ANTIQUES - early American furniture - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, May, 2000 by Wendell Garrett

In Furnishing all should be with Propriety--Elegance should always be joined with a peculiar Neatness through the whole House, or otherwise an immense Expense may be thrown away to no Purpose, either in Use or Appearance; and with the same Regard any Gentleman may furnish as neat at a small Expense, as he can elegant and superb at a great one.

William Ince and John Mayhew,

The Universal System of Household Furniture, 1762

An unprecedented boom followed American independence, and with periodic fluctuations it carried the new nation through the first half of the next century. Architecture was then the most important of the arts, and for wealthy merchants and large landowners the house and its furniture presented a means of exhibiting their good taste and consequently raising their social status.

It was the owners of these impressive houses who created the demand and set the standard for fashionable furniture. Their taste was associated with simplicity of shapes and an instinctive sensitivity to proportion allied to a devotion to reason and good sense, for which Ince and Mayhew argued and the poet Alexander Pope pleaded:

Something there is more needful than expense

And something previous ev'n to taste--'tis sense.

The period was characterized by an obsessive attempt to arrive at the golden mean. As Lord Shaftesbury declared: "He who aspires to the character of a man of breeding and politeness is careful to form his judgments of arts and sciences upon right models of perfection." The model for furniture was of a pronouncedly architectural character, and the architectural model was the classical world. Broken pediments, pilasters, and cornices were the order of the day. Indeed, Batty Langley in the City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs (1740) insisted that cabinetmakers needed to understand architecture. "'Tis a very great Difficulty," he observed, "to find one in fifty of them that can make a Book-Case etc. indispensably true after any one of the Five Orders without being obliged to a Joiner for to set out the Work, and make his Templet to work by."

The main features of neoclassical furniture were extreme simplicity of outline, large uninterrupted surfaces that emphasized horizontal and vertical lines, the subordination of ornament to a minor role, and a stress on solidity. These were the characteristics that the English designer Richard Brown summarized in 1820 as "bold in outlines, rich and chaste in the ornaments, and durable from the rejection of little parts."

So restless was the search for new forms and so rapid were the changes in design that Thomas Martin in The Circle of the Mechanical Arts (1813) suggested that "were it practicable, it would be necessary that cabinet, like female fashions, should be published monthly."

Wendell Garrett