Review by Amber C. Albert
Crafting Excellence: The Furniture of Nathan Lumbard and His Circle

Christine Jackson, Brock Jobe, and Clark Pearce. Crafting Excellence: The Furniture of Nathan Lumbard and His Circle. A Winterthur Book. Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 2018. 288 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., appendix, index. Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London. $65.00.

For most, Nathan Lumbard’s name conjures images of iconic arabesque inlays that define his high-end furniture forms. Crafting Excellence: The Furniture of Nathan Lumbard and His Circle provides a more inclusive and faithful depiction of Lumbard through a comprehensive examination of the man and his world. Social and material contexts, such as oil portraits of Lumbard and his wife, Delight (figs. 1.2, 1.3), stimulate readers’ imaginations. Set against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century market-driven consumerism, this series of essays provides a greater understanding of Lumbard’s decisions concerning design and execution. Researchers from multiple disciplines will find themselves consulting the volume, and decorative arts scholars, already familiar with this furniture group, will be enchanted all over again.^[1]

Together, the three authors, Lumbard descendants, and numerous collaborative organizations have painstakingly assembled a detailed account of the cabinetmaker’s social world and cabinetmaking technique. Each contributing author leverages his or her professional strengths and background to complement the work of each other. Christie Jackson is senior curator of the Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts and previously served in a curatorial capacity with Old Sturbridge Village. Clark Pearce is an independent scholar of American decorative arts who specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American furniture. Brock Jobe has been recognized internationally for his decorative arts publications. Currently, Jobe is professor of American Decorative Arts emeritus, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Winterthur, Delaware.

Crafting Excellence contends that Nathan Lumbard’s early work was a “singular expression of village refinement” (p. 111) as part of a wider circle of rural artisans in western Massachusetts. First, Jackson describes Lumbard’s familial and professional networks, including those of his wife, Delight Allen. Subsequently Pearce analyzes the cabinetmaking circle’s materials, design, and forms. In particular, he identifies and even lauds the “quirky” aspects of construction that define furniture by this circle of cabinetmakers (p. 58). With a solid foundation of biography and furniture analysis in place, Jobe then debates Lumbard’s broader contribution and asks, was the man who produced such “inventive, dynamic, exuberant” (p. 89) furniture a New England original? The three narrative chapters, grounded in twenty years of primary source research and public exhibitions, culminate in a sixty-one-piece catalogue of the cabinetmaker’s circle of attributions.

Character portraits, enhanced by images and details of the nineteenth-century material world, set Crafting Excellence apart from other seminal investigations of historic decorative arts. With the flair of Ann Smart Martin’s Buying into the World of Goods, Jackson breathes life into her study’s protagonists. Oliver Wight, who likely trained or at the least employed Lumbard, was the type of man who always grasped for the next rung on the social ladder, but he never achieved the stability of consistent work or profit (p. 43). Familial recollections of Lumbard highlight the cabinetmaker’s quiet nature and dedication to his craft. The authors attribute much of Nathan’s financial success to the social connections of his wife, Delight (p. 25).^[2]

The character portraits are further enhanced by the context of their material surroundings. After all, what use is a sideboard without silver to store behind lock and key? Illustrated non-furniture artifacts primarily descended in the Allen family or are from the permanent collection of Old Sturbridge Village. Even peripheral examples like the personal items of Ezra and Mary Allen, Delight Allen’s first cousins once removed, lend an intimate air to Lumbard’s furniture. Such delicate objects include combs, wedding slippers, and garments (figs. 1.15–1.18). The reader can envision Mary tossing the comb onto her Lumbard chest of drawers on her way out the door. Such an extent of surviving material culture presents a significant departure from the studies of cabinetmakers in the American South. Although life in agrarian towns above and below the (future) Mason/Dixon Line was similar, scholars of Southern decorative arts have a dearth of such contextual materials at their disposal. In the South, decades of political turmoil, economic hardship, and a humid climate took a serious toll on precious personal belongings.

A philosophical gap in the publication is its research question: was Nathan Lumbard a New England original? This southern scholar sees in the work of Jackson, Pearce, and Jobe a larger question with far-reaching implications. Was Nathan Lumbard an “American paradigm” of rural cabinetmaking in the early Republic? A brief comparison of the Massachusetts circle (Lumbard, Wight, and Ebenezer Howard) to that of the Burgners in East Tennessee (Moses Crawford, John C. Burgner, and Hugh McAdams) reveals similarities in the role(s) of wealthy contacts and relocation toward stronger markets. Like Lumbard, financial successes in rural Tennessee were tied to their social connections. In fact, the Burgner “circle” of cabinetmakers could be visually rendered as a Venn diagram of overlapping circles highlighting customers, competitors, and family members. As entrepreneurs are wont to do, they pursued economic opportunity in different communities, as did Lumbard and Wight: Crawford and McAdams conducted business across county lines and Burgner crossed state lines from Tennessee to North Carolina and back again.^[3]

Future scholarship will determine if rural cabinetmakers in the early Republic had more similarities than differences. To that end, two questions immediately come to mind. First, to what extent did the cabinetmakers’ families rely on income from family farms? Second, were enslaved men or women in cabinetmaking households trained as craftspeople? A study of rural furniture makers—North and South—would be a welcome addition to the canon.

Wider context aside, there is no doubt that Lumbard and his “circle” were prolific artisans. One need only review the exquisitely photographed tall clocks in the catalogue (plates 38–43) to get a sense of these men at the height of their creative achievement. Further, it is worth noting that since this work went to press—and after nearly fifty years in a single private collection—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired a Lumbard clock, in turn, making it a publicly accessible piece of Massachusetts’ tangible past.^[4]

Painstakingly researched, deftly organized, and beautifully illustrated, Crafting Excellence recreates the material and social world of a western Massachusetts cabinetmaker. Future decorative arts scholars will look to this text as inspiration for monograph-length studies grounded in a diverse array of sources. Moreover, this southern scholar admits her envy of the extensive material context from which Jackson, Jobe, and Pearce have so completely and meticulously reconstructed their story of Nathan Lumbard.

Amber C. Albert
Historical Association of Catawba County