Review by Robert F. Trent
Welsh Furniture, 1250–1950: A Cultural History of Craftsmanship and Design

Richard Bebb. Welsh Furniture, 1250–1950: A Cultural History of Craftsmanship and Design. 2 vols. Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, Wales: Saer Books, with the assistance of Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum of Wales and the support of Llyfregkk Genedlaethol Cymry—National Library of Wales, 2007. Vol. 1, Welsh Furniture, 1250–1700. 365 pp.; 595+ color and bw illus., bibliography, index, glossary. Vol. 2, Welsh Furniture, 1700–1950. 441 pp.; 800+ color and bw illus., bibliography, index, glossary. £150.00.

While this astoundingly rich and somewhat confrontational publication has not received adequate attention in the United States, it ought to be high on any furniture scholar’s list of desirable acquisitions. Not only is Welsh furniture of major importance to many American vernacular traditions, but the book itself is probably the single most important book about English furniture to appear since the late Christopher Gilbert’s two-volume The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale was published in 1978.

Richard Bebb is an antiques dealer and furniture historian in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, Wales, and has pursued the study of Welsh furniture for forty years. This two-volume, lavishly illustrated book reflects Bebb’s desire not only to survey the material but to place the furniture in a cultural context. The study has the imprimatur of the National Museum of Wales in St. Fagan’s, and it thus represents an official history of sorts.

Approaching Welsh furniture involves many of the same pitfalls found in histories of Scottish, Irish, and Cornish furniture. All these regions, once casually referred to by the English as the “Celtic fringe,” are the focus of fierce ethnic and regional loyalties and equally strong animosity toward the dominant or ordinate culture centered in London and embodied in the local nobility and aristocracy. In this respect, the Welsh are in much the same position regarding the centralized state as are the Bretons in France. Both areas were peopled by a Gaelic-speaking “minority” that resisted the central authority after military conquest. Both areas were caricatured as backward and even barbaric by the central authority. Both areas enjoyed a curious and uneven renaissance as cultural entities during the twentieth century.

To this Celtic quandary may be added an underlying resentment that pervades the membership of the Regional Furniture Society in England, to the effect that English furniture history has been hijacked by elitist art historians who are interested only in metropolitan furniture and who misrepresent vernacular expressions as derivative and debased. Although Bebb is an urbane scholar, he continually sets up elitist straw men who are thought to embody this abusive stance. Indeed, one of the most alarming assertions in the book is that Benno M. Forman (1930–1982), the doyen of American vernacular furniture studies, was such an elitist, based on an isolated quotation from the first chapter of his posthumously published American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730 (1988). Setting aside the questionable validity of this particular assertion, one senses that regional histories of furniture from Celtic areas of Great Britain and Ireland are a minefield of resentment against both elitist interpretations of style (as embodied, perhaps, by Irish Furniture published in 2007 by the Knight of Glin [a.k.a. Desmond FitzGerald] and James Peill and reviewed elsewhere in this issue) and more or less racist interpretations to the effect that almost everything made in Celtic areas reflects physical isolation, ignorance, poverty, and linguistic barriers.

Despite occasional outbursts of this sort of resentment, Bebb has established a detailed and sensitive treatment of the complexities in establishing a just appreciation of any given piece of Welsh furniture. Virtually the entire introduction (pp. 3–38) and chapter 1 (pp. 39–96) of the first volume are devoted to setting up valid frames of reference for Welsh furniture, and they constitute a model for any furniture scholar undertaking a regional study. Wales shares a long border with the English counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire. It borders the Severn estuary that leads to the great West Country port of Bristol, and Wales has many rivers leading into the interior. Some areas had market towns and developed roads, and they functioned as part of the commercial life of the West Country. Remote mountain regions were accessible by horse but were perhaps too remote to have imported furniture from the town centers. Welsh influence often extended to the adjacent English counties, as well.

Still other factors include the evolving role of the gentry versus the farmers and artisans and the ambiguity of the Welsh-English language barrier. Bebb also cautions against too mechanical a model of regional styles, because furniture often was purchased from distant suppliers, or artisans moved from one location to another. Another important point is assessing what “metropolitan influence” meant in any given situation. Wales shared in international trade with many ports along the English Channel, and there is reason to think that some traditions were transmitted directly from the Continent, particularly from France and the Low Countries.

Bebb then rehearses the sorts of evidence used to establish regional traditions. These include makers’ marks, owners’ names or heraldry, documentation, fixed woodwork, architectural contexts, inventories, travelers’ accounts, and the history of the woodworking professions. Many of these observations have been made by other authors, but Bebb displays a singularly acute use of them.

The survey in chapters 2 through 4 of the first volume, treating furniture made before 1700, perforce includes heterogenous material. Chapter 2 treats a great deal of ecclesiastical material, much of which previously was ascribed to unspecified foreign artisans. Save for the occasional dragon or other emblem, most of the carving differs little from contemporary French carving. One of Bebb’s somewhat irrational claims surrounds the technique, style, and dating of the great three- and four-posted board-seated turned chairs for which Wales is famous. He seems determined to regard them as essentially a Welsh form, although the kinds of evidence he marshals to justify his claims are not convincing. Marginalia in medieval manuscripts demonstrate that such chairs were a pan-European tradition. The structural peculiarities associated with board seats trapped in grooves held in all four seat rails almost certainly evolved in the Low Countries, and similar chairs were made in England. What seems to have been peculiar about the Welsh chairs was their persistence well into the early eighteenth century, as well as extreme elaboration in format and decorative turnings. Why Bebb is compelled to push his arguments regarding the peculiarly Welsh character of these chairs is unclear, but he feels strongly enough about them to display personal rancor about those with differing opinions.

A series of monographs explicating famous groups of furniture associated with the Welsh gentry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries makes up chapter 3. Herein resides a difficult nexus of stylistic and iconographic problems. The Welsh gentry claimed descent from remote royal and noble houses, with suitable heraldic devices. They also employed Celtic bards to celebrate their lineage. At the same time, many of these figures were allied to the House of Tudor, which seized the English throne in 1485. Many of the Welsh gentry became English courtiers and served on diplomatic missions in France or elsewhere. The strong French influence already apparent in both English and Welsh furniture of this period was thereby reinforced. Bebb demonstrates that the mix of French carving and Welsh iconography seen in objects owned by Welsh grandees was not the result of foreign artisans, but represented the first Welsh style.

Chapter 4 closes the first volume and provides a bridge to the second volume. The late seventeenth century was the period during which the classic Welsh joined furniture forms were formulated, including the two-part cupboard (Cwpwrdd deuddarn), the three-part cupboard (Cwpwrdd tridarn), the dresser, the coffer, and the long-case clock. The divergence between noble and gentry patronage widened, but the yeoman class prospered enough to begin commissioning expensive case pieces. Once again, Bebb asserts that “hierarchal diffusion” is an inadequate explanation for the emergence of distinctively Welsh furniture forms, but many of the objects illustrated in this chapter are indistinguishable from furniture made in many regions of England under metropolitan influence.

The second volume (with chapter 5) begins with a discussion of the most metropolitan area of Wales along the Severn estuary. In this area, traditional configurations of case pieces and house plans persisted, save among the nobility and upper gentry. The typical interior coalesced into a two-room plan with lofts. The ground floor usually had a combined sitting room and kitchen (Cegin), with case pieces and a settle forming partitions between the sitting room and a bedroom. Some bedrooms featured built-in box beds like the lit clos of Brittany. The principal case pieces remained much like their immediate late-seventeenth-century forebears but began to be made with characteristic tabled panels with shaped heads. Seating and tables tended to be much more like those of other regions in England.

A genre of inlaid furniture on the southern coast is of immediate interest to American scholars for two reasons. First, it provides a direct analogue and possible source for similar inlay in the Delaware River valley region. Second, some small coffers were mounted on stands with cabriole legs; this practice may reflect Dutch influence, and it is reminiscent of similar coffers from the Channel Islands, Bermuda, and the Connecticut coast.

As the eighteenth century progressed, some regional types began to influence each other, and certain furniture forms were hybridized. Some large coffers with drawers were provided with doors in the upper case and became short linen presses. The same process transformed some cupboards into linen presses. The three-part cupboard, which began as a cross between a cupboard and a dresser, completed an evolution into a dresser in many areas. At the same time, dressers became specific to local areas, with an important variant that had an open shelf or storage area in the lower case. Desks with drawers became more common and were associated with literacy and the Methodist religion. Another type associated with Methodism was the preaching chair used in Methodist chapels. Some of these may have been portable, because accounts of Methodist preaching in America during the Great Awakening mention preaching chairs, as well.

The impact of nineteenth-century revival styles and the slow industrialization of the furniture trade are analyzed in chapter 6. The genre of romantic views of Welsh interiors greatly augments written resources in this period. Metropolitan styles became much more influential, and the traditional joinery was largely displaced by dovetailed board construction. In progressive circles the successive historical styles were much in vogue, but in this respect the Welsh situation does not appear to have differed all that much from other regions of England.

Chapter 7 treats subsequent industrialism and the furniture trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Save for certain developments like bardic chairs associated with the revival of Gaelic poetry, these later objects are of limited interest and not notably different from developments elsewhere.

In the eighth and final chapter, Bebb recapitulates his arguments against what he terms the “orthodox” or elitist theory of stylistic diffusion. This chapter is largely redundant; the book might have been strengthened by reserving these theoretical arguments for the end, instead of confronting the reader with them at the beginning of the first volume. Ultimately, one comes away with the judgment that much of what Bebb is arguing for so vociferously already influences much of American vernacular furniture study. In some cases, one wonders why Bebb considers certain furniture forms or practices as especially Welsh, when they are also present in Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany.

Several telling criticisms can be made about the book as a whole. It does not present a comprehensive survey of regional types, although the text suggests a detailed knowledge of them that must be accepted on faith. This could have been addressed with CDs that explained regional data. Second, one would have appreciated a discussion of possible Welsh influence on America, particularly in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where large numbers of Welsh immigrants had such an impact.

Robert F. Trent
Wilmington, Delaware

American Furniture 2008

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