The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: Giving Attention to the City's Chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; And to Their Tools & Methods of WorkingHeuvel, Johannes
History
The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: Giving Attention to the City's Chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; And to Their Tools & Methods of Working
Heuvel, Johannes
Furniture making; Furniture workers -- Virginia -- Williamsburg; Furniture, Colonial -- Virginia -- Williamsburg
Putting together these and other bits and pieces, several conclusions
seem warranted: Williamsburg cabinetmakers made furniture not only to
order but for open sale in their shops; they probably spent more time
repairing furniture than in making it; they were by no means too proud
to undertake such incidental jobs as putting up and taking down
bedsteads and curtains. Finally, they were capable of producing any and
all of the major items of furniture: chairs, beds, chests, desks,
bookcases, clothes and china presses, tables, and candlestands.
While perhaps not all of them would have had occasion to make every
variety of the less common articles, some doubtless were called on for
spinning wheels, bootjacks, bowls and trenchers, cradles, toys, tools,
coffins, spice chests, fire screens, music stands, trunks, cellarettes,
looking-glass frames, and so on and on.
_THE LATEST LONDON STYLES_
Every swing in London fashions in clothing, music, wigs, and the
decorative arts was normally echoed a few years later by a similar but
muted swing in colonial fashions. In each case the peak of the vogue
(not necessarily the first evidence of it) in the colonies came a decade
or two after the same style had reached its height in London.
The eighteenth century was the golden age of furniture design in
England. The decorative tastes of the Restoration and of the reign of
William and Mary set the stage for the appearance at the opening of the
century of the curvaceous style known as Queen Anne. There followed a
succession of partly overlapping, sometimes ill-defined and sometimes
distinct styles in English furniture design and interior design. These
succeeding fashions have since become known by the names of reigning
monarchs or of men whose books of collected designs set or summarized
the predominant taste of the years in question. We know these styles,
and style periods, as early and late Georgian, Chippendale, Adam,
Hepplewhite, and Sheraton.
In the American colonies the Queen Anne style did not come into full
flower until 1725 or thereabouts. The “decorated Queen Anne” or early
Georgian substyles cannot be clearly discerned in colonial furniture
before the advent of “Chippendale” influence, about 1750, swept all
before it. Thomas Chippendale’s famous _Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s
Director_, published in 1754, was but one of a number of books of
designs issued in London and widely used in colonial cabinetmaking
shops. It was foremost among them, however. And even if such
characteristic features of colonial Chippendale as the claw-and-ball
foot, for example, do not appear in Chippendale’s book, his name has
become a label—perhaps ill-fitting—for the whole middle period of
colonial furniture making.
[Illustration: _Chairs._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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