Review by Gerald W. R. Ward
Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 36 (2015): I-473

Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 36 (2015): 1–473. Numerous color and bw illus. $72.83 pb. (Also available online at www.mesdajournal.org.)

In 1978 Elizabeth Pratt Fox organized “Southern Furniture: Baltimore to Charleston” at the Yale Center for American Art and Material Culture. This exhibition was a bit of a departure, especially for a northern institution, in that it put the spotlight on what was then still a relatively new area of emphasis in decorative arts studies. The show featured nineteen objects, all but two from the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery, and focused on objects from Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Accompanied only by a small brochure, “Southern Furniture” made a small but high-quality contribution to the subject that was then beginning to draw increasing attention in the field. Now, several decades later, the study of southern furniture is one of the most active and vibrant avenues of research in American decorative arts.

The trajectory of that evolution in southern furniture studies is outlined in Ronald Hurst’s detailed historiographical introduction to the 2015 issue of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As is now the custom under the leadership of its editor, Gary Albert, the articles in JESDA first appear sequentially online—and are accessible without charge. After all the year’s contents have been issued digitally, they can then be obtained as a paperbound book at a substantial but fair price. Both digital and hard-copy versions offer advantages and disadvantages; the ongoing debate over delivery vehicles and platforms is not to be solved here, but suffice it to say that JESDA does an amazing job of generously sharing new scholarship with readers of all persuasions.^[1]

Hurst traces the highlights of half a century of southern furniture literature, as fresh material and new information have been brought to light by such institutions as MESDA, Colonial Williamsburg, Historic Charleston, and many others, as well as by independent scholars. Hurst also sees a significant widening of the circle in the literature, observing that “it took southern furniture scholars from the Atlantic coast almost as long to recognize the merit of inland Southern cabinetmaking as it did for northern scholars to acknowledge the South” (p. 21). Thus, he cites major new work on the Inland South and the Lower South: Kentucky, Tennessee, Upcountry South Carolina, the Georgia Piedmont, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This broader range of studies is a good reminder that the “South,” depending on how you define it, embraces many “nations.” One recent study, for example, sees it including the Tidewater and the Deep South, as well as Greater Appalachia and New France, and notes that each section has a much different history of origin and evolution.^[2] The furniture of each area—as with the massive study of Louisiana furniture published several years ago—is beginning to attract attention. Hurst’s bibliography of some thirty-one titles (six of which are articles in American Furniture) reflects this widening coverage.

Hurst’s overview sets the stage for five lengthy essays that continue to advance the field. These efforts combine detailed traditional document research with, in one case, an innovative type of object analysis. In the initial essay, Albert, with the help of Freddie Salsbury, a mathematician, uses “hierarchical cluster analysis” to assist in the identification of furniture that can be attributed to Jacob Sass (1750–1836) of Charleston, a significant member of that city’s German school of cabinetmaking. Despite the evidence of Sass’s prominence in Charleston furniture-making circles, only one piece—a signed desk and bookcase of 1794 at Historic Charleston—had previously been firmly linked to his shop. By analyzing twelve variables of construction and decoration on 130 examples of pre-1820 Charleston furniture, Albert is able to increase the number of attributions to the Sass shop from that single object to a total of thirteen, adding ten case pieces and two tables to the canon. Using traditional connoisseurship analysis and provenance research, as well as the profiles of shared physical characteristics, Albert allows us to understand Sass’s career more fully. In addition, Albert’s analysis provides for the development of a nuanced profile of Charleston’s craft organization. The intermingling of shop traditions and makers of various backgrounds leads him to the conclusion that “by the first decade of the nineteenth century the German school furniture of Charleston was speaking less with a Teutonic growl and more with a faint Scottish brogue or the hint of a New England Yankee accent” (p. 93).

“Hierarchical cluster analysis” is similar to the “block-clustering analysis” used by the late Benjamin A. Hewitt in his computer-assisted study of American federal-period card tables, published in 1982 (but not referenced in this new article).^[3] Hewitt analyzed 176 variables on 374 card tables in order to develop his statistical profiles of regional characteristics, allowing for the attribution of “unknown” tables to specific towns or regions based on their relationship to documented examples. It is encouraging to see this new attempt to bring a more objective means of analysis to the customary subjective types of connoisseurship. Two appendixes that contain the data set for the informal probability set of Charleston case furniture and the results of the hierarchical cluster analysis are only available online (see p. 98 of the printed version).

Other substantial essays in this issue, too detailed to do justice to here, include June Lucas’s update on the furniture from the Swisegood school of Piedmont North Carolina, active from 1785 to 1858, and Daniel Kurt Ackerman’s detailed breakdown of the ledger book of the backcountry cabinetmaker John C. Burgner (1797–1863). Online readers can access a complete PDF of Burgner’s document, which is thought to be “perhaps the most comprehensive document of a cabinetmaker working during the first half of the nineteenth century in the southern Backcountry—and possibly in the entire South” (p. 466). April Strader Bullin adds a “research note” on the Scottish cabinetmaking school of Richmond and Petersburg, calling attention to a diagnostic feature—the quatrefoil knot design—that tends to pinpoint a Scottish origin. She identifies a group of seven tables attributed to George Donald and Thomas Arbuthnot that “constitute the earliest defined school of furniture associated with Richmond and Petersburg” (p. 136).

Perhaps the most compelling article in this issue is a biographical study by Stephen Jackson and Robert Leath of Robert Deans (1721–1781), a peripatetic craftsman who lived and worked in Edinburgh, Charleston, and London. In addition to detailing the sometimes “salacious” details of Deans’s personal life, the authors pinpoint him as the probable craftsman of Drayton Hall’s spectacular interior finish, as well as the maker of the amazing cabinet-on-chest, or lady’s closet, at MESDA (figs. 26, 27).

Born and trained in Scotland, Deans essentially fled his home country in 1749 to escape an altercation with Jean Bell, a much older woman who claimed that she and Deans had been privately married in secret, and thus he was her lawful husband, as well as the father of her child. (Deans acknowledged his paternity.) Eventually, Bell took her case to court, where she prevailed in her quest for aliment (a Scottish law equivalent of alimony). Deans, already married to another woman, decided he had no recourse but to make himself scarce.

Before his departure, Deans had embarked in Edinburgh on a career as a professional woodworker, skilled in both architectural work and furniture making. He seems to have obtained some important commissions from members of the aristocracy, particularly one Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton. That experience allowed Deans to work alongside other talented craftsmen and to be exposed to the latest styles. Owing to that background, the authors credit him as a key figure in the transmission of British Palladian designs to Charleston in the mid-eighteenth century, from 1749 until 1764.

In Charleston, Deans almost immediately started to collaborate with a London-trained carver named Henry Burnett (d. 1761). For a decade, the two worked together on some important commissions, possibly including Drayton Hall. Deans had developed a relationship with John Drayton, the architect of the house, and may have had access to his significant architectural library. Recent dendrochronology on the timbers of Drayton Hall suggests that the house may have been built between 1748 and 1752, about ten years later than previously assumed. This new dating of the house to the early 1750s raises in the minds of the authors the intriguing possibility that Deans and Burnett may have been responsible for the up-to-date woodwork fashioned for this house as it was being brought to completion. The two men were probably also responsible for the fascinating lady’s closet owned by Mrs. Benjamin Smith (Anne Loughton), wife of a wealthy Charleston merchant. Tracing its origins in pattern books, design and construction, and parallels with related examples, the authors conclude that as “a Scottish furniture form emanating from Edinburgh with urban British construction, the Smith family’s lady’s closet can now be attributed to the Charleston cabinet shop of Robert Deans with Henry Burnett as his carver” (p. 211).

While many talented craftsmen throughout the British colonies struggled economically, Deans was a financial success in Charleston. By 1756, he was able to join the local Masonic lodge, where he was enrolled as an “architect,” and two years later he was able to escape the shop floor to become a “land speculator and real estate developer” (p. 176). One of his last commissions in Charleston was a two-storey house for Henry Laurens, yet another wealthy and well-connected Charlestonian. With “full pockets,” Deans and his wife moved to London in 1764, having risen high on the economic ladder in a very short time.

Jackson and Leath end their detailed biography by tracing Deans’s last years in London. He continued to be harassed for support by Jean Bell, who remained unsuccessful, however, in obtaining the several hundred pounds of financial support she claimed Deans, as her husband, owed her. While in London, Deans renewed his acquaintance with the Laurens family and also developed a prototype for a mahogany “Indigo Beater,” a device or machine to pound indigo or rice that would make the processing of these crops in South Carolina less laborious for enslaved workers. Accidents and illness, however, plagued Deans in his later years, and after dissipating much of his American-earned fortune, he died in 1781. Thanks to Jackson and Leath, Deans—whatever his shortcomings as a person might have been—is now elevated to the pantheon of major early American craftsmen.

JESDA’s interest in southern furniture continues unabated. This anniversary issue was followed by volume 37, published in 2016. Among its four articles are two devoted to furniture: Amber M. Clawson’s “The McAdams Family of Cabinetmakers and the Cultural Palette of East Tennessee’s Rope and Tassel School of Furniture” and a “Research Note” by J. Christian Kolbe devoted to Seth Haywood and Willis Cowling, a turner and cabinetmaker in Richmond from 1825 to 1829. The contents for the 2017 issue indicate that more furniture articles are on the way, and the next half century of southern furniture scholarship is off to a flying start.

Gerald W. R. Ward
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston