London furniture 1966 - 1714

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2001 by Adam Bowett

Expansion of the East Indies trade was equally marked. The buying power of the English East India Company had always been restricted because English woolens and manufactured goods had little appeal in the East. In 1663 the Bullion Act was passed permitting the company to export gold and silver bullion, thereby vastly increasing its ability to purchase goods in China, India, and the Moluccas, the so-called Spice Islands of Malaysia. (8)

The combination of government policy and private enterprise made London an entrepot to rival or even overtake Amsterdam. London's vibrant economy exerted a powerful draw on Europeans. It is estimated that fifty thousand immigrants came to the city between 1660 and l689. (9) The largest group were Huguenots, many of them silk weavers, silversmiths, and furniture makers.

It has long been thought that the early years of English cabinetmaking were dominated by foreign craftsmen and that only gradually did English joiners acquire the skills to become cabinetmakers themselves. However, recent research has found scant evidence for this. Indeed, of the four cabinetmakers known to have supplied furniture to Charles II (r. 1660-1685) in the 1660s, all were English and at least two--Edward Traherne and John Burroughs--were members of the Joiners' Company Traherne's probate inventory, compiled after his death in 1675, reveals him to have been a maker of the first rank. His stock-in-trade included every type of fashionable furniture--cabinets, chests of drawers, tables, stands, and looking glasses--of which many were described as "inlaid" or "flower'd" with floral marquetry.(10) Among his many clients were Charles II and Queen Catherine, two of Charles's mistresses, several members of the government, and two future queens, Mary II and Anne." (11)

The trades were in theory all supervised and regulated by the livery companies, one for each trade. In practice, their authority was less than absolute, although they did play a leading role following the Great Fire. The most important of the furniture-making livery companies were the joiners and the upholsterers, with the turners and carvers somewhat less so. The surviving records of the Joiners' Company are particularly valuable and suggest that its members were at the forefront of most new developments in English furniture making, including the crucial transition from joinery to cabinetmaking.

In 1660 the cabinetmakers comprised a small and select group, but by 1700 cabinetmaking was regarded more or less as part of the standard repertory of the Joiners' Company In a petition submitted to Parliament that year the Joiners' Company boasted that its members were "bred up in the...Art or Mystery of making Cabinets, Scrutores, Tables, Chests and all other sorts of CABINETWORK in England, which of late Years they have arrived at so great a perfection as exceeds all Europe." (12)

One man who epitomized both the technical progress in cabinetmaking and the liberal ethos of the Joiners' Company was Gerrit Jensen (or Johnson). who was probably an immigrant from the Low Countries. He became a member of the Joiners' Company in 1667, (13) and by the 1680s he counted Charles II among his clients. In 1689 he was appointed "Cabinet Maker in ordinary" to William III, and in addition he worked for some of the wealthiest noble families in England. His surviving documented furniture is of the highest quality and in the most advanced style (see Pl. VII). Not surprisingly, he had professional contacts with leading Parisian furniture makers such as Pierre Gole (c. 1620-1684). When he died in 1715, Jensen was a rich man with property in London and Kent and a country house in Hammersmith. (14)