Adam Bowett. Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900: An Illustrated Historical Dictionary. Kew, Eng.: Oblong Creative Ltd. in association with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2012. xxxiii + 360 pp.; numerous color illus., appendixes, bibliography, index of botanical names, index. $180.00.
In a number of articles and two books examining British furniture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Adam Bowett has brought welcome clarity and order to British furniture history. By clearly establishing navigable landmarks, Bowett is attempting a kind of hygiene very welcome to British furniture history that is also cleansing to the study of American furniture. Bowett’s new book, Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900: An Illustrated Historical Dictionary, augments his previous work and surpasses it in effort, scope, and interpretative possibilities. This project was clearly dear to Bowett’s heart, given the enormous amount of effort it required: much archival research, a prodigious number of field trips for personal examination of objects, the establishment of a multidisciplinary team including botanists from the Royal Gardens at Kew, and his journey to become proficient in the microanalysis of wood. Woods in British Furniture-Making documents the timber trade with its chronology of trade routes, colonial conquest and exploitation, and the availability of different species—sometimes leading fashion and sometimes following it pell-mell. It is a work of scholarship that will endure for centuries and that resonates with profound meaning for the study of American furniture.
Woods in British Furniture-Making starts with two introductory essays, the first an overview of timber and timber use in Britain that is the best thing ever written on the subject, clearly depicting how dependent British furniture makers were on imported wood and how the wood choices available were governed by colonial conquest and political alliances, import duties, bonuses, and treaties—themselves often subject to commercial pressures. The second essay is an overview of wood anatomy and identification written for a lay reader.
The body of the book, as suggested by the subtitle, is a list of entries on cabinet woods alphabetically arranged by common or trade name, first hardwoods and then softwoods. Four appendixes: a map of trade routes, a botanical family arrangement of the woods included, a geographic arrangement of the woods, and a photographic depiction of some of the woods (mostly from the collection at Kew) follow the body of the text. Latin botanical name and general information indexes conclude.
Even modern common names for woods are baffling and imprecise, and the addition of archaic names, often corruptions of words from many languages or based not on any wood name but on the port of shipping origin, results in the reader’s occasional bewilderment. Bowett’s experience as an archivist is evident in this possibly odd organizational choice. Most users of the book will probably be starting with an object and trying to comprehend it rather than starting with a period document and trying to understand the meaning of arcane wood names. A book of this type is not an ideal tool for trying to identify wood, and this book does not pretend to accomplish this. The Latin names for the trees harvested as wood are fully indexed and easily correlated to the common name headings but not listed in the headings unless they also are or were common names. A diligent reader will be able to locate the sometimes ephemeral common names associated with a known scientific name. The dictionary—or, perhaps more accurately, encyclopedia—format is not friendly to the casual general reader wishing to simply read the whole text in order. Since the entries reflect the frequently redundant and/or confusing names, sometimes for the same wood, some entries (for instance, for mahogany, madera, vinhatico, and canary wood) overlap and paraphrase one another to a degree unfortunate for through reading but essential for an alphabetic reference. The word “otiose” occurs twice in six pages; an editor of an essay might have insisted on “fruitless” for one instance, but, since each entry is a stand-alone piece, such a concern is irrelevant. Finding an editor, or editors, for the book must have been daunting. Copyediting a text with such diverse topics must have been difficult enough, but editing for content that includes botanic names and scientific terms, multiple foreign names often in pidgin or archaic versions, and art historical references is a task too complex for one content editor. A more widely versed editorial team would have been useful.
From a wood identification point of view the book is most important as a contextual tool. Bowett is not a trained wood identification scientist but a diligent and industrious amateur. If a professional anatomist were engaged for every sample, the book might be much more expensive, but it would be more accurate. The anatomic information will not aid the average reader to identify wood. Such a reader would learn that parenchyma and storied rays are anatomic structures useful in identifying wood genera and/or species, but it is unlikely that the reader would really understand what they are.
This reviewer consulted Harry Alden, Ph.D., of Alden Identification Services, about Bowett’s wood identification assertions. Alden noted that he is very enthusiastic about Bowett’s profound contribution to knowledge of the history of the timber trade but not pleased with Bowett’s assertion, “wood identification is often a matter of educated guess work” (p. xxvi). It is true that wood anatomists compare microscopic samples to lists of salient keys that point them to a particular genus and sometimes species. These keys, especially for some tropical woods and uncommon species, may not take into account all the possible variations in a given genus or species; more minute or refined keys may one day be available. Also, as Bowett suggests, the salient features necessary to identify a wood may not be present in every sample available for examination. Veneer, for instance, may not be thick enough to contain an important identifying cell. Still, Bowett’s contention that it is often guesswork is overly broad. A competent scientist will state what is known whether or not it is conclusive and merely allude to the possibilities if it is not. Microanalysis cannot specifically identify the white oak Quercus alba, the dominant eastern North American white group oak; it can identify only an oak of the white group—a group including oaks from all over the northern temperate world. Interpretation of style and date of the sample furniture source and timber trade information are rigors that should follow a completely dispassionate microanalysis and either could or could not reasonably point to Quercus alba as the likely white group oak candidate.
A number of technical errors of anatomic information scattered throughout the book were noticed by Dr. Alden and this reviewer. For example, Swietenia mahogani only occasionally has storied rays, although Bowett states that “most American mahogany” [that is, all three species] does (p. xxvii). It is this occasional feature that sometimes allows it to be distinguished from S. macrophylla and S. humilis, which do not have storied rays, a distinction Bowett states cannot reliably be done. The size of the early-wood pores of cherry (Prunus) are not significantly larger than the late-wood pores for the wood to be confidently called semi-ring porous, as Bowett does. Alder (Alnus) is native to the Americas as well as to Europe, something omitted in Bowett’s range description of world alders, as is horse chestnut (Aesculus), with seven American species, although perhaps Bowett is asserting that only A. hippocastanatum was used in the British trade, something microanalysis cannot assert. “Spp.” is the plural abbreviation for species and is not appropriate for describing a single unknown species of a known genus. So, unless the author is convinced that more than one unknown species of a known genus is present in an object—such as a case piece with both white and yellow group pine—the abbreviation for a single unknown species, “sp.,” is the correct choice. Similarly, while “variety” and “family” are perfectly good words, they have specific botanical meanings to which Bowett does not adhere, for example, “the tupelo or gum family of North America comprises four species” (p. 239). Black gum and tupelo (Nyssa) are members of the family Cornaceae (dogwoods and their relatives) with more than 100 species, according to current taxonomy, which admittedly is a moving target. “There are 18 species and 7 varieties of ash native to North America”(p. 16). A variety of ash would be a reference to a horticultural selected clone or cultivar, the neologism for “cultivated variety,” as in Fraxinus americana v. Autumn Blaze (the “v.” stands for variety). Atlantic white cedar (Chaemacyparis thyoides) and northern white cedar (Thuya occidentalis) are certainly different species, as Bowett states (p. 278), but they further belong to different genera, and Thuya occidentalis can indeed be distinguished microscopically from its western relative Thuya plicata, as can butternuts from walnuts.
Many other examples of anatomic misinformation are present in Woods in British Furniture-Making, most of them very unimportant, but good copyediting by a competent botanist would easily overcome this minor flaw if the book gains another richly deserved edition. While creating a definitive taxonomic or anatomic reference was not really Bowett’s goal, a book this important need not be tainted with misinformation. Readers attempting to learn more about tropical woods used for timber would be well served to consult Tropical Timbers of the World by Martin Chudnoff (1984) and Present and Potential Commercial Timbers of the Caribbean by Franklin R. Longwood (1962), both published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and both missing from Bowett’s bibliography.
The book is profusely illustrated, but many of the illustrations are not effective. The picture of the back of a white pine panel with red bricking (p5, p. 181) is intended to point out the ease of identification of white pine, even through the red stain, because of its prominent resin canals. The picture, however, is so small that the resin canals are hardly visible in the illustration even with magnification. One of the appendixes (4) is a series of photographs of historic samples of economically notable wood species, mostly from the Kew Gardens collection. Bowett is indebted to many at Kew, and that organization jointly published the book with Oblong Press, so it is entirely understandable that he wanted to publish this collection that no doubt figured strongly in the history of his study of wood. The resulting glossary, however, is not very effective; many of the samples are so discolored that they are useless as tools to recognize a wood. No one familiar with Brazilian or Indian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra and Dalbergia latifolia) would recognize those woods from the virtually black samples illustrated. The best use of photographs to depict the appearance of wood known to this reviewer remains The Wood Book by Klaus Ulrich Leistikow and Holger Thüs (2002), based on the work of Romeyn Beck Hough, employing large, clear pictures of transverse, tangential, and radial sections of the various species. Woods of British Furniture-Making is an expensive book and surely was expensive to produce. An online version of the book with illustrations that could be enlarged in high resolution would be a perfect adaptation of this fine work. Perhaps future scholars will be able to use the book in that format. The period illustrations, botanicals, graphs, maps, and tables all are quite clear in the book as it is.
Bowett is frank about clearing up previously published misinformation, some of it long and dearly held and useful to the trade, but in this work he is never sniping or disrespectful to previous authors even when they clearly could have known better. He also is very respectful of the conundrums and ambiguities of the subject and willing to fairly portray several sides of a disputed issue with grace and intellectual candor. The confusing and contradictory common names of some exotic woods as used in the literature can become baffling. Bowett’s handling, for instance, of “horseflesh” and sabicu alone are worth the purchase price to this reviewer. We know by microanalysis when we encounter sabicu (Lysiloma sabicu or L. sp.), but we don’t know for certain what “horseflesh” meant in the eighteenth-century wood trade. Alden identified a number of pieces of Boston furniture at Winterthur, most attributed to Benjamin Frothingham, as containing sabicu. Period shipping records indicate that “horseflesh” was shipped in some quantity to Philadelphia, but this reviewer knows of only one example of surviving sabicu Philadelphia furniture and that example does not strictly adhere to the anatomic keys for Lysiloma sabicu. Some entries are not as strong as others. The red cedar (Juniperus) entry overlooks the southern coastal American species Juniperus salicicola, which, while microscopically indistinguishable from J. virginiana or bermudiana, was probably the species most represented in the shipping map in the trade route glossary from Charleston, South Carolina, to England. It is the local Juniperus of the Charleston area and yields much better and clearer wood than its more northern cousin, and it was also shipped to northern American cities. Bowett’s treatment of wainscot and deal—oak boards and softwood boards imported to England primarily from the Baltic, Germany, and Scandinavia—much surpasses anything previously published. The extensive entries on the major cabinet woods mahogany and walnut are exemplary.
Bowett has plowed through so many period documents researching this book that it is remarkable he has retained and organized them so thoroughly. He knows a gem when he finds one, as exemplified by the terse quotation he uses to end his entry on “walnut, satin,” a onetime British trade name for the American red gum Liquidamber styracifula, “except for appearance, it possesses almost every bad quality which can be found in any wood.” One can easily imagine woodworkers familiar with this unstable and uncooperative wood nodding in agreement. This statement coupled with the story of the fiasco in Whitehall in 1901, when red gum, in a confusion of common names with Australian gums, was used as street paving and lasted for about eight months before it was removed and lawsuits began, show Bowett’s keen sense of the follies of human behavior when commerce is involved. He also is the first in what will no doubt be a long list of historians to employ his research in the interpretation of furniture history, as his entry on walnut demonstrates. Percy Macquoid’s “Age of Mahogany”’s sudden eclipse of the “Age of Walnut” is belied by the information Bowett presents revealing the persistence of walnut in high-style London cabinetmakers’ stock well into the 1750s and early 1760s.
Although Bowett appears to have consulted woodworkers to report their experience of working different woods, even including the smell of the wood being worked, his unfamiliarity with period tool use leads to the erroneous conclusion that walnut “mouldings were made in short grain sections, backed onto a deal or oak core. This was done to emphasize the figure; it may also have been easier to produce a crisp profile planing across the grain rather than along it” (p. 254). No one who uses molding planes, even those rare examples with skewed blades, could ever agree with the last part of that sentence. Cross-grain moldings were a design and aesthetic choice, and their manufacture required a great deal of difficulty and extra labor. Such moldings usually accompany the similarly vertical veneering of flat surfaces, even when those surfaces are horizontally configured, like drawers. This was a design choice. Simply planing the wood across the grain does not produce a crisp profile but a ripped-up mess. Bowett’s occasional unfamiliarity with process does not devalue the book; it is typical of most academic-based writing on any craft or trade. His frequent successful efforts to understand technology, as in his description of Dutch gang-bladed sawmills, are a genuine boon to the understanding of furniture making.
This book is exploration, military, political, economic, art, shipping, cultural, and scientific history. It is not about the oppression of indigenous peoples to harvest the wood, nor about the resulting environmental degradation, as timbering was and is an extractive industry. It is not that Bowett is blind to this cost—several passages indicate otherwise—but that subject would be the province of a different book entirely, a sort of botanical version of Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America (1959). Such a book would be both welcome and heartbreaking, but that was not Bowett’s mission.
Bowett’s primary intent may well not have been to write a book that is important to the student of American furniture, but it is profoundly important to that field. A piece of furniture of typically British form can be worth ten or more times its British value in the American marketplace if it is provably of American origin. Thus, there are powerful market incentives to argue for American origins as long as the case being made is salable. A common method of establishing an American origin is the microanalysis of wood. This trend began to take hold in the 1960s and reached its academic apogee in Benno Forman’s American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An Interpretive Catalogue (1988), with regional attributions based on microscopic wood identifications, frequently unsupportable by peer review or established wood anatomy. That work seemed to be the intellectual child of Joseph Downs’s regionalism—then still very current as a working theory of the simultaneous development of every form in every style center—bolstered by more minute investigation of sources and construction techniques and by microscopic wood analysis done in-house at Winterthur by Gordon Saltar.
American Seating Furniture remains both an important intellectual contribution to furniture history and a monument to the misuse of microanalysis. Most of the entries other than those for seating furniture made entirely of black walnut include species identification, supposedly based on microanalysis, which is not possible: “all turned members American silver maple (Acer saccharinum) . . . red oak (Quercus rubra)” for plate 73, or “American ash (not Fraxinus excelsior)” for plate 5, or “American beech (Fagus grandifolia)” for plate 52—this is just a smattering. Microanalysis of wood cannot produce these species differentiations; maples can be divided only into hard and soft groups, oaks only into white, red, and live groups, and pines into the white, red, and yellow groups. Fagus (beeches), Fraxinus (ashes), Aesculus (buckeyes), Populus (poplars, cottonwoods, and aspens), Prunus (cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, and almonds), and Ulmus (elms) cannot be differentiated by species. American Seating Furniture is filled with plausible but hypothetical species identifications—red oak, white oak, white pine—as well as some just bizarre guesses, such as Acer pensylvanicum (moosewood, a small, high-altitude, and northern understory tree or shrub), Quercus stellata (post oak), or Aesculus glabra (Ohio or fetid buckeye). Even worse, many instances in which an American species is named are given apparently to help support an American attribution of the piece of furniture, sometimes of uncertain continent of origin. The list of impossible identifications and botanical/historical reckless error goes on and on.
Nonetheless, wood analysis was soon depicted in the trade as though it were a glossy scientific test akin to the introduction of fingerprints or DNA evidence in criminal court proceedings. The working theory that evolved in the trade and in academia was that, with some exceptions like imported exotic primary wood, the locality of the tree that produced the wood from which the furniture was made establishes the locality of the manufacture of the furniture. As Bowett makes very clear, if this theory were true, then after a certain date, perhaps as early as the seventeenth century, there would be almost no British furniture—certainly not urban furniture. What would exist would be German, Baltic, or Scandinavian furniture, since those areas were the sources of the secondary, core, and sometimes primary woods. After the establishment of trade in North American woods, British furniture would gradually become northern European/American. The problem with the “local tree means local manufacture” theory is that it overlooks the importance of an invention known to have been in use when the furniture was made. This mystery invention is the ship. It was cheaper to move goods by ship, sometimes for long distances, than to move them across swamps, mountains, forests, and rivers with no efficient system of roads. American black walnut was imported into Britain and used in quantity there. Most American cabinet woods also made their way to Britain in varying quantities and at various times. An understanding of the history of the timber trade is easily as important as genus and/or species identification in understanding which side of the Atlantic was responsible for the manufacture of a given piece of furniture.
The common genus used as secondary wood on both continents, pine (Pinus), is a perfect example of this complex relationship between species (or group, in this case) identification and the determination of the continent of origin of a given piece of furniture. The genus Pinus consists of more than one hundred species, which microscopic analysis can separate into only three groups: white group, red group, and yellow group. These groups roughly correspond to five-needle pines for the white group, two-needle pines for the red (and black) group, and three- or two- (or sometimes both) needle pines for the yellow group. American white pine (Pinus strobus) is a five-needle member of the white group widely used in furniture since the seventeenth century. Most other members of this group are American or Asian, along with the European alpine Pinus cembra and the Balkan Pinus peuce, which did not make their way into the larger timber trade in Europe. Thus, the working theory of thirty years ago regarding wood and furniture origin has been that white group pine in a piece of American or European antique furniture indicates American origin. Red group origin points to the pan-European Scotch pine Pinus sylvestris with occasional exceptions allowed for North American Pinus resinosa, according to the working theory. Although there are several western American and Asian members of the red pine group, they are eliminated by improbability. The eastern American red pine (Pinus resinosa) was not available to cabinetmakers of the American style centers of the eighteenth century because it was a tree of the high altitude Appalachians in what is now the United States (less so in cooler Canada) and too difficult to transport to cities to be economically viable, something that is slowly and grudgingly becoming understood in the antiques trade. The yellow group is primarily North and Central American, so this group was also thought to indicate American origin. The truth of the history of the timber trade as so tellingly presented by Bowett is that this theory is not only far from absolute but, in many instances, not even accurate. It is often the reverse argument that is most telling.
Thus, the presence of white or yellow group pine in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century furniture does not prove American origin since these woods were abundantly imported to England, something Bowett details by date and quantity as clearly as shipping records allow. But the presence of red pine, the primary constituent of yellow or red deal, as Bowett thoroughly explains, is usually an indication of British or other European origin because North American and Asian members of this group were not in the timber trade at the time. The same can generally be said of spruce and fir owing to the infrequent availability of the American species of these woods in early furniture manufacturing centers, again owing to transportation difficulties. Bowett’s description of the importation of Canadian red pine somewhat displacing Baltic deal in the later nineteenth century does not alter the picture for seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century American and British furniture.
The meaning of the timber trade is complex, and it is not contended here that microanalysis be abandoned; rather, that its meaning should be understood in accurate historical context. Understanding antique furniture of uncertain continent of origin should actually require that it be subjected to much more thorough analysis. All the original softwoods should be analyzed with the recognition that it is not the presence of American wood that proves something American, it is the presence of European wood that proves something European. We were timber rich and had no need for imported secondary woods; the British were timber starved and relied almost entirely on imported wood. Several other European countries such as Holland also needed to import wood to manufacture furniture.
A clock case with an eight-day clock inscribed “Made by Thomas Crow, Wilmington” on a banner fastened to the dial arch (fig. 1) was part of Christie’s American furniture sale of January 27, 1996. The mahogany case contains multiple American woods, including yellow group pine, tulip poplar, and Atlantic white cedar, as well as a white group oak determined by microanalysis. It looks like a case from the Liverpool, England, area, and, despite the Crow inscription, the movement and dial appear British and so unlike known Crow work as to strongly suggest that Crow was marketing a British clock and adding his name as the source. Perhaps what Thomas Crow made, according to the inscription, was the sale of a clock he imported. In 1996 the state of understanding about the importation of North American wood for use in British cabinetmaking was generally not sophisticated, since there was no accessible printed source of clear, accurate information; the only available avenue to a correct conclusion about this confusing subject was close observation and deep experience in the field.
The mahogany case of this clock is entirely foreign to local Wilmington cabinetmaking practice in the late eighteenth century or, for that matter, to any area near Wilmington. The auction catalogue entry suggesting the possible authorship of James McDowell is not plausible. The design of the case and the shop practices that produced it are entirely consistent with Liverpool, from the quoined corners of the base and surface treatment of book-matched mahogany veneer, to the shape of the waist door and the compact hood decorated with glass panels—presumably originally decorated with reverse painting. The stock of the case sides and other components is much thinner than is customary in any mid-Atlantic shop tradition and entirely consistent with those of Liverpool or other British areas. Clearly, either an immigrant maker traveled on a ship from Liverpool to Wilmington, bringing his stylistic and shop practice vocabulary along with a Liverpool clock for American relabeling, or else many species of American wood traveled by ship to Liverpool and then the clock and case were transported by ship back to Wilmington. Either explanation is possible. The “local wood means local manufacture” theory clearly favors the former. Christie’s cataloguers were aware of this dichotomy but the “Made by Thomas Crow Wilmington” inscription and for them the existence of microanalyses proving the use of multiple American woods swayed the argument toward American manufacture. Furthermore, in 1996 the available wood analyses were somewhat erroneous and included more American woods than are present in the case and mistook northern white cedar for Atlantic white cedar.
If an understanding of the pattern of export to Britain of American wood in the late eighteenth century is coupled with the study of design, construction, and shop tradition on each side of the Atlantic, a different and clearer understanding can emerge. The mixture of woods in the case was an increasingly plausible option on the wood-starved west coast of Britain, as conditions strengthened favoring importation of American wood. Thus, a mixed lot of cheap North American imported secondary wood along with Caribbean mahogany for furniture making in a substantial port in this traffic is sensible; “Liverpool’s position on the west coast made it a primary port of entry for American timber, second only to London” (Bowett, p. 153). The white group oak used in the base structure of the hood could well be wainscot. When the choice of who or what was on a transatlantic ship in the eighteenth century—a cabinetmaker who made one entirely Liverpool-derived sophisticated clock case in Delaware for a Liverpool manufactured clock and who then made no other known surviving American object, or secondary woods known to have been in international timber trade and then a clock of a type commonly made for export manufactured of those imported woods—is examined in this light, Liverpool manufacture becomes the logical conclusion.
A companion book to Woods in British Furniture-Making or a detailed extensive article dealing with the same subject in America to act as an adjunct to Bowett’s book is easy to imagine since he has done the heavy lifting. The American story of wood use is largely implied by Bowett, even when it is not directly stated. Whether or not he considered how much his book would be of use to students of American furniture as he undertook this monumental work, we owe him a profound debt. Thank you, Adam Bowett. No collector, dealer, academic, or auctioneer of American or European furniture should overlook this work. It is essential for an understanding of the subject.
Alan Miller
Quakertown, Pennsylvania
