Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman. American Rococo, 1750—1775: Elegance in Ornament. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992. Distributed by Abrams. XV + 288 pp.; 250 bw and color illus., bibliography, exhibition checklist, index. $60.00.
During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, American artisans produced some of the most richly ornamented furniture, silver, textiles, and other household furnishings that many colonists had ever seen. Even today, these artifacts-now termed rococo in style-capture our imagination as much for the technological achievements they represent as for their artistry. Despite decades of scholarship in the field of American decorative arts, a serious and inclusive treatment of this important material had never been attempted until Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman wrote American Rococo, 1750—1775: Elegance in Ornament. Essentially a catalogue, the book was produced as a companion to an exhibition of the same name organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Using essays, catalogue entries, and high-quality photographs Of 173 artifacts, Heckscher and Bowman open some new doors for the reader and offer fascinating insights into the origin and meaning of the rococo style in America. They tap into several little-used resources of information and gather together the facts from a number of earlier, widely scattered studies. Yet in their attempt to present a broad summary of this remarkably diverse subject, the authors fail in important ways as well.
In a brief introductory essay, Heckscher and Bowman recount the Italian and French origins of rococo ornament and its transferal into British design vocabularies via immigrant Huguenot craftsmen. Matthias Lock and Henry Copland are noted for their roles in developing the initial British interpretations of the style, and, of course, Thomas Chippendale, William Trice and John Mayhew, Robert Manwring, and their peers are appraised as disseminators of the rococo through Britain's trade shops and great houses.
Heckscher and Bowman next trace the movement of rococo taste to the colonies by means of published designs, imported goods, and migrating tradesmen. In America, they note that the "adoption of the rococo focused almost exclusively on the style's ornamental motifs-shells and rocaille, scrollwork, acanthus leaves, and other flora and fauna, often in asymmetrical compositions." Moreover, we are told, "only in and around the major cities were the necessary ingredients in place to cultivate [its] development," the most fertile areas being Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and their environs.
The balance of the book is devoted to catalogue entries for the various media produced in the rococo taste, with chapters dedicated to architecture, engraving, silver, furniture, and a final section on iron, glass, and porcelain. These efforts are, in many instances, filled with valuable observations. For example, Bowman's remarks on engraving illuminate the topic and clearly demonstrate the importance of trade cards, bookplates, and other printed ephemera to an early distribution of the rococo in America. Similarly, her remarks on American rococo silver, its inspiration via British imports, and its regional variations are thought provoking. She also convincingly argues for the seminal role of immigrant British journeymen in the sudden appearance of sophisticated rococo ornament on silver from some long-established American shops and points out that in many instances newly arrived journeymen were more accomplished at the craft than their colonial masters. The furniture entries, written by Heckscher, account for more than one-third of the text and nearly half of the book's illustrations. Broken into regional groups, each with its own preliminary essay, the material is further subdivided by function. Among the forms Heckscher explores in this part of the work. is the portrait frame, a natural vehicle for the carved confections of the rococo movement, and one that has been too little studied in the past. Using surviving bills and other evidence, Heckscher is able to document the carvers of several important frames from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and his observations will almost certainly lead to further carving attributions for works produced in those cities. An exploration of the carving and gilding trades in late colonial Philadelphia is also useful and, as in the discussion of silversmithing, makes clear the importance of immigrant British craftsmen to the development of the city's unusually florid rococo furniture.
These and other important contributions aside, it must be noted that American Rococo suffers from several important defects, not the least of which is its narrow definition of the term "rococo." The authors note early in the book that Chippendale described his own designs as a mixture of the Chinese, Gothic, and French or Modern tastes, but the first two components are rarely mentioned in the present work. Although the French taste dominated American rococo productions, there were important passages of Chinese and Gothic ornament as well. Yet even when an object with blatantly Chinese or Gothic decoration, such as the Chew family sofa (cat. no. 150), is included in the catalogue-and there are few such inclusions-those elements, their design sources, and their place in the overall scheme generally go unnoted. A more balanced approach that acknowledged these aspects of the rococo style would have strengthened the work, especially with regard to furniture.
Along the same lines, any consideration of rural furniture in the rococo style was omitted. The impressive (if less academic) carved furniture of backcountry Pennsylvania, the Connecticut River valley, and other rural centers was inspired directly by the urban American rococo movement, and these objects need to be considered alongside their city-made counterparts if we are to understand the whole. Indeed, one also wonders about the less heavily ornamented furniture that was made in the larger cities by the same craftsmen who produced the most lavishly decorated goods. Are these pieces not rococo as well, and where do they fit into the overall picture?
A more serious lapse involves the entire section on southern furniture, which is peppered with both minor factual errors and large misconceptions. Among the former, for instance, note that the population of Williamsburg at 1775 was not 3,000, as stated, but about 1,800, and the town was by no means the "largest city" in the colony. Virginia's government did not move to Richmond in 1779, but in 1780. Nor was cypress the "favorite secondary wood" of the South, as it was used only sporadically in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, where yellow pine and poplar were the secondary woods of choice during the colonial period. And the author reports that the shop of Charleston cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe produced "only two" easy chairs between 1768—1775, although Elfe's account book lists at least nine examples and possibly more.
These sorts of inaccuracies are small in scale, and, although there are a number of them, they might be overlooked. Of more central concern is Heckscher's decision to combine the furniture of Williamsburg and that of Charleston under one broad heading, even though two more dissimilar cities could hardly be found. Charleston, one of the richest urban centers in colonial America, was a great seaport with a population of nearly 40,000; Williamsburg was a small, inland governmental town, perhaps one-twentieth as large, with little commerce and no direct access to shipping. Although the cabinet industries in each place were grounded firmly in British tradition and technology, the furniture they produced had relatively little in common, aside from structural sophistication. To group the products of Charleston and Williamsburg together in a study of this kind is akin to pairing the cabinet trade of Annapolis with that of New York City.
More disturbing still is the manner in which important pieces of southern furniture are trivialized and misinterpreted. Text that likens a significant Virginia Masonic chair (cat. no. 123) to a group of "tools . . . tossed into a magnetized box," the whole having "aesthetic shortcomings," is simply uninformed. A ceremonial armchair covered with symbolic Masonic regalia-this one arguably the finest colonial example known-is not a piece of parlor furniture and cannot be judged as such. When Heckscher writes, "it must be admitted that [the craftsman's] great effort lacks total coherence," he is assessing the chair from the standpoint of personal, twentieth-century aesthetics, with no attempt to place the object in its logical, cultural context. Although the chair might have looked odd in a Virginia planter's home, it must have had a commanding presence on a platform in a Masonic hall.
Likewise, an exceptionally fine Charleston easy chair (cat. no. 122) is described as "much in the Philadelphia idiom," when, in fact, it is purely English in design and execution. There is no evidence to indicate that either Charleston tradesmen or their clients had the slightest interest in Philadelphia furniture or its design. To suggest that high-style South Carolina furniture was derived from or can be measured by Pennsylvania standards again reveals an unfortunate cultural bias.
In fact, the author's implicit decision to judge all American rococo cabinet wares against those of Philadelphia is one of the most troubling aspects of the furniture section. No one would argue that Philadelphia's rococo furniture is not remarkable for its virtuosity and aesthetic appeal, but it did not guide American taste in the eighteenth century, nor `vas it necessarily better or more appealing than furniture from other American centers. There can be little doubt that furniture from any large city looks the way it does primarily (though not entirely) because the taste of the wealthy local clientele dictated that it do so. Even London-trained, immigrant British cabinetmakers eventually conformed to local American tastes. In short, if the citizens of Boston, Newport, Charleston, or any other major urban center had desired to own furniture in the Philadelphia style, they certainly could have done so, as talented carvers and cabinetmakers were working in all of those places. But clearly, Philadelphia rococo did not suit affluent Bostonians or their counterparts in Newport or Charleston. To assume that the most heavily ornamented furniture was also the most desirable once again measures eighteenth-century objects by wholly modern, acultural standards and robs them of their inherent meaning.
It must be acknowledged that a broad-based study of American decorative arts in the rococo style is a daunting assignment, as the volume, variety, and complexity of such goods is almost overwhelming. Unfortunately, by failing to place the noteworthy material it explores into a cultural context, American Rococo has fallen short of the mark. In its restricted definition of the style, its failure to explore any but the most lavishly decorated objects, its inadequate scholarship on southern furniture, and its elevation of Philadelphia forms above all others, the work has left a great many questions unanswered and a number of useful resources untapped.
Despite such shortcomings, the book does present new and carefully synthesized material on several subjects, including silver and engravings, and it offers a convenient and ready reference to basic information on some of colonial America's most elaborately and artistically crafted decorative arts.
Ronald L. Hurst
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation