5s. each, although £1 : 15s. or £2 to £2 : I os. would be fair prices. Chairs in oak and elm that imitate the fashionable shapes that were made in walnut and mahogany during the eighteenth century are worth having, for they are not so much imitations as pleasant simplifications of luxurious designs made by country craftsmen; sometimes sets of half a dozen will fetch anything from £8 to 415 or £20. Prices vary considerably, and it is practically impossible to lay down what this or that type of furniture should fetch without actually seeing the furniture concerned. For instance, with oak gate-leg tables made during the latter half of the seventeenth century the price may range from 46 to 435 or 440. The table may be extensively "made-up" that is to say, its framing and some of its legs may be original, but it has been "restored", and a fresh leg added here and there and a new top have granted it a fresh lease of life. If it has been restored with skill it will be just as satisfying in use except to ultra-romantic people) as an entirely genuine antique. Its past history affects its price. Its size and design and any peculiarity of shape may again affect its price; but, to give a specific example, a double gate-leg table with simple turned legs, the top with both leaves extended measuring about five feet in length, would be reasonably priced at £12. If the legs were bobbin­turned instead of plain the price would increase by £3 or £4, and the highly decorative "barley-sugar" twist would imply a further increase. It must be understood that the figures quoted are only approximate. There has been such a prolonged craze for old oak that even the most inferior pieces fetch high prices. Genuine antiques of "The Age of Walnut" are usually costly. . . . Mahogany furniture is far easier to acquire. Unless you can search exhaustively and pay tremendously it is im­possible to purchase any piece of furniture that can be traced back to the workshop of, any of the famous eighteenth-century makers; but although you cannot buy without vastt expenditure the furniture that came from Chippendale's shop in St. Martin's Lane it is rela­ tively easy to buy a set of dining-room chairs made in oak or mahogany "in the Chippendale manner" by a country contemporary of the great craftsman for a matter of £15 or 42o the half-dozen. They will be plain renderings, what is known as "Cottage Chippendale", but they will be satisfying to the eye. Hepplewhite and Sheraton had their "Cottage" equivalents.'

The cost of early American colonial furniture furniture - if any is left after the second world war is now unpredictable. During the war period it has soared.

When you begin trying to buy modern period early American colonial furniture you will need even greater reserves of patience than when the dealers are telling you the old, old story. At least the dealers know something about furniture, know something f the meaning of style and character. But the average retail furnisher, or head of the furniture section of a big departmental store, is not even passively ignorant of design ; he is aggressively ignorant. He thrusts his prejudices at you. And his prejudices are those of the people Mr. J. B. Priestley writes about with such zest, people who live either rather mildewed lives in shabby suburbs or who are heartily localised in one­horse industrial hells in the Midlands, people whose ideas favour turgid ostentation in furnishing: 'Ee, lad, ah likes good stoof thick' The retail furniture buyer chooses what the public shall buy. He says he knows what the public wants. He knows what he fancies himself, and his lack of education and taste obstruct every experiment that early American colonial furniture manufacturers make. Not that they make many.

The question has often been asked : What would Chippendale do if he were alive to day:would his gifts get a chance?

Every manufacturer of early American colonial furniture knows the answer to that. Chippendale would be told by the retail buyer that his work wasn't what the public wanted. `Now look here, Chippendale, old man,' the buyer would say, `this stuff won't do at all. It isn't a bit like the stuff that went so well last year. You know, people won't stand for this sort of thing. A man with my experience,' etc.

And to back up the retail buyer, whose only concern is to shift stock as quickly as possible, all the powers of modern persuasion are commanded by the establishment he serves. An essential preliminary to any shopping expedition, whether to buy furniture or any other products of modern industry, should be the reading of a disturbing little book entitled Culture and Environment.' The writing of a book that analysed the forces of persuasion so ably could only have been possible in an age when the selling of goods has become so vastly more important than the goods themselves. The great problem of the twentieth century is the problem of distribution, the economists insist on telling us. Shift your, stock. Salvation through selling. If the furniture falls to pieces as the last instalment falls due, so much the better; more stock can be shifted to replace the dismembered and dishonoured wreckage. The retailer often regards you not as a customer, a person to be served and studied, but as an outlet for sales, representing so much space into which stock can be shifted. Beware of him. He has even more junk to get rid of than the early American colonial furniture dealer.