William C. Ketchum, Jr., and the Museum of American Folk Art. American Cabinetmakers: Marked American Furniture, 1640–1940. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995. 404 pp.; 350 bw illus., appendixes, bibliography, index. $45.00.
Hyperbole is frequently used on book jackets and promotional literature from publishers, but rarely has it been employed with more temerity than on the jacket for this volume. “American Cabinetmakers is one of the most important antiques books ever to be published. The first book to catalog and illustrate all known American wood furniture pieces that bear the signatures, labels, brands, impressions, or ink-stamp marks of their makers, it is an essential volume for serious collectors, antique dealers, auctioneers, museum personnel, researchers, and historical societies. . . . [It] is a classic in the antiques and collectibles field.” Rarely has the hype been so ill-deserved.
Books on craftsmen and their marks are popular and extremely useful in studying the decorative arts. Edwin AtLee Barber’s Marks of American Potters (Philadelphia: Patterson & White Co., 1904); Dorothy T. Rainwater’s Encyclopedia of American Silver Manufacturers (in various editions of 1966, 1975, and 1986); and Ledlie Irwin Laughlin’s Pewter in America: Its Makers and their Marks (Barre, Massachusetts: Barre Publishers, 1969) are classics in the field. It is comforting to have reliable reference works, such as these and many others that are thoroughly researched and conveniently arranged, on our shelves to answer the most basic questions. Furniture, however, has never been the subject of this sort of basic book on marks and craftsmen, and clearly the authors and publisher hope that collectors, antique dealers, museums, and others will buy this book to fill that void.
According to American Cabinetmakers’s foreword and introduction, the late director of the Museum of American Folk Art, Robert Bishop, began in the 1970s, with the Henry Ford Museum’s associate curator of furniture, Katherine B. Hagler, to accumulate illustrations, clippings, and notes on marked or labeled examples of American furniture. The scope of the project excluded cast- or wrought-iron furniture and examples of wicker, rattan, and “other alien materials.” It also excluded clock and musical instrument makers, unless they were known to have manufactured the furniture cases as well as the contents. Only the briefest details of the cabinetmakers’ histories were collected to supplement the marks. After Bishop’s death in 1991, the next director of the Museum of American Folk Art, Gerard C. Wertkin, discussed the possibility of completing Bishop’s compilation with William C. Ketchum, Jr., a prolific writer on various antiques subjects, whose credits include Hooked Rugs (1976), Western Memorabilia (1980), Collecting Bottles for Fun and Profit (1985), Collecting the 40s and 50s for Fun and Profit (1985), Holiday Ornaments and Antiques (1990), and Country Wreaths and Baskets (1991). With the acknowledged assistance of a number of the museum’s students in the Folk Art Institute, Ketchum has produced this 404-page book.
I will not waste the reader’s time with a detailed criticism or enumeration of the errors of fact in American Cabinetmakers. The list would, simply, be much too long. There is no evidence of any original research in this book. It appears to be a cut-and-paste job assembled from secondary sources, books, magazines, and newspapers, with virtually no attempt to confirm details of the individually marked or labeled pieces of furniture or the perfunctory “biographical” information about the craftsmen.
To illustrate this point I mention only the entries on “Silas” Ingals of Vermont and Francis Jackson of Pennsylvania, which appear, not coincidentally, on the same page (182). The mark “S.I.” attributed to Silas Ingals was actually used by a Vermont chairmaker named Samuel Ingals, who worked in Danville. An accurate biographical entry for Samuel Ingals can be found in Charles A. Robinson’s Vermont Cabinetmakers Before 1855: A Checklist (Shelburne, Vermont: Shelburne Museum, 1994), an indispensable work that I highly recommend. An arrow-back Windsor armchair labeled by Francis Jackson of Easton, Pennsylvania, and owned by the William Penn Memorial Museum (not the “State Museum of Pennsylvania”), Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is cited as the basis for the entry on this craftsman. The author claims that “Nothing further is known of Jackson’s shop”; however, that very piece of furniture at the museum has a printed paper label with the following text: “FRANCIS JACKSON'S/CHAIR MANUFACTORY,/NORTHAMPTON STREET, EASTON. / Where Windsor and Fancy —— bot- / tom Chairs are done in the neatest man- / ner; also Spinning wheels, Wool wheels, / Cut reels, and all Kinds of Turning. / The best Copal Varnish, and all Kinds / of colors for graining, for sale. / [and an illegible printer’s name in Easton].” Nothing further is known? Indeed!
Bibliographic “sources” at the end of this volume list the secondary works that provided the references to approximately 1,500 craftsmen in the book. Though important volumes such as Ethel Hall Bjerkoe’s The Cabinetmakers of America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1957); Charles F. Montgomery’s American Furniture, The Federal Period, 1785–1825 (New York: Viking Press, 1966); and John Bivins, Jr.’s The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina, 1700–1850 (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1988) are included, the significant omissions are staggering: Charles J. Semowich, American Furniture Craftsmen Working Prior to 1920: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984); Charles G. Dorman, Delaware Cabinetmakers and Allied Artisans, 1655–1855 (Wilmington, Del.: Historical Society of Delaware, 1960); Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988); and Sharon Darling, Chicago Furniture: Art, Craft, & Industry, 1833–1983 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1984). A simple look at Beatrice B. Garvan’s Federal Philadelphia, 1785–1825: The Athens of the Western World (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987) might have revealed to the authors the fine mahogany chest-on-chest illustrated there (p. 72) made and signed by the African-American cabinetmaker, Thomas Gross, Jr., working in Philadelphia in 1807 and later.
Lastly, American Cabinetmakers is an affront to me and my colleagues and our predecessors at the Decorative Arts Photographic Collection in the library at Winterthur and at the many other major repositories of documentation on American furniture, such as the marvelous libraries at MESDA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why would a supposed reference book, which boasts a museum as co-author, fail to utilize the most basic, well-known, and public libraries on decorative arts in America?
Bert Denker
Winterthur