The Livingstons' best New York City Federal furniture

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Philip Zimmerman

Except for an occasional sideboard, secretary, chair, or Chippendale-style card table, early New York City furniture is seldom listed among the celebrated achievements of American furniture makers - at least not until the arrivals of Duncan Phyfe (1768-1854) by 1792 and Charles Honore Lannuier (1779-1819) in 1803. Although it is possible that the growing metropolis of New York City lacked talented furniture makers and a demand for fine furniture until the 1790s and early 1800s, it is also possible that furniture historians have overlooked or misidentified at least a few important examples from the city. Certainly the attention lavished upon Phyfe and Lannuier has left in the shadows a significant body of New York Federal furniture by other craftsmen.

Two sofas and a "Lady's Cabinet Dressing Table" (the latter based on Plate 49 of Thomas Sheraton's Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing-Book of 1793) contribute to a broader understanding and appreciation of New York Federal furniture. The three pieces, which belong to the New York Historical Society in New York City but are in storage, came under discussion in 1991, when several furniture authorities were asked to assess the society's holdings. Their opinions of the sofas and cabinet ranged from late eighteenth- or early nineteenth century New York City manufacture to reproductions of uncertain origin made about 1890.

The age of a piece of furniture cannot be established with any reliability by broken parts and dirty finishes. Even oxidation of unfinished wood surfaces - a condition that is notoriously difficult to imitate by artificial means - cannot measure time with any useful degree of accuracy because it does not occur at a steady rate.(1) Far more important is an evaluation of such physical features as construction techniques and tool marks; nails, the woods used, and other aspects of materials; and matters of design.

The two sofa frames are constructed differently, but none of the differences are inconsistent with Federal furniture-making practices. The sofa in Plates I and Ia has open corner blocks and two beech braces between beach and ash rails (see Pl. V). The other sofa (Pls. II, IIa) has yellow poplar corner blocks and four cherry braces running front to back between ash seat rails (see P1. VI). The inlaid tablets in the crest mils depict the same motifs but numerous differences exist in their execution, specifically in the amount and manner of scratch-work detail, the use of hot-sand shading on one, and the curvature of the bell flowers. Only the sofa in Plate II has rosettes carved in the arm terminals.

The materials and construction of the upholstery on the sofas shed some light on the date of their manufacture. The upholstery fabrics match in a few essential and critical ways. Minor variations do not mask the fact that the tapestry coverings on the seats and backs are from the same factory and period; specifically they were made by the Aubusson factories in Aubusson, France, probably in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The backs and seats are covered by full panels of the same size, and the covering on the insides of the arms are cut and pieced from different tapestries. The outside of the back of both sofas is covered with the same red moreen or harateen. A cut velvet, installed to show the blue underside that matches the blue ground of the woven covers, is used on the outside of the arms on one of the sofas and is stitched to the seat and back panels of the other sofa. There are no extraneous nail holes in the frame of the sofa in Plates II and IIa, confirming that all of the existing upholstery is the first and only applied to the frame. The front tack line on the other sofa (Pls. I, Ia) has been reset, a dust cover removed from the bottom, and the red panels on the outside of the arms appear to have been altered, suggesting a possible repair. The shanks and heads of all the decorative brass tacks, which are original, are cast in one piece, in keeping with manufacturing techniques predating the Civil War. Most important, both sofas have narrow linen webbing applied in an open-weave pattern that is typical of American and English upholstery of the early nineteenth century and before. Later nineteenth-century upholstery, by contrast, usually employs wide jute webbing tightly woven together.(2)

Despite the obvious differences in their construction and the execution of the inlays, the two sofas should be considered a pair. The differences between them could be explained by any number of specific circumstances that are presently impossible to determine: workers in the same large shop could have employed different techniques; the two sofas could have been made sequentially; or they could have been made in two different shops at the same time.(3)

The lady's dressing cabinet (Pls. VIII, VIIIa) is among the most complex pieces of furniture made in Federal America, reproducing the design in Sheraton's book to a degree that surpasses the renowned and often-published Baltimore example shown in Plate IX, which essentially combines the top of Sheraton's design with a sideboard base.(4) Sheratons description of his plate provides informative commentary about the piece, noting: