Furniture - American

Until recent years so little was known about American antique furniture that it was widely supposed to be provincial English. Thorough study by scholars, some of them English, now tells us it has a character of its own, independent of the English furniture on which it was styled. Some connoisseurs, impartial Continental Europeans, comparing a Philadelphia 'Chippendale' highboy, a Rhode Island block-front secretary, a Duncan Phyfe sofa table [unique American types] with their nearest English parallels today, give preference to the American creations. Even when the comparison is between two of a kind, two fairly similar and equally well-made chairs or desks or chests of drawers, the choice often goes to American examples.

From the arrival of the original Pilgrims in 1620 down to the opening of the Revolutionary War in 1775, most of the early settlers in America were British although there were some settlements of Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Spanish, and French. From the first the different conditions in the two lands made for different circumstances in the lives of the peoples, their homes, and their furniture. The two countries lay in isolated hemispheres, separated by 3,000 miles of ocean. The climates were different; the requirements for survival of life were different; and so were the social, moral, intellectual, and economic environments.

As to things that the two people might build with their hands, such as furniture, one circumstance outweighted all others: the Americans were thrown on thier own resources. They might want to model their furniture on English exmaples or designs, but by necessity they had to do it in thier own way. In adapting their product to American use each furniture maker had to rely for the rendering upon himself. The result was variation - individuality. So marked was this variation, that today not only can we separate English from American antique furniture but we can trace most American examples to the section of the country--northern, middle, or southern--in which they were made; often to the city--Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston--and on occasion actually to the shop of the man who made them.

Save in local regions where the setters were Dutch, German, etc., Americans followed the English furniture styles. Perched along the shore of a vast continent which had to be tamed by the plough, they had no time in which to work out polite modes of their own. They turned for their fashions to the country from which most of them had come. They were usually ten to twenty years behind the style, but followed in the path. It was hardly possible to follow the fashioins, except in an independent way, because of the scarcity of models and the absence of guides. Only the merest scat ering of families imported their furuniture. Ships were few and small; furniture is bulky; and cargoes were given over to goods that could not be readily prodcued in the New World. Furthermore, it had been early discovered that imported furniture woefully suffered shrinking and cracking in AmericaÍs drier air; also, that it offered no resistance to American insects. In short, almost every [p. 132] eventuality tended to make American furniture, though English in Style, American in distinctive spirit and characteristics.

Much English antique furniture, when compared with American, appears to have been inspired by the desire for impressive show. No such noble grandeurs occur in American furniture, no broad and spacious sizes, no courtly elegance, no lavish luxury, no sumptuous ornamentation, no massiave, monumental plainness. American furniture is unsophisticated, informal, democratically modest. Based on English originals though they be, American examples tend to be more forthright in design, more straightforward in construction, smaller in size, quieter in taste, and more utilitarian in the practicalities.

The spirit of early american furniture makers was one of buoyant vitality, of energies released by exhilearating opportunity and channelled into handicraft by freedom of choice. Some workmen might be rude in skill, some naðve, some expert, but almost never were they routine. Their spontaneity was as endlessly fresh as life itself in the New World. Added to the spontaneity was the aspect of unassuming skill. To be sure, there was pride. Early American furniture makers clearly were as proud of their work as artists are of their art, yet none, not even the most adroit, showed overweening self-assurance.

Sobriety, spontaneity, informality, democratic modesty, unassuming skill; there is a common denominator in these qualities of spirit, and the factor can be summed up in one word - simplicity. Americn antique funiture is simpler than English antique furniture. The tendency holds true not only up to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but also from 1620 to 1820, and the reason is obvious. In America the envirionment, the times, and the people were simpler. This simplicity of spirit manifests itself in physical charactaeristics. The forthright design in American furniture becomes, in the working out, a physical characteristic. So does straightforward construction, modest approach, spontaneity, and unassuming skill. The excellence of the American handiwork often astonishes Englishmen. Skill that was rough and ready did occur--possibly too much of it - but there are surviving examples which show masterly skill, on occasion as fine, though never as formidable, as any achieved in London.

Several scholars have remarked on the generally smaller size of American furniture, and given as the reason for it the smaller size of the American home. Few, however, have as yet pointed out another physical characteristic equally central: that while English antique furniture tends to be broad and horizontal [perhaps the broader size led naturally towards the horrizontal], American furniture tends to be vertical. Slender, lean, thin, tallish, these are the adjectives that generally describe it. The tendency appears in every American furniture style from Queen Anne on through Sheraton, and appears in every type of article - the height of the side chair in relation to width, of the armchair as well, and the wing chair, the highboy, the secretary, and so on. Even in post-Revolutionary forms, late froms such as the sideboard, the American accent is on vertical line, the English on horizontal. This American tendency to be tall and slender, combined as it is with less carving than the English liked - indeed, less ornament of any sort--makes for a quite distinctive and non-English character.

Comparisions aside, American antique furniture is worthy of praise for its own sake. At its best it has the vigour of direct, of functional design, the merit of harmonious proportions, the grace of slender line and outline, the charm of informal size, the beauty of richly grained wood surfaces, and the force born of lack of elaboration, simplicity. [pp. 132-133]

Chief Periods and Styles
Jacobean. The first furniture made in North America was based on the English Jacobean style. Modelled after characteristic household pieces which the Pilgrims of 1620 and later permanent first settlers brought with them from England to the New World, the earliest examples now surviving probably date between 1650 and 1670. They are of strong straightforward, simple design and construction, generally bulky, yet often remarkably well proportioned. From the many Jacobean examples which have been gathered into museums, we judge that the woods employed were mostly American oak, pine, and maple. Perhaps most numerous are oak chests, usually with a bottom drawer or two, and all but covered with flat carving. Handsomest are three more forceful forms: [1] Jocobean court cupboards, a kind of buffet, generally oak, adorned with applied and often ebonized wood panellings, mouldings, bosses, spindles, and bulbous or columnar supports; [2] press cupboards, very similar cupboards, in which the lower section is closed with doors or made as a chest of drawers for holding household linens, etc.; and [3] separate chests of drawers, likewise much ornamented with mouldings, bosses, and panellings. Among American Jacobean tables are dining boards on trestles or plain frames and, for other rooms, stout smaller tables on four legs generally connected by sturdy stretchers. Often the legs and stretchers are spiral-twisted for the sake of ornament, or lathe-turned in the shape of balls, knobs, etc. Similar legs and stretchers are generally found on the most popular table in seventeenth-c. America, the gate leg. American chairs in the Jacobean manner may be [p. 133] divided into three groups: three-legged armchairs, plain or carved wainscot chairs, and 'Dutch'-type armchairs made of posts and spindles. Americans subdivide the latter kind into Carver chairs, with one row of vertical spindles in the back, and Brewster chairs, with two rows. These are names of Pilgrim Fathers who are said to have brought them over in the Mayflower. A later chair, quite the most luxurious made in seventeenth-c. America, is the high-back cane chair, boldly turned and scroll-carved, the so-called 'Charles the Second' chair. A few day beds of this luxurious 'Carolean' type also have survived. [p.135]

William and Mary. After Queen Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange, came to the throne in 1689, a Dutch-influenced style of furniture gradually began to appear in England. Examples of it reached America just before the beginning of the eighteenth century and started a new fashion there, a number of cabinet makers being skilled enough to adapt the new style admirably to American use. Americans liked this furniture in the William and Mary style. They found it less ponderously heavy and bulky than the Jacobean, and therefore better suited to their small houses. They liked its decorativeness, its pleasant inlays, it marquetry work. That they also liked the few lacquered pieces which reached them is indicated by several surviving examples of quaintly simulated American lacquering. This lacquering, then called japanning, was practised from about 1712 up to the time of the Revolution, and seems to have been done best by a group of Boston workmen. American furniture based on the William and Mary style is definitely less massive and formal than English pieces, less imposing. It is often fine furniture none the less, the finest made in America up to 1720-5, unless we except 'Charles the Second' chairs. Perhaps the most notable single development was the tall chest of drawers, evolved by setting five or six tiers of drawers on a stand high enough for the drawers to be opened without stooping down. The combination is [p. 134] nowadays called a highboy, and when the stand is made as a separate piece of furniture, a sort of dressing table with drawers, it is called a lowboy. By the addition of other features, highboys and lowboys became unique American designs. Those in the style of William and Mary were mostly of walnut or walnut veneer, the stand on six tall legs with connecting stretchers and ball-shaped feet, making for an attractive silhouette, doubly so because the stretchers were curved and the six legs prettily turned in the shape of inverted cups, trumpets, or balls-and-cones. Among other developments of the William and Mary style perhaps the most widely adopted in America was the cabriole leg. [p. 135]

Queen Anne. The Dutch influence introduced into England by William and Mary transformed English furniture in the reign of her sister and successor, Queen Anne [1702-14]. The transformation was from large to smaller furniture and from fairly stiff and formal lines to lovely curves, the happiest change in English furniture in hundreds of years. Furthering this air of grace, a touch of carving, notably the scallop shell, was added. The style of Queen Anne seems not to have reached America until after her death. However, for the next half-century, even up to 1755-60, it was the fashion and standard in good furniture. Expansion was the order of the day in America. The wilderness was being pushed back even farther from the coast; new villages and towns were being founded; cities were growing larger; trade and agriculture were increasing by leaps and bounds; many new and especially pleasant houses were being built; Queen Anne furniture was ideally suited to dress them; and cabinet making had reached a new high level of skill. In consequence, a good deal of fine furniture in the Queen Anne style was made in America. Hogarth's 'line of beauty', the wave-like cyma curve, characterized it. Chair legs, chair seats, chair backs, chair splats, all were curved, front view and profile. Spacious wing chairs, comfortably upholstered, came into use. Also corner chairs, and those stick-and-spindle chairs, open, cool American Windsors. Even sofas in the Queen Anne style were made, though not many. On case pieces as well as on chairs and sofas the rounded Dutch or club foot was much used, its popularity continuing long after the claw-and-ball-foot came in. On highboys and lowboys the six turned legs were superseded by four cabriole legs, with hints of the missing two appearing as pendant knobs, centre front. Secretaries and clothes cupboards incorporated Queen Anne style elements, such as doors with the panels arched. A few four-post bedsteads with cabriole legs and Dutch feet have survived. Tables also often had Dutch-type feet and cabriole or at least curved legs, while that most popular American table up to then, the gate leg, gradually gave way to the drop-leaf table, in which hinged [ p. 135] leaves were propped up by swinging arms or legs without gate features. Many drop-leaf tables are squares or rectangles when open; numerous oval and circular ones also occur. A separate word about Queen Anne mirrors should be added, since they were probably the first fine mirrors made in America. Usually the glass is in two parts, quite visibly, no moulding or other covering masking the joint. The upper glass section is shaped to fit the cyma-curved and ached frame in which a cresting is sometimes carved. They continued in favour almost up to the time of the Revolution. [p. 136]

Early Georgian. Since furniture based on the Queen Anne style was popular in America until 1755-60, sundry features and developments readily recognized in England as Early Georgian features are often combined with it. The term Early Georgian is, however, seldom used in describing American-made furniture. In Fact, the transition from Queen Anne to ChippendaleÍs style is far more abrupt in America than in England. [p. 136]

Chippendale. In 1754 Thomas Chippendale published in London his now celebrated book of English furniture designs that gathered into one volume the various new tendencies which had been appearing in English furniture since the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Chippendale's designs brought to a head the transitional furniture tendencies of Early Georgian England, a transition which may be briefly described as a turning from the Dutch towards the French style. A few American adaptations of these Early Georgian characteristics had appeared a decade or two before Chippendale's book was published. But the force of the change from Queen Anne lines was not felt in America until about 1760, when the Chippendale style burst forth with all the popular impact of a triumphant fashion. Americans from that day to this have used the term Chippendale to mean Early Georgian furniture with Dutch characteristics [shell carving, cabriole legs, claw-and-ball feet, the Cupid's bow top rail], and to include the mid-eighteenth-c. Georgian Gothic, Chinese, and French Louis XV features which occur in Chippendale's drawings, as well as the flowing rococo carving and embellishment in which he loved to specialize. American furniture based on this design reached its most elaborate development in Philadelphia between 1760 and 1776, under superb cabinet makers such as Affleck, Folwell, Randolph, and Savery. However, neither in Philadelphia nor anywhere else were American Chippendale pieces as large, as lordly, or as lavishly ornamented as in England. In fact, tending towards the functional in form, American Chippendale often offers little curvature, considerable restraint in ornament, and crisp rather than flowing forms, a far cry from this rococo flights of fancy. In puritanical districts such as New England where adornment never had been smiled upon, Chippendale-style furniture was often so simplified as to appear succinct, so straight and strict as to seem prim. To call such furniture by Chippendale's name is out of character, and is so recognized increasingly, though a more satisfactory term has not yet turned up.

American 'Chippendale', however, did constitute a new style in America, the most elaborate and luxurious up to that time. The style continued till 1785, or thereafter, bringing in the whole series of new developments that had begun about 1750, when Queen Anne chairs with looped top rails and club feet gave way to chairs with the Cupid's bow top rail, and claw-and-ball feet, while the solid vase-shaped or fiddle-back splat gave way to the open carved, interlaced splat [p. 136], showing Gothic, Chinese, or French motifs. Also the 'Marlborough' leg appeared, and chairs with square , straight, footless legs, generally connected by stretchers. In all these chairs the American tendency was towards smaller size, suited to a smaller chair seat then was the rule in England, American taste being modest, and American rooms not as palatially large as in fashionable English houses. Chippendale chair-back settees were made, and a few upholstered Chippendale sofas with open-rolling arms.

In England secretaries and chests of drawers with cabinet tops generally had glass doors. In America the doors were more often of wood, attractively panelled. Cabriole legs were always used on highboys and lowboys, while low-standing cabinet pieces were given either the short cabriole or a bracket foot, the bracket straight or orgee. Both cabriole and square, straight legs were used on tables, and the apron of smallish tables, like the apron of cabinet pieces, was variously treated: plain, curved, or carved with a band of ornament. Tripod tables became quite popular, elaborate examples carrying acanthus carving on the legs and pedestal. Sometimes the pedestal flaunted a surpassing luxury, a tilting top boldly shaped and carved like the notches in a piecrust. A bit of carving might also appear on the knees of bedposts with short cabriole legs. Generally, however, before the Revolution American bedpost legs were square and plain, with round, fluted footposts. The headposts, covered by draperies, were mostly plain, and headboards also tended towards the plain. Always we must remember the freedom with which American furniture craftsmen interpreted the English style, making not only for individual variation on the form but also for differences from the English style. [p. 137]

Adam. The furniture style that superseded Chippendale's in England - the 'beautiful spirit of antiquity' which inspired the classical designs of the Adam brothers - had no following in America. The reason is that the designs were never published, and therefore were not available to Americans; that the furniture itself was made for the rich and not for export; and that in 1775, just about the time that Americans might have heard about the Adam style, the Revolutionary War broke out. When relations between the two countries opened up again in 1784 the Adam style was already on the wane in England, giving way in the next few years to the Hepplewhite and Sheraton styles. The result was that in America the style called Chippendale was followed by the styles of Hepplewhite and Sheraton, the two arriving at much the same moment and sharing the honours as to esteem. It is true that some Adamesque mirrors [probably Hepplewhite mirrors with motifs derived from Adam] were made in America; also that there were installed a few mantelpieces in the classical manner. But no American furniture in the Adam style was produced. Fittingly enough for the new republic, a revival of classical architecture, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson himself, arose in the United States immediately after the Revolution. The first Government building constructed, the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, was designed as a Romanesque temple in 1795. Both in public and in residential architecture the classical revival swept the country for the next three-quarters of a century, streaming westward 3,000 miles across the continent to the Pacific coast, and losing favour only when set aside by untoward circumstances, notably the Civil War of 1860-5. How appropriately these houses in the new republic would have been dressed had they been furnished in an informal American version of Adam's classical style!. [p. 137]

Hepplewhite. In American furniture the style of Hepplewhite so often tends towards, or incorporates, features of Sheraton's style, that many articles called Hepplewhite are best described as combination Hepplewhite-Sheraton. This American mixture of two English furniture fashions was natural in the circumstances. The peace treaty ending the war between England and the United States had been signed in the latter part of 1783; trade between the countries had begun again in 1784; and by 1785 the type of furniture then the latest vogue in England, Hepplewhite, was being advertised in American newspapers as the latest importations. Another five years were to pass, however, before the economy of the United [p. 137] States had sufficiently recovered from the war for many citizens to buy these importations or to order American-made furniture based on Hepplewhite designs. By that time, 1790, a new type of furniture, the Sheraton, had sprung into being in England, and American cabinet makers were shortly beginning to adapt it to American use. It was inevitable in these circumstances that elements of the two styles [which already had certain features in common] should often be combined.

The two styles can be differentiated, however, in a great many pieces of American furniture, though the distinction is not easy to sum up in words. American Hepplewhite chairs generally have shield-draped backs [or shield variants, such as the interlaced heart, the oval, etc.] with either openwork splats or banisters in the back. The splats may be touched with carving, such as plumes, wheat ears, or leaves. The legs on these chairs are generally square and tapered, often ending in spade feet. Such legs also generally appear on Hepplewhite wing chairs, sofas, tables, and that new convenience in the dining room, the sideboard. In most late eighteenth-c. sideboards the front was designed in a serpentine curve, and it is said that if the ends of the curve are concave the design is Hepplewhite; if convex, Sheraton. All are generally veneered in finely marked mahogany and carry a bit of inlay - satinwood or maple strings bordering the drawers, a few bellflowers dropping down the legs, etc. in the main, American sideboards are so much less ornamented than English as to be easily distinguished.

A word should be added about the new type of drawer handle introduced about 1780; a bail pull attached to an oval brass plate. Such handles, the plate often stamped with an eagle, acorn, oak leaves, grapes, or some such design, continued to be used until 1820, though small round brass knobs were sometimes used instead. Wall mirrors now began to be made in smaller sizes. These Hepplewhite mirrors seem to have been much influenced by Adam's classical [Pompeiian] mirror designs, and the influence carries over into American Hepplewhite mirrors to the extent that the frames are elegantly thin [Pompeiian], carved, gilded, often bear garlands of leaves and flowers hanging halfway down the sides, and are surmounted by a finial, usually an urn, set in a scrolling ornament as delicate as filigree work.

A major change in the dressing of American rooms was visible by the end of the eighteenth century; for sundry articles of furniture were going out of fashion - lowboys, highboy, tall chests of drawers, etc. - the replacements being chests of drawers of more moderate size, decorative types of tables, and several new furniture forms. The increased use of occasional furniture, such as card, tea, side, Pembroke, pedestal, and sofa tables, alone would have changed the appearance of rooms. Add waist-high chests of drawers [bureaux], modest-size bookcases, tambour desks, china closets, sideboards, etc., and the change becomes pronounced. [p. 138]