Review by Francis J. Puig
The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700–1840

John A. Fleming. The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700–1840. Camden East, Ontario: Camden House Publishing; Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994. Distributed by Firefly Books. 179 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., appendixes, bibliography, index. $34.95.

John Fleming’s The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700–1840 is the first major monograph on Canadian furniture since the publication of Jean Palardy’s seminal The Early Furniture of French Canada. Despite Fleming’s long history as a collector and furniture historian, the book is a major disappointment. The publication lacks a scholarly approach, which could have made it an invaluable monograph for Canadian and American collectors, curators, and dealers. Fleming takes a highly personal approach to his study of Canadian furniture, an approach that appears to reflect a poor understanding of furniture history over the past twenty years as well as of current material culture approaches to the field. The reader is presented with an undocumented and unsubstantiated “aesthetic and psychological” analysis that purports to explain why Canadians preferred particular paint colors on furniture. The primary saving grace of the book is that it publishes many heretofore unknown pieces of furniture and that most of the photographs by James A. Chambers are of superb quality.^[1]

The monograph is organized with chapters on six specific subjects: “Settlement,” “Styles,” “Furniture,” “Surface, Colour and Decoration,” “Conclusion,” and “Epilogue.” Each of these is further broken down into separate essays. For example, the section titled “Settlement” is further divided into “The Houses” and “Interior Space.” Under “Styles,” the Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Régence, Louis XV, Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and Folk traditions are discussed. The “Furniture” section includes essays on woods, construction, hardware, and upholstery. Finally, the section titled “Surface, Colour and Decoration” also includes essays on “Painted Surfaces” and “Sculptural Decoration.”

The essays not specifically dealing with the analysis of furniture styles consolidate useful information. In several cases this information is not concisely available to scholars in this country. For instance, in the first essay titled “Settlement,” Fleming outlines the history of the French colony, including its settlement patterns, population makeup, and origins, by citing census material as well as contemporary primary sources. A similarly factual presentation of information appears in Fleming’s analysis of houses built by French settlers (pp. 28–35) and in his discussion of the interiors of these houses, where he makes a clear connection between house builders and the creators of large, frequently integral case furniture such as armoires. He makes this connection by citing building contracts calling for the creation of both structures and furnishings to go in them (see pp. 43–47). Contemporary travel accounts and inventories are also cited in this section, giving the reader a good understanding of lifestyles and concepts of interior decoration in rural Canada during both the French and British regimes into the nineteenth century.^[2]

In the chapter titled “Styles,” Fleming’s analysis changes tone. Although he outlines the court styles that influenced design in French Canada, he also makes comments that can be interpreted as ethnocentric and are not substantiated by analysis or comparison. For example, when comparing furniture forms made in French Canada with those made in the United States, he makes the following statement: “French furniture, as compared with English and German furniture, the two other major forms in colonial North America, gave to the early furniture of New France three general characteristics: exuberance of line, harmony of proportion . . . and the integration of decorative features with structure” (p. 52). Not only are such seemingly factual statements purely subjective, they also sound ethnocentric with their implied relegation of non-French furniture forms to a second-best category. Likewise, France is presented as a primary origin of the styles used in the United States and in England through statements such as “English furniture of the 18th century was influenced by French and Dutch designs”(p. 67). Certainly this influence may have been true to an extent, but the statement, like many others throughout the book, is presented glibly, without analysis, examples, or references to back up the author’s beliefs.

Fleming’s chapter titled “Furniture” includes a discussion of the furniture-making industry in Canada. Beginning with census information identifying occupations by crafts and continuing through apprenticeship records, he cites schools believed to have educated carpenters and cabinetmakers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and mentions a number of extant contracts between joiners and clients for the creation of furniture. Yet this section and a subsequent one titled “Construction” are notably weak in the analysis of the actual furniture under discussion. On page 83, for example, Fleming comments that “many of the surviving examples of French Canadian furniture have been executed with the greatest technical competence and a sure sense of design to the smallest unseen detail.” Earlier in the book he notes that the dating of furniture is approximate, “based upon an analysis of construction techniques, other material characteristics (types of wood, thickness of planks, use of pins, nails, glue, paints, colours and combinations of colours, layers of paint, et cetera) or style features that establish a terminus post . . .” (p. 21). Sadly, none of these construction details are explained in the appropriate chapter on furniture, or anywhere else in the book, or illustrated in photographic form. Indeed, many of these details are discussed only haphazardly in a small number of the object captions, leaving the reader without any sense of how frequently they occur or what patterns or generalizations might be deduced as a result of them; nor are there any photographs of construction details to allow the reader to observe what Fleming is referring to. Though the author’s assumptions may well be true, a book that purports to be a source of information on Canadian painted furniture should at least outline criteria with which to judge, date, and attribute furniture.

Some of these comments, furthermore, seem again very protective. By saying that Canadian furniture has been “executed with the greatest of technical competence” one might assume that Canadian furniture of the French period (before 1760, one would assume) is very finely constructed. In fact, Canadian furniture prior to and after 1760 is anything but finely crafted. By comparison to what was contemporaneously made in the United States, it is very crudely constructed. Drawer sides and bottoms and even fronts are planks, sometimes up to two-inches thick, and to describe them as executed with the greatest of technical competence is misleading.^[3] Rather than obfuscating this fact, Fleming might better have spent his time by clearly identifying and illustrating this feature and other characteristics of Canadian furniture and explaining them in terms of the technological and historical development of the Canadian colony.

In the following chapters on “Paint” and “Sculptural Decoration,” Fleming assigns great importance to the use of certain colors and decorative patterns. He writes: “The colours that predominated in 18th-century French Canada were the blues, green, and reds of 17th-century France. These are colours still identified with the natural world in the symbolic and psychological meanings, both sacred and secular” (p. 138). Throughout the chapter he makes reference to theory with respect to the use of color: For example, “the eye sees the greatest elementary beauty in simple colours: red, yellow, green and blue. . . . Blue, as the colour of the sky and secondarily of water, is associated in European tradition with fidelity and with things spiritual, while green has always been linked to youth, growth and hope” (pp. 119–20). He attempts to identify the use of certain colors with specific values and associations, some unconscious, made by Canadian consumers. Sadly, although Fleming is able to cite a number of sources for the importation of color pigments for the manufacture of paints in Canada before the English occupation of the 1760s, most of his documentation for the use of color postdates the Treaty of Paris and, in fact, appears in English/American publications dating after 1763. Very significantly, this section also lacks any reference to chemical analysis of the painted surfaces of the furniture illustrated in the book. In fact, the only paint analysis to appear in the book is presented in the object captions of the handful of pieces that belong to Canadian museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian Conservation Institute, or the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

In the preface to the book Fleming makes the disclaimer that he has “not tried . . . to lard a lean book ‘with the fat of others’ works’” (p. 10). Sadly, this is too true. The publication could have been the one scholars have been waiting for. It could have synthesized more than thirty years of Canadian scholarship since Palardy’s publication, but instead it is a wasted opportunity. Some attempt could have been made, for instance, to identify bodies of work, either by region or by maker. This identification could have occurred through the analysis of construction techniques, through a scientific analysis of woods used in stylistically related pieces, or with a serious and systematic chemical analysis of pigments used. None of this scholarship appears in the book except in an amateurish and haphazard way.

Francis J. Puig
University of South Florida