The painted furniture of Maine

Magazine Antiques, May, 2000 by Edwin A. Churchill, Thomas B. Johnson

In the preface to his seminal study on the subject, American Painted Furniture, 1660-1880, of 1972, Dean A. False Jr. wrote that he "hoped this work will serve as a springboard for further deeper studies of countless clutches of local painted examples, each one of which adds its own distinctive flavor to the variety of the whole field."[1] In False's native Maine, the next generation of scholarship produced Simple Forms and Vivid Colours in 1983, which firmly documented a number of pieces of painted furniture to their centers of production in the state, sometimes even identifying the actual makers and decorators.[2] Since then, additional research on the furniture itself, its makers, patterns of ownership and use, decorative sources, and geographical and economic influences has provided a fuller picture, including some new interpretive models.[3]

One of the fruits of this work has been the discovery of a far more complex pattern in the regional production of painted decoration, one that takes into consideration design sources, geography, and time periods. Much of the painted furniture made in Maine before about 1800 seems to have been plain painted. Most of the surviving pieces are decorated in earth oxides of red or brown, although a "blue painted chest" listed in the 1778 estate inventory of John Lee of Gardinerstown suggests a wider palette of colors. [4] About 1800 some painters also began to try to emulate more stylish formal pieces by mimicking fine wood or burl gaining. For example, the decorator of the tea table in Plate III, from the town of Buckfield in Oxford County attempted to reproduce book-matched veneers on the scalloped skirt. The legs are painted in the same brown and black as the top, to represent a straight-grained mahogany although the top is now much worn. A similar spirit is evident on a headboard of about 1800 found in the coa stal community of Searsport (Pl. IV) and on a somewhat earlier high chest painted with a highly stylized wood-grain pattern. [5] A notable exception to the impulse to reproduce graining is illustrated by the chest from York shown in Plate II, which retains a very early, if not original, crosshatched design painted in black across the maple drawer fronts. The chest is the work of an as-yet unidentified maker working at approximately the same time as the better-known York cabinetmaker Samuel Sewall (1724- 1814). [6]

By the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, decoratively painted furniture had been strongly embraced across the state, but the various expressions did not find equal representation everywhere. In some localities, allover trompe l'oeil treatments predominated, others favored neoclassical motifs borrowed from formal sources, and still others valued more individual or folk expressions.

In the southwestern part of the State, including the early urban center of Portland, painted decoration tended to be more formal and sophisticated. The longest settled part of the state, the region was dominated by a relatively wealthy population of Congregationalists and whigs, who looked outward and south to Boston for role models. Their influence is reflected in decorated furniture that exudes a sense of quality, control, and, above all, good taste. Although unusually colorful, the small two-drawer stand in Plate I epitomizes these attributes. The design is carefully laid out and executed--the floral and foliate motifs are painterly and pleasing, as are the stylized vines flanking the drawers. The crosshatching is typical of painted decoration on furniture from southwestern Maine. Such a piece would have found a place in most proper households in the region in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Not surprisingly, there is a paucity of decorated furniture from Washington and Hancock Counties in the sparsely settled far northeastern part of the state, often referred to as Downeast Maine. The isolated inhabitants of this region were predominantly poor, conservative, and cautious. Dependent on those to the southwest for supplies and support, and with minimal resources, they tended toward simplified forms and plain colors. Representative of the conservative decoration on the few surviving examples is a washstand by Benjamin Sawyer and Thomas Colson of Thomaston, which has muted red-black graining enhanced with a thin yellow line of striping and a simpler bronze-stenciled rosette on the splashboard. [7]

Between these two regions lies central and west-central Maine. Incorporating the Androscoggin and Kennebec River basins, it was an area where democratic and populist political thought mixed with fundamental and sometimes radical religious sects, including Baptists, Shakers, and Cochranites, Not infrequently, its inhabitants were at odds with the elite of southwestern Maine and Massachusetts. They were less inhibited by social protocol and thus favored designs that were more spontaneous, bolder, and more colorful. The dramatic decoration produced in the region had no metropolitan antecedents and can best be described as folk inspired, often to the point of being almost abstract (see Pl. VI). The washstand in Plate VII, made by John Williams of Mount Vernon, is a case in point. Its exuberantly shaped backsplash, with its undulating foliate and floral decoration and starburst motifs on the ears, captures the spontaneity of western Maine design, as do the quickly applied leaf elements on the legs and the hurried ly painted yellow and green reserves on the square sections of the legs. Over and over, decorators in the area outlined the basic lines of an object with vivid color combinations--green and yellow, black and red, green and red, and dark and light green.