Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren. Texas Furniture: The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880. 1975. Vol. 1. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. xi + 378 pp.; numerous bw and color illus., checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $60.00.
Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren, with a foreword by Don Carleton. Texas Furniture: The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880. Vol. 2. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. xi + 336 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, glossary, bibliography, index. $65.00.
It is a cliché that “everything is bigger in Texas”—square miles, oil fields, barbeque, hair, hats, right-wing political extremism, and so on. That old saw applies to the new two-volume study of Texas furniture under review here, which contains some 736 pages, more than 350 illustrations, and weighs in at a hefty seven and a half pounds or so. It is a massive effort worthy of its subject’s traditional reputation.
When Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren, inspired by the vision of Ima Hogg, compiled and published Texas Furniture: The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880 in 1975, it was only the second book on the subject, following closely on the heels of the Witte Museum’s Early Texas Furniture and Decorative Arts, issued in 1973. Texas Furniture gave us an in-depth look at the mid-nineteenth-century furniture produced in the Lone Star State, much of it in a Germanic fashion reflecting the second great wave of German immigrants to this country.
Now, thirty-seven years later, Taylor and Warren, with the assistance of the University of Texas Press and the university’s Briscoe Center for American History, have done something unusual if not unprecedented in our field. They have reissued the 1975 volume in a revised format and have added a second volume of equal weight and depth to create a uniform, two-volume set that provides an encyclopedia of images and data that will be the standard source on the subject for at least another generation.
Volume 1 of the new set is essentially a reprint of the 1975 volume, which has long been out of print. Here, the contents are presented in an easier-to-use and -to-shelve vertical format, rather than the original horizontal design, and the black-and-white photographs of more than two hundred objects are larger. The revisions to the text consist of corrections and additions to the lengthy checklist of Texas cabinetmakers included as an appendix and cross-references to objects catalogued in the new volume 2.
More than 150 examples, derived from Taylor and Warren’s ongoing research and new discoveries, are presented in volume 2, identical in format to the new volume 1 with the exception that this volume’s objects are presented in color photographs. Each volume principally consists of a photo library of objects arranged by form into nine chapters: beds, wardrobes, chests of drawers, chairs, sofas, tables and stands, desks, cupboards, and safes (such as pie safes). (Volume 2 also contains a new section on miscellaneous objects.) Each section is preceded by a short introduction, written for the 1975 text and reprinted in both volumes here. The illustrated objects are identified as to maker, place, date, materials, dimensions, history, and current owner (although not necessarily updated for volume 1 objects), and are discussed in a short interpretative text. Each of the two new volumes contains the same list of some nine hundred Texas cabinetmakers and chairmakers, based largely on census records and other archival sources. At least one maker who made an object illustrated in the pictorial section, Henry Kuenemann, is not, somewhat inexplicably, included in the checklist. (This small oversight only came to my attention because the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston owns a large wardrobe of circa 1870 [1990.483] attributed to Heinrich Kuenemann II, and I was hoping to learn more about him.)
Two introductory chapters in volume 1 still remain the best overview of the regional nature of Texas furniture, covering “the coast and the hinterland” and the business and craft of cabinetmaking in the various areas at the time. Readers fresh to the subject, however, might find the new introduction to volume 2 (pp. 1–17) to be the best place to start navigating these books. There, the authors trace the evolution of collecting Texas furniture from the 1920s forward, highlighting the efforts of pioneer collectors over several generations to preserve the physical heritage of their state. From an art historical and material culture standpoint, they also discuss the dual Texas cabinetmaking traditions: the Anglo-American, based on immigration to Texas from the American South; and the Germanic, based on immigrants. German-born cabinetmakers were disproportionately represented in Texas, making up (for example) about one-third of the woodworking craftsmen in 1860 as opposed to a German-immigrant population of only about 6 percent. The Anglo-Texas furniture was largely in what the authors call a “Plain Grecian” (aka “pillar and scroll”) style (p. 9), and objects in this tradition are more fully represented in volume 2. The Germans, in contrast, created furniture in the Biedermeier style that was, generally, more finely crafted and of higher-quality woods. Interestingly, although Spanish American and African American cultural traditions were significant in nineteenth-century Texas, the authors have been unable to locate any furniture by Hispanic or African American cabinetmakers (p. 11).
While the 1975 volume focused on the work of professional cabinetmakers, Taylor and Warren have added in volume 2 a number of works they classify as noncommercial furniture, such as a body of material by Christofer Friderich Carl Steinhagen (d. 1893), a wheelwright and wagon builder in Anderson, Texas, who made objects for his own family’s use. The authors also bring to light in volume 2 additional examples of special-order marquetry furniture made as gifts or for display at state fairs and expositions. Much of the furniture they document is perhaps more reflective of a simple, sturdy way of life on the frontier, but some of the imposing case pieces, especially the wardrobes, safes, and cupboards, are also monumental objects that form a significant body of work worthy of consideration in any telling of the full story of American furniture from an aesthetic point of view.
Improved communication networks in the 1880s and onward, principally the extension of the railroad, largely brought to an end the small-shop, craft-based era of Texas furniture. Mass-market factory furniture from the North and East penetrated the local markets and provided an inexpensive option that overwhelmed the local craftsmen. As the authors note, “every piece of furniture illustrated and described in [these books] is the fossil of a conversation between craftsman and client, a conversation within a context that is gone forever” (2: 18). They are to be congratulated for their initial and ongoing, persistent efforts to recapture these conversations and to document this fascinating passage in American material life.
Gerald W. R. Ward
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston