Our evolving understanding of untouched furniture surfaces

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2000 by John T. Kirk

The study and collecting of early American furniture began at the end of the nineteenth century. Because research escalated rapidly during the twentieth century we can now, with some surety, answer the basic furniture questions of how, when, and where a given piece was made, and even assess fairly accurately its balance of local and European influences. Of course, there will always be refinements to our understanding--for example a group of pieces thought to be by one maker or produced in one town will be reassigned, dates will be adjusted, and some pieces will be judged to be of greater or lesser value than previously thought. However, the general historical pattern of American furniture making has been laid out. [1]

In this article I wish to explore in detail the evolving understanding of what is today near the top of the list of questions most scholars, dealers, and collectors ask themselves when looking at an early piece: Is the surface original, and if so, how should it be treated?

In 1975 I wrote in The Impecunious Collector's Guide to American Antiques a chapter entitled "Buy It Ratty and Leave It Alone," addressing the then-current practice of removing original paint and its patina from furniture. I featured in the discussion the chest over drawer shown in Plate I, which bears traces of everything that ever happened to it. Not only is the surface untouched, but the front has large plane marks and beautiful purple reddish paint.

Several factors had converged at the end of the nineteenth century to create a mindset that fostered the stripping of paint from early furniture. There was a greater emphasis on cleanliness, as new household machines made the removal of dirt simpler, and easy-to-clean surfaces changed the character of how serviceable objects were treated, particularly in bathrooms and kitchens. At the same time, the English arts and crafts movement encouraged an emphasis on the handmade and the visibility of the primary material. Its history-conscious designers drew inspiration from early rural products that seemed to express honesty in their workmanship and the materials they employed. (It was the first instance of rural work influencing urban high-style objects.) When the style moved from Europe to this country in the late 1880s, American practitioners quite naturally looked to our early rural expressions. With the style's double emphasis on the natural and the basic, it was easy to ignore the fact that many of the forms t hat inspired arts and crafts designs had originally been painted. That they had acquired wear and dirt over the years only furthered a happy disdain for an early finish. It was inevitable that the prevailing social and aesthetic judgments required that when early pieces were brought out of basements, attics, and barns and given historical or heirloom status, they had to have their dirty surfaces removed. The new love of natural wood also made it logical that the concurrent colonial revival style would favor plain, varnished surfaces even when reproducing forms that had originally been painted.

Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painted pieces were made of two or more woods because each had a special structural quality needed in the design. A windsor chair, for example, might employ maple for the turned stretchers, legs, and supports under the fronts of the arms because its closed-grain character turned beautifully; pine, yellow poplar, or another soft wood made the shaping of the saddle seat easy; and springy ash or hickory might be used for the back spokes and top rail. A unifying coat of paint gave the chair a strong silhouette while covering the varying colors and grain patterns of the woods. The late nineteenth-and twentieth-century collectors who stripped the old paint, and the reproducers of early forms, reveled in the contrasts the different woods produced (see Fig. 1).

After I wrote "Buy It Ratty and Leave It Alone," many collectors, and therefore dealers, took the ideas it expressed seriously, and, for a time, an untouched, grungy surface became more in demand, and even came to be known as a "Kirk surface." The growing preference for these surfaces was not unique to American furniture. For example, there was a concurrent increasing appreciation and display in this country of African masks and figures with accumulated surfaces. [2]

The predilection for the ratty and heavily layered surface grew in part out of the late 1950s and 1960s preference for the instinctive, scumbled, overlaid, and often brooding works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg (1925-) and Jasper Johns. The latter's 1957 work Drawer (P1. II), in which a board with two knobs is embedded in the canvas to suggest a real drawer, illustrates Johns's typical worked surface. Using pigment in hot wax, or encaustic, he built up a layered, monochromatic, visually intriguing surface. Seeing this kind of work intensified my commitment to preaching the aesthetic value of untouched early painted furniture.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s the love and monetary worth of the ratty and dirty expanded from painted furniture to pieces that were highly styled and made to show off expensive woods, such as walnut, cherry, and mahogany. By the late 1990s the acceptance of the grungy was so widespread that on December 10, 1999, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "Collecting, Today's Art Lesson: Grime Pays," with a subheading announcing "A Status Symbol: Filthy Furniture."