In 1978 Robert Blair St. George published an article in which he attributed a group of early turned chairs to Ephraim Tinkham II (1649–1713) of Plymouth and Middleborough in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Not content merely to cite the relevant objects and documentation, St. George proposed a reevaluation of what might half-seriously be termed the “Wallace Nutting rules” of early American turned chair aesthetics:
1. Seventeenth-century chairs with posts of greater diameter are earlier and more valuable.
2. Seventeenth-century chairs with decorative spindles below the seat (“Brewster” chairs) are distinguished from those with spindles above the seat only (“Carver” chairs), and most Brewster chairs are more valuable than most Carver chairs.
3. Brewster and Carver chairs are earlier and more valuable than almost all seventeenth-century slat-back chairs with posts of comparable diameter.
In other words, Nutting thought of these variations as discrete “types” in a fixed temporal sequence; Brewsters preceded Carvers, and both preceded slat-back chairs. Why he valued earlier chairs more highly than later ones is unclear. Perhaps Nutting thought earlier ones were dignified by association with the founders of Plymouth Colony, like William Brewster, William Bradford, John Carver, Myles Standish, and John Churchill. All these patriarchs reputedly owned armchairs now located at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth. The popular terms “Brewster” and “Carver” used by Nutting derive from two of the Pilgrim Hall examples, although it is not apparent when these antiquarian terms entered popular usage.[1]
St. George rightly pointed out that the Tinkham shop tradition included variants that did not conform to Nutting’s notions. Chairs with essentially the same ground plan and post format could feature two tiers of spindles in the back, one tier under the arms, and one tier under the seat; only one tier of spindles in the back; or slats in the back and spindles under the arms and below the seat. The latter variant is the most unusual in this shop tradition. Nutting owned and published a slat-back example, which he termed a “semi-Brewster,” but offered no explanation of how it fitted into his stylistic and dating system. St. George suggested that all these variants were available simultaneously and that Tinkham may have used prefabricated posts to assemble chairs in whatever format the customer desired. St. George also asserted that Tinkham employed the same pattern for all his posts.[2]
Over the last twenty years, several related chairs have emerged from Plymouth County families, including one example that St. George knew only from an old photograph (fig. 1). These chairs have expanded the repertoire of design and ornament as well as the probable date range of the Tinkham shop tradition. The recent discovery of Netherlandish and New England antecedents has also helped place these chairs in a broader cultural and stylistic context.
It now appears that the Tinkham shop tradition began well before Ephraim’s apprenticeship, which probably commenced about 1662 or 1663. Although his master has not been identified, it seems fairly certain this anonymous tradesman introduced chairmaking styles and practices that persisted well into the eighteenth century. Ephraim Tinkham thus represents the “second generation” of this artisanal tradition. The myriad stylistic sources manifest in these chairs suggest that the tradition may have experienced temporary “aberrations” due to outside influences at several junctures. In short, the extraordinary variety encompassed by the tradition is the cumulative achievement of four or five shops over perhaps seventy years rather than the collective experience of one individual. We will, nevertheless, continue to use the generic term “Tinkham” to describe this chairmaking school and its products.
This article departs from St. George’s model in several regards. Although other chairmaking traditions probably produced slat-back examples as early as 1640, all of the Tinkham ones date after 1700. The fully turned chairs influenced by Boston examples appear to be the earliest ones in the Tinkham group. It is unclear whether Tinkham chairs with two tiers of spindles in the back predate those with one tier, but careful comparison of all traits suggests that one-tier backs are either later or are not represented by earlier surviving examples. Establishing a stylistic chronology for Tinkham chairs is further complicated by the fact that some makers were regressive in their application of certain ornamental details, such as finial turnings.
Although scholars have identified the European design sources for many seventeenth-century American case pieces, they have done little to verify the antecedents of contemporary turned chairs. This is understandable given the paucity of turned chairs in European museums and the almost total lack of documented examples in England and the Netherlands. Fortunately, Dutch chairs can be analyzed by examining genre paintings. The lack of documented Continental turned chairs is unfortunate, because the historical record suggests that Dutch turned chairs were popular throughout Europe and were exported widely from the late Middle Ages until the eighteenth century. The Dutch undoubtedly established the basic three-post and four-post formulae for turned chairs and successfully competed with new styles emanating from Paris after 1670 by developing rush-seated, high-backed versions of upholstered prototypes. In many instances, it is extremely difficult to tell whether a seventeenth-century turned chair with an English history was made there or in the Netherlands. In most instances, the more stylish or well made the object, the more likely it is to be Dutch.[3]
The Dutch chair illustrated in figure 2 has no provenance, but it provides exact parallels for most of the details found on Tinkham chairs. Since Tinkham’s master probably arrived in New England during the 1620s or 1630s, the Dutch chair cannot be regarded as an antecedent; nevertheless, it is likely that Tinkham’s master and the maker of the Dutch chair were separated by only three or four apprenticeships from an ancestral shop in a major Netherlandish urban center. The large number of Dutch and Rhenish artisans that migrated to English ports between 1560 and 1640 render this idea rather more plausible than not.[4]
The proportions of the Dutch chair are strikingly similar to those of fully developed, second-generation Tinkham chairs, such as the Winslow example (see fig. 1). As St. George noted, many (but not all) Tinkham chairs are relatively narrow at the rear and wide at the front—in other words, they have a strong trapezoidal splay. The Dutch chair exhibits a peculiar approach wherein the front posts are vertical but the rear posts have a distinct backward rake, presumably for comfort. Many of the Tinkham chairs have layback, but all four of their posts are tilted to the rear (see fig. 1). These chairs sometimes have raked arms like those of the Dutch example, although none display the same labor-intensive series of five diminishing spindles under the arm.
Setting aside gross characteristics of the frame, the Dutch chair’s turned ornaments provide exact parallels for the following “Tinkham” ones: the ball-reel-ball finial (fig. 3); the bilaterally symmetrical vase-ball-vase and the column-ball-column spindles (figs. 4, 5, respectively); the ovoid pommels or grips (fig. 6); the ball turning flanked by filleted coves on the posts (fig. 7); and minor groupings of fine, scored accents. One feature of the Dutch chair that is absent in the Tinkham group is the board seat held in plowed seat rails. The side rails on the Dutch chair have round tenons that intersect the rectangular tenons of the front rail (fig. 8). This structure also occurs on a small number of Plymouth County turned chairs, notably the Bradford-Brewster-Standish group at Pilgrim Hall and the Reverend James Keith chair at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Given the striking similarities between the Tinkham chairs and the Dutch example, it is possible that turners in the Tinkham tradition made board-seated chairs that simply have not survived.[5]
All of the Tinkham features that deviate from the Dutch model are either innovations influenced by other design sources or the result of simplification. In some instances, turners in the Tinkham tradition abandoned these departures and returned to earlier designs. A Boston great chair (fig. 9) and two Tinkham examples (figs. 10, 11) illustrate these points. The finials of the Boston chair are quite similar to the applied colonettes on Boston case pieces attributed to London-trained joiners Ralph Mason and Henry Messinger and London-trained turner Thomas Edsall. Several other chairs with London-inspired details and eastern Massachusetts histories survive. Not only do they reinforce the Boston attribution of the aforementioned example, but they help distinguish that city’s chairs from those produced in Salem, Plymouth (exemplified by the Bradford-Brewster-Standish and Tinkham groups), and other towns and communities in the region.[6]
Unlike most Boston turned chairs, the one illustrated in figure 9 has two tiers of spindles in the back and one tier between the second and bottom front stretchers. It is easy to infer that a chair of this type inspired the progenitor of the Tinkham tradition to modify the traditional Anglo-Dutch back plan (see fig. 2), perhaps as early as 1650–1660. A turned great chair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 10) and a related example that descended in the Bartlett family (figs. 11, 12) show this Boston influence at its strongest. Not only do they have the same distribution of spindles as the Boston chair, but their posts display the same heavy urns with flanges seen on the posts of the urban prototype (fig. 9). The finials of these Tinkham chairs also incorporate a second flange element that is an abbreviated version of the one on the finials of the Boston chair. Were it not for the finial turnings of the Tinkham chair shown in figure 10, one might attribute it to Boston on the basis of its urn spindles. On the Bartlett chair, the maker pulled back from such thorough-going Boston influence. He modified the urn turnings on the posts and finials but retained two variants of his standard spindle turning—the vasiform kind and the columnar kind.[7]
The Bartlett chair and the example shown in figure 13 are the only Tinkham chairs that incorporate both kinds of spindle. The Bartlett chair also suggests that spindles with relatively straight bodies may predate those with more robust vasiform shapes (figs. 14, 15). This observation may seem routine, were it not for the fact that many scholars interpret straight-bodied turnings as “degenerate” versions of earlier ones with pronounced ogee curves.
The chair shown in figure 13 is quite close to the Bartlett chair but reverts to the base tradition in the form of the spindles and the somewhat edited cove-ball-cove turnings on the posts. It is also the earliest example with a ball-reel-ball finial and a giant, stepped-in pillar turning on the front posts—details that became commonplace later in the tradition. Because this finial has strong affinities to those used on many Boston baroque chairs made after 1695, it represents the latest stylistic feature of the Tinkham chair and places it solidly in the 1695–1710 date range. By contrast, the stepped-in pillars on the front posts of the chair may be a conservative detail. Related pillars occur on earlier Plymouth County cupboards and tables, which suggests that Tinkham and his master may have provided ornaments for local joiners. These stepped-in pillar turnings may also represent Boston influence, because the joiners and turners of Plymouth County copied many features of Boston case pieces.[8]
As the Tinkham chairs illustrated in figures 10 and 11 suggest, the design format consisting of two tiers of spindles in the back, one tier under the arms, and one tier between the second and bottom front stretcher may have been derived from a Boston prototype rather than a Dutch one. On the Dutch chair shown in figure 2, the principal spindle tiers are connected to the seat rails and are quite tall relative to the space they occupy. On the other hand, the purported Boston source has no spindles under the arms (see fig. 9). Adding to this confusion about the probable sources for the two-tiered spindle back in the Tinkham tradition is the existence of a one-tiered version, epitomized by the so-called John Carver chair (fig. 16). Like the William Bradford chair, the Carver example was venerated as a Pilgrim relic before the founding of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth in 1820. Obviously this chair did not belong to John Carver (d. 1621) but is a Tinkham example of about 1690 to 1700. The great pillar motif on the front posts is typical of the group, and the three large spindles in the back are similar to the smaller columnar spindles on earlier Tinkham chairs. Missing are the pommels or hand grips, which usually have diameters that exceed those of the front posts by more than an inch. Dubbed “mushrooms” by collectors of Nutting’s generation, great pommels are most often associated with slat-back armchairs from Norwich, Connecticut. Such grips were wasteful of materials and labor because they were turned from the solid rather than applied. To some extent, however, they visually compensate for the otherwise plain format of chairs without many spindles. A slightly later chair that descended in the Ellis family of Carver, Massachusetts (fig. 17), indicates what the Carver chair’s pommels may have looked like before they were whittled away. Despite its simplified format, the Carver chair has the same finials as the Bartlett chair (figs. 11, 16) and the example shown in figure 10, thus it must date somewhat before 1695.[9]
A group of three chairs fleshes out a progression of the two-tiered design between about 1700 and 1720. One example (fig. 1) descended in the Winslow, Hayward, Russell, and Jackson families of Plymouth and has long been known as the Isaac Winslow chair. Of all the Tinkham chairs, it has the most vigorous ogee spindle turnings. Like the design format of the chairs shown in figures 9 and 11, these spindles may represent another instance of Boston influence. The Winslow chair is quite similar to one with columnar turnings and an oral tradition of descent in the Churchill family of Plymouth (fig. 18). These chairs share many features, but the finials and the slightly softer cove-ball-cove turnings on the posts of the Churchill chair suggest that it is later than the Winslow example. The finials of the Churchill example have lost the extra flange and top button (compare figs. 3 and 18); however, they resemble the finials of the Dutch chair (fig. 2). This elemental reduction may represent the waning of Boston influence and a return to the archetypal finial design. The Churchill chair retains the great pillar turning found on the posts of later examples in the Tinkham tradition. Another two-tiered chair that reputedly descended in the Fairbanks family of Dedham and Wrentham, Massachusetts, may date as late as 1710 (fig. 19). The spindles on the Fairbanks chair are inverted versions of the columnar ones on the Churchill chair, and its finials are simplified by the elimination of the large, lower ball. Microanalysis of pigment samples taken from the Fairbanks chair indicates that the spindles were painted black and that the rest of the object was unpainted. This instance is the first in which the “tan-and-ebony” color scheme associated with seventeenth-century case furniture has been documented on a turned chair.[10]
The latest Tinkham chairs, which date between 1720 and 1730, display a number of odd innovations. Two chairs (figs. 20, 21) have two sawn, strigiform balusters in the back, highly simplified ornaments, and finials capped with baroque buttons. Other late chairs have slats, including Nutting’s “semi-Brewster” (fig. 22) and an ungainly chair with two slats, a turned top rail, and eccentric finials (fig. 23). A number of these chairs (fig. 24) have slanted turned arms that hark back to the Dutch example; however, slanted arms also appear in a number of eighteenth-century New England chairmaking traditions.
The late Tinkham chair shown in figure 24 has long been associated with Governor William Bradford (1588/89–1657) of Plymouth, although his birth and death dates refute that tradition. A nineteenth-century deacon reported that one of Bradford’s granddaughters brought the chair to Windham, Connecticut, from Massachusetts. Research by R. Ridgeway, however, suggests that the chair came from the governor’s great granddaughter, Elizabeth Adams (1681–1766), who married the first minister of Windham, the Reverend Samuel Whiting (1670–1725). The chair became the pulpit chair of the Windham church, where it has remained until recently. As these later chairs suggest, turners trained in the Tinkham tradition may have continued working well into the eighteenth century, but after 1730 their designs are not readily distinguishable from others that also were subject to strong metropolitan influence.[11]
One working method of the Tinkham turners is distinctive and may help identify later chairs in the tradition. St. George asserted that “the scribed lines used by [Tinkham] . . . to demarcate the location of turned details . . . are in the same relative positions on all the chairs”; however, none of the pattern lines on chairs sampled for this article match. Unlike many turned chairs, which were made with a pattern stick formulated in the master’s shop and copied by his apprentices, their apprentices, and so on, the Tinkham chairs appear to have been laid out with a tool handle. Presumably, the turner used the length of the handle as a constant and calibrated fractional amounts by eye. This practice may explain the boring mistakes evident on at least three of the armchairs (figs. 25-27). Turners used scribed lines to locate their mortises and usually bored their joints either above or below the lines to prevent the mortises from intersecting where two horizontal members (stretchers or seat lists) enter the post at the same level. Most turners used wedges to clamp pairs of posts in a low assembly bench and aligned and bored the mortises simultaneously. Considering the rarity and complexity of large, intricately turned armchairs like the Tinkham ones and the somewhat pragmatic layout and production techniques described above, it is understandable that a turner might misbore one or more mortises, especially if he was in a hurry; nevertheless, the high incidence of boring errors seen in the Tinkham tradition is striking and demands more thorough investigation.[12]
The newly discovered Bartlett family chair and its Dutch prototype extend the stylistic chronology and probable date range of the Tinkham tradition and challenge St. George’s assertion that all this furniture could have been produced during the working life of one individual. New examples may turn up that will confuse or alter the analysis and dating proposed here, but that does not negate the importance of such exercises. Much more research needs to be presented and debated before scholars can fully understand eastern Massachusetts turned seating made before 1700.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Robert Blair St. George, Peggy Baker, Caroline Kardell, Jeremy Bangs, John Sinkler, George Neumann, Robert Bartlett Freeland, Fred and Anne Vogel, Gertrude Bancroft, Dudley and Constance Godfrey, Alfred Fredette, Henry and Lorene Cone, Eddy Nicholson, and John and Marie Vander Sande for their help at various stages of researching and writing this article. We are especially grateful for the help provided by Sophie Davidson, Peter Follansbee, Gavin Ashworth, and Luke Beckerdite.
