Hyperbole is frequently used on book jackets and promotional literature from publishers, but rarely has it been employed with more temerity than on the jacket for this volume. “American Cabinetmakers is one of the most important antiques books ever to be published. The first book to catalog and illustrate all known American wood furniture pieces that bear the signatures, labels, brands, impressions, or ink-stamp marks of their makers, it is an essential volume for serious collectors, antique dealers, auctioneers, museum personnel, researchers, and historical societies. . . . [It] is a classic in the antiques and collectibles field.” Rarely has the hype been so ill-deserved.

Books on craftsmen and their marks are popular and extremely useful in studying the decorative arts. Edwin AtLee Barber’s Marks of American Potters (Philadelphia: Patterson & White Co., 1904); Dorothy T. Rainwater’s Encyclopedia of American Silver Manufacturers (in various editions of 1966, 1975, and 1986); and Ledlie Irwin Laughlin’s Pewter in America: Its Makers and their Marks (Barre, Massachusetts: Barre Publishers, 1969) are classics in the field. It is comforting to have reliable reference works, such as these and many others that are thoroughly researched and conveniently arranged, on our shelves to answer the most basic questions. Furniture, however, has never been the subject of this sort of basic book on marks and craftsmen, and clearly the authors and publisher hope that collectors, antique dealers, museums, and others will buy this book to fill that void.

According to American Cabinetmakers’s foreword and introduction, the late director of the Museum of American Folk Art, Robert Bishop, began in the 1970s, with the Henry Ford Museum’s associate curator of furniture, Katherine B. Hagler, to accumulate illustrations, clippings, and notes on marked or labeled examples of American furniture. The scope of the project excluded cast- or wrought-iron furniture and examples of wicker, rattan, and “other alien materials.” It also excluded clock and musical instrument makers, unless they were known to have manufactured the furniture cases as well as the contents. Only the briefest details of the cabinetmakers’ histories were collected to supplement the marks. After Bishop’s death in 1991, the next director of the Museum of American Folk Art, Gerard C. Wertkin, discussed the possibility of completing Bishop’s compilation with William C. Ketchum, Jr., a prolific writer on various antiques subjects, whose credits include Hooked Rugs (1976), Western Memorabilia (1980), Collecting Bottles for Fun and Profit (1985), Collecting the 40s and 50s for Fun and Profit (1985), Holiday Ornaments and Antiques (1990), and Country Wreaths and Baskets (1991). With the acknowledged assistance of a number of the museum’s students in the Folk Art Institute, Ketchum has produced this 404-page book.

I will not waste the reader’s time with a detailed criticism or enumeration of the errors of fact in American Cabinetmakers. The list would, simply, be much too long. There is no evidence of any original research in this book. It appears to be a cut-and-paste job assembled from secondary sources, books, magazines, and newspapers, with virtually no attempt to confirm details of the individually marked or labeled pieces of furniture or the perfunctory “biographical” information about the craftsmen.

To illustrate this point I mention only the entries on “Silas” Ingals of Vermont and Francis Jackson of Pennsylvania, which appear, not coincidentally, on the same page (182). The mark “S.I.” attributed to Silas Ingals was actually used by a Vermont chairmaker named Samuel Ingals, who worked in Danville. An accurate biographical entry for Samuel Ingals can be found in Charles A. Robinson’s Vermont Cabinetmakers Before 1855: A Checklist (Shelburne, Vermont: Shelburne Museum, 1994), an indispensable work that I highly recommend. An arrow-back Windsor armchair labeled by Francis Jackson of Easton, Pennsylvania, and owned by the William Penn Memorial Museum (not the “State Museum of Pennsylvania”), Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is cited as the basis for the entry on this craftsman. The author claims that “Nothing further is known of Jackson’s shop”; however, that very piece of furniture at the museum has a printed paper label with the following text: “francis jackson’s/chair manufactory,/northampton street, easton. / Where Windsor and Fancy —— bot- / tom Chairs are done in the neatest man- / ner; also Spinning wheels, Wool wheels, / Cut reels, and all Kinds of Turning. / The best Copal Varnish, and all Kinds / of colors for graining, for sale. / [and an illegible printer’s name in Easton].” Nothing further is known? Indeed!

Bibliographic “sources” at the end of this volume list the secondary works that provided the references to approximately 1,500 craftsmen in the book. Though important volumes such as Ethel Hall Bjerkoe’s The Cabinetmakers of America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1957); Charles F. Montgomery’s American Furniture, The Federal Period, 1785–1825 (New York: Viking Press, 1966); and John Bivins, Jr.’s The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina, 1700–1850 (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1988) are included, the significant omissions are staggering: Charles J. Semowich, American Furniture Craftsmen Working Prior to 1920: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984); Charles G. Dorman, Delaware Cabinetmakers and Allied Artisans, 1655–1855 (Wilmington, Del.: Historical Society of Delaware, 1960); Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988); and Sharon Darling, Chicago Furniture: Art, Craft, & Industry, 1833–1983 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1984). A simple look at Beatrice B. Garvan’s Federal Philadelphia, 1785–1825: The Athens of the Western World (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987) might have revealed to the authors the fine mahogany chest-on-chest illustrated there (p. 72) made and signed by the African-American cabinetmaker, Thomas Gross, Jr., working in Philadelphia in 1807 and later.

Lastly, American Cabinetmakers is an affront to me and my colleagues and our predecessors at the Decorative Arts Photographic Collection in the library at Winterthur and at the many other major repositories of documentation on American furniture, such as the marvelous libraries at MESDA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why would a supposed reference book, which boasts a museum as co-author, fail to utilize the most basic, well-known, and public libraries on decorative arts in America?

Bert Denker
Winterthur|

.
Mary E. Lyons.
Master of Mahogany: Tom Day, Free Black Cabinetmaker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. 42 pp.; color and bw illus., glossary, bibliography, index. $15.95.

Much has been said about the need for finding working-class role models for urban children of color, but little has been written for young readers on the lives and works of African-American artists and artisans who might be such models. As a result, examples of African-American crafts contributions to American history are largely absent from museums, libraries, and curricula. The African-American Artists and Artisans series of juvenile texts published by Charles Scribner’s Sons seeks to nurture new generations through lively, well-illustrated, and thoroughly researched biographies, which also add new data to the general literature on American decorative arts.

The series is authored by Mary E. Lyons, a former school librarian in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a winner of the Carter G. Woodson Award of the National Council for Social Studies. Her research and writing have been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. The series includes works on twentieth-century artists Horace Pippin and Bill Traylor and on nineteenth-century quilter Harriet Powers. Master of Mahogany: Tom Day,Free Black Cabinetmaker is the biography of the best-known, nineteenth-century, African-American cabinetmaker and architectural joiner, Tom Day (1801–ca. 1861).

Day was born a free black at the beginning of the nineteenth century and developed a carpentry and joinery business in rural Milton, North Carolina. By the 1850s, he had become one of the state’s largest cabinetmakers, supplying furnishings to state officials, churches, private homes, and the growing tobacco-based economy of the antebellum upper South. Before dying in 1861, Day was one of a small handful of black slaveholders in piedmont North Carolina. His son Devereaux went on to develop lumber and cabinetmaking interests in South America.

Lyons introduces the young reader to antebellum history, cabinetmaking, and nineteenth-century labor practices as she divides Day’s early life into his indentured, journeyman, and workshop years up to 1830. Strong historical documentation supports the story of his later, highly public life as a master cabinetmaker. By drawing upon this available research, Lyons builds an objectively comprehensive, although somewhat speculative, text describing the complex life of a financially successful, slave-owning free black in the antebellum South. She also points to southern pre–Civil War racial tensions and the national financial panic of 1857 as causes of Day’s economic collapse in 1859. Her focus for Day’s business and documented personal activities frees this text of the cloying romanticism that too often characterizes juvenile text descriptions of nineteenth-century southern black life.

Day’s work combined late Empire case piece, table, and chair forms with innovative and idiosyncratic surface embellishments, which often project distinctly African sculptural characteristics. His best work is easily distinguishable from contemporary carved mahogany and veneered pieces because of its often anthropomorphic and graceful cyma-curve treatments. Works attributed to him bring a premium in the collector market and are included in the Acacia Collection in Savannah, Georgia, and the Center for African-American Decorative Arts collection in Atlanta, Georgia. Strikingly elegant color photographs by Jim Bridges document Day’s church pews, newel posts, and West African mask-like mantel carvings, and ground the text in a graphically rich context of deeply patinated and polished mahogany surfaces and sweeping sculptural forms. The reader yearns to embrace these elegant architectonic embellishments.

An opportunity is lost, however, to link the text more closely to the illustrated objects by showing how the objects were made. Inner-city youths have largely lost touch with the mechanics of crafting handmade objects, and more information could usefully have been provided on tools and techniques associated with woodworking. The absence of even a single image of an African-American actually handcrafting furnishings in a shop could have been corrected by using illustrations drawn from various archival sources. The text, although tantalizing, thus ultimately fails to draw the reader into the magic of actually designing and building such viscerally evocative forms. One sees and senses the textures of the objects without feeling the sensibilities and spirit of their maker.

Similarly, little light is shed on how much Day may have known of, or drawn upon, the Bambara sculptures that today seem so close to his newel-post forms. Nothing is yet known of his understanding of African sculpture, although late 1995 findings suggest that he had a brother who was a missionary to West Africa and with whom he corresponded. Although there was likely a nascent black commerce with former African-American settlements in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the mid-nineteenth century, much research remains to be done to determine how the African diaspora may have tried during this period to trace its roots back into tribal morphologies and symbolic sculptural forms. We learn much here from documented historical records of the life of a free black southern cabinetmaker, but not enough of the spirit of this unique craftsman or of how he might have drawn upon the design components of his African past to develop distinctively African-American decorative references.

Perhaps such questions are beyond the scope of a juvenile text, but Lyons’s synthesizing research raises expectations as it extends our knowledge of Day far beyond previously published scholarly texts, with significantly more striking illustrations of Day’s work than seen before. To tease but not to satisfy the imagination on questions of how African designs may have influenced African-American decorative arts in the half century before Emancipation only inspires greater curiosity about this generally underdocumented aspect of African-American contributions to the American decorative arts. Master of Mahogany transcends its categorization as a juvenile text by introducing us to the life of a unique nineteenth-century cabinetmaking entrepreneur and is a significant contribution to this field of research. Mary E. Lyons’s work also adds to the pedagogy of incorporating a wider range of design influences into the broadly assimilationist melange of appropriated forms and embellishments that we now understand the American decorative arts to be.

Ted Landsmark
Boston University

.
John D. Hamilton.
Material Culture of the American Freemasons. Lexington, Massachusetts: Museum of Our National Heritage, 1994. Distributed by University Press of New England, Hanover and London. xii + 308 pp.; 36 color and numerous bw illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $75.00.

After decades of largely being ignored by the scholarly community, American fraternalism has been the focus of expanded scrutiny during the last twenty years. Following the publication of Dorothy Ann Lipson’s Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1835 (1977), studies exploring the sociological, religious, and cultural implications of America’s omnipresent, ritual-based, fraternal organizations have appeared with increasing frequency. Volumes such as Christopher J. Kauffman’s Faith & Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882–1982 (1982) and Lynn Dumenil’s Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (1984) have examined individual groups, whereas Mark Carnes’s Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989) and Mary Ann Clawson’s Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (1989) have explicated the larger ramifications of the American fraternal movement, which spawned bodies as diverse as the Knights of Labor, the Loyal Order of Moose, and the B’nai Brith. Our understanding of the historical importance of America’s oath-bound voluntary organizations, which at their height in the 1890s were estimated to include one of every five American men, also has been enriched in recent years by the work of scholars including John L. Brooke, C. Lance Brockman, Steven C. Bullock, Anthony Fels, Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, and William A. Muraskin. These investigations have been informed by the new perspectives of the last thirty years, which have placed race, class, and gender at the center of historical discourse.

The new literature, however, largely has ignored the importance of material culture as a conduit of meaning within American fraternalism. Artifacts and works of art have been central to American fraternal life from the moment that the first Freemasonry lodge was convened in the colonies in the early eighteenth century. Over the last three centuries fraternalism has manifested itself physically in a vast range of forms and in almost every conceivable medium. The material heritage includes objects as diverse as eighteenth-century silver Masonic jewelry created by Paul Revere, celluloid temperance souvenirs distributed in the 1890s, and buildings such as the twenty-three-story office tower erected by the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1969. Although most institutional collections of American decorative arts and historical artifacts contain objects with fraternal associations, this massive body of material has yet to be adequately documented or explicated.

John D. Hamilton’s Material Culture of the American Freemasons is the fourth publication from the Museum of Our National Heritage in this institution’s continuing effort to fill this void in the scholarly literature. Like the first three titles edited by Barbara Franco, Masonic Symbols in American Decorative Arts (1976), Bespangled Painted & Embroidered: Decorated Masonic Aprons in America 1790–1850 (1980), and Fraternally Yours: A Decade of Collecting (1986), the present work was produced to accompany an exhibition mounted by the museum in Lexington, Massachusetts—in this instance, a show entitled “The Oblong Square: Lodge Furnishings and Paraphernalia in America Since 1733,” held from June 13, 1993, to February 20, 1994. As a series, these four catalogues comprise an invaluable means of entry into the arcane world of fraternal objects and serve as useful tools for investigating American symbolic thought.

Material Culture of the American Freemasons is organized into seven topical chapters, accompanied by six appendixes, a foreword, and a preface. Hamilton, the author, has grouped objects achronologically, according to their function within the fraternity’s activities. Lodge room furnishings, for example, are found in chapter three, funereal accoutrements comprise chapter seven, and objects used in dining are gathered in chapter six. Each chapter includes at least one thematic essay, but the bulk of the text is arranged into entries related to individual items from the collections of the Museum of Our National Heritage. These entries are meticulous in documenting the artifacts’ provenances and historical associations. The author is to be commended for the extensive research that this undertaking obviously entailed.

The book’s greatest strength is the breadth of material illustrated and discussed, ranging from inlaid desks to blindfolds (known within the Masonic fraternity as “hoodwinks”) and from casket handles to door knockers. This text will be a useful reference for curators and collectors in their efforts to identify Masonic items and locate related examples. The appendixes listing names, dates, and locations for Masonic artists, regalia manufacturers and dealers, and engravers of Masonic certificates and aprons will also prove invaluable for future scholarship on the subject.

Furniture comprises only a small portion of the volume, but most of the primary Masonic genres of furnishings are represented. Eighteenth-century Chippendale-style side chairs are illustrated and discussed, as are idiosyncratic, nineteenth-century officers’ chairs, grain-painted altars, ceremonial candlesticks, stenciled chests, Windsor-style settees, and inlaid desks. The museum’s collecting, however, has tended toward early and unique items, and this publication reflects that emphasis. Between 1870 and 1930, vast quantities of Masonic furniture were mass produced in factories by firms such as the American Seating Company, S. Karpen & Bros., and M. C. Lilley & Company. Unfortunately, this major category of Masonic furniture is underrepresented here. An additional appendix documenting these nineteenth- and twentieth-century manufacturers could have filled a significant research void, since many of their products exist today and frequently appear in the marketplace.

Although individuals unfamiliar with Masonic history and culture will find this book helpful as an introductory guide to Masonic artifacts, they also may experience frustration in assimilating the mass of seemingly loosely related information contained here. In spite of its detailed examination of hundreds of individual objects, the structure of this catalogue, which lacks a central historical narrative or explicit thesis, provides insufficient framework for easy digestion of the data presented. Freemasonry is an extraordinarily complex organization that has developed organically over more than three hundred years on six continents and has been shaped by esoteric traditions including hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, numerology, and Martinism. Since each chapter mingles examples from the Scottish Rite, the York Rite, and the Blue Lodge (with a few from the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine added to the mix), newcomers to the field may have trouble sorting out the separate Masonic rites, let alone untangling the various traditions influencing them.

Part of the problem may be that Hamilton, a member of the fraternity, has found his scholarship fettered by his own Masonic vows of secrecy. “In describing the significance of items in the collection,” he informs us in the preface, “a fine distinction has been made between providing meaningful information for those outside Freemasonry, and in not breaking faith with the confidentiality of ritual” (p. xi). In ensuring that secrets were not revealed, though, the author has unnecessarily denied the reader significant information that would have aided the exegesis of these pieces. Nowhere, for example, does Hamilton inform us that the central ritual of Freemasonry revolves around the reenactment of the murder, burial, and disinterment of Hiram Abif, the architect responsible for constructing Solomon’s Temple. This narrative framework, available to the general public in any number of exposés published in the nineteenth century, informs the interpretation of most Masonic objects. All of the brotherhoods’ teachings, and thus the significance of the objects used in their inculcation, are based upon the moral lessons inherent in this central narrative, which is enacted in the lodge room during every initiation.

The volume’s disregard for recent scholarship on fraternal organizations is also troubling and inexplicable. Hamilton fails to address the insights on Freemasonry and fraternalism presented in the important new studies mentioned previously, and these works are omitted from his bibliography. Rather than entering into the dynamic discourse concerning Freemasonry currently occurring within the academy, the author relies heavily upon the antiquarian publications of Masonic research bodies, Grand Lodges, and other such organizations. By following this conservative course, he documents Masonic individuals, activities, and objects without substantially relating Freemasonry to the social transformations taking place in American society over time. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rise of the Masonic Knights Templar, for example, who were supposedly successors to the holy warriors of the crusades, is discussed without reference to romanticism and the contemporaneous growth of American interest in things medieval. Similarly, with twentieth-century materials, the reader is shown elaborate theatrical costuming for the presentation of rituals but receives no analysis of the societal forces that motivated men in the 1920s to dress as Biblical patriarchs and Roman centurions.

By presenting materials topically rather than chronologically, and by isolating the fraternity from its cultural context, Hamilton has given us a volume that is rich in factual information but lacking in historical perspective. This work portrays Masonry as unchanging. The Brethren apparently feasted, practiced ritual, and buried each other with little variation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. This perspective, though, denies the vitality and historical complexity that makes Masonic history worthy of study. Although certain continuities do exist, Masonry is not a monolithic cultural entity existing in isolation from society. Throughout the last three centuries Masonry has both shaped, and been shaped by, transformations in American culture. The fraternity, rather than remaining static, is continually in flux. Over time, Masonic membership repeatedly has boomed and collapsed and experienced changing socioeconomic and ethnic profiles. New technologies have influenced ritual practices. Innovative Masonic organizations, including the Order of the Eastern Star for women and DeMolay for teenage boys, have been invented to meet changing social mores and demands. By focusing tightly upon individual artifacts rather than on larger patterns of object usage, this study provides data for examining the complexity of American Masonic history but does not explore the subject comprehensively.

Although one might wish it were analytically more complex, The Material Culture of the American Freemasons is a noteworthy contribution to the study of an overlooked, but significant, facet of American material life. More American Masonic artifacts are illustrated and described between the covers of this volume than have appeared before in a single publication. For the foreseeable future, this text will be the standard reference guide for American Masonic objects.

William D. Moore
Livingston Masonic Library

.
John A. Fleming.
The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700–1840. Camden East, Ontario: Camden House Publishing; Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994. Distributed by Firefly Books. 179 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., appendixes, bibliography, index. $34.95.

John Fleming’s The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700–1840 is the first major monograph on Canadian furniture since the publication of Jean Palardy’s seminal The Early Furniture of French Canada. Despite Fleming’s long history as a collector and furniture historian, the book is a major disappointment. The publication lacks a scholarly approach, which could have made it an invaluable monograph for Canadian and American collectors, curators, and dealers. Fleming takes a highly personal approach to his study of Canadian furniture, an approach that appears to reflect a poor understanding of furniture history over the past twenty years as well as of current material culture approaches to the field. The reader is presented with an undocumented and unsubstantiated “aesthetic and psychological” analysis that purports to explain why Canadians preferred particular paint colors on furniture. The primary saving grace of the book is that it publishes many heretofore unknown pieces of furniture and that most of the photographs by James A. Chambers are of superb quality.1

The monograph is organized with chapters on six specific subjects: “Settlement,” “Styles,” “Furniture,” “Surface, Colour and Decoration,” “Conclusion,” and “Epilogue.” Each of these is further broken down into separate essays. For example, the section titled “Settlement” is further divided into “The Houses” and “Interior Space.” Under “Styles,” the Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Régence, Louis XV, Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and Folk traditions are discussed. The “Furniture” section includes essays on woods, construction, hardware, and upholstery. Finally, the section titled “Surface, Colour and Decoration” also includes essays on “Painted Surfaces” and “Sculptural Decoration.”

The essays not specifically dealing with the analysis of furniture styles consolidate useful information. In several cases this information is not concisely available to scholars in this country. For instance, in the first essay titled “Settlement,” Fleming outlines the history of the French colony, including its settlement patterns, population makeup, and origins, by citing census material as well as contemporary primary sources. A similarly factual presentation of information appears in Fleming’s analysis of houses built by French settlers (pp. 28–35) and in his discussion of the interiors of these houses, where he makes a clear connection between house builders and the creators of large, frequently integral case furniture such as armoires. He makes this connection by citing building contracts calling for the creation of both structures and furnishings to go in them (see pp. 43–47). Contemporary travel accounts and inventories are also cited in this section, giving the reader a good understanding of lifestyles and concepts of interior decoration in rural Canada during both the French and British regimes into the nineteenth century.2

In the chapter titled “Styles,” Fleming’s analysis changes tone. Although he outlines the court styles that influenced design in French Canada, he also makes comments that can be interpreted as ethnocentric and are not substantiated by analysis or comparison. For example, when comparing furniture forms made in French Canada with those made in the United States, he makes the following statement: “French furniture, as compared with English and German furniture, the two other major forms in colonial North America, gave to the early furniture of New France three general characteristics: exuberance of line, harmony of proportion . . . and the integration of decorative features with structure” (p. 52). Not only are such seemingly factual statements purely subjective, they also sound ethnocentric with their implied relegation of non-French furniture forms to a second-best category. Likewise, France is presented as a primary origin of the styles used in the United States and in England through statements such as “English furniture of the 18th century was influenced by French and Dutch designs”(p. 67). Certainly this influence may have been true to an extent, but the statement, like many others throughout the book, is presented glibly, without analysis, examples, or references to back up the author’s beliefs.

Fleming’s chapter titled “Furniture” includes a discussion of the furniture-making industry in Canada. Beginning with census information identifying occupations by crafts and continuing through apprenticeship records, he cites schools believed to have educated carpenters and cabinetmakers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and mentions a number of extant contracts between joiners and clients for the creation of furniture. Yet this section and a subsequent one titled “Construction” are notably weak in the analysis of the actual furniture under discussion. On page 83, for example, Fleming comments that “many of the surviving examples of French Canadian furniture have been executed with the greatest technical competence and a sure sense of design to the smallest unseen detail.” Earlier in the book he notes that the dating of furniture is approximate, “based upon an analysis of construction techniques, other material characteristics (types of wood, thickness of planks, use of pins, nails, glue, paints, colours and combinations of colours, layers of paint, et cetera) or style features that establish a terminus post . . .” (p. 21). Sadly, none of these construction details are explained in the appropriate chapter on furniture, or anywhere else in the book, or illustrated in photographic form. Indeed, many of these details are discussed only haphazardly in a small number of the object captions, leaving the reader without any sense of how frequently they occur or what patterns or generalizations might be deduced as a result of them; nor are there any photographs of construction details to allow the reader to observe what Fleming is referring to. Though the author’s assumptions may well be true, a book that purports to be a source of information on Canadian painted furniture should at least outline criteria with which to judge, date, and attribute furniture.

Some of these comments, furthermore, seem again very protective. By saying that Canadian furniture has been “executed with the greatest of technical competence” one might assume that Canadian furniture of the French period (before 1760, one would assume) is very finely constructed. In fact, Canadian furniture prior to and after 1760 is anything but finely crafted. By comparison to what was contemporaneously made in the United States, it is very crudely constructed. Drawer sides and bottoms and even fronts are planks, sometimes up to two-inches thick, and to describe them as executed with the greatest of technical competence is misleading.3 Rather than obfuscating this fact, Fleming might better have spent his time by clearly identifying and illustrating this feature and other characteristics of Canadian furniture and explaining them in terms of the technological and historical development of the Canadian colony.

In the following chapters on “Paint” and “Sculptural Decoration,” Fleming assigns great importance to the use of certain colors and decorative patterns. He writes: “The colours that predominated in 18th-century French Canada were the blues, green, and reds of 17th-century France. These are colours still identified with the natural world in the symbolic and psychological meanings, both sacred and secular” (p. 138). Throughout the chapter he makes reference to theory with respect to the use of color: For example, “the eye sees the greatest elementary beauty in simple colours: red, yellow, green and blue. . . . Blue, as the colour of the sky and secondarily of water, is associated in European tradition with fidelity and with things spiritual, while green has always been linked to youth, growth and hope” (pp. 119–20). He attempts to identify the use of certain colors with specific values and associations, some unconscious, made by Canadian consumers. Sadly, although Fleming is able to cite a number of sources for the importation of color pigments for the manufacture of paints in Canada before the English occupation of the 1760s, most of his documentation for the use of color postdates the Treaty of Paris and, in fact, appears in English/American publications dating after 1763. Very significantly, this section also lacks any reference to chemical analysis of the painted surfaces of the furniture illustrated in the book. In fact, the only paint analysis to appear in the book is presented in the object captions of the handful of pieces that belong to Canadian museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian Conservation Institute, or the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

In the preface to the book Fleming makes the disclaimer that he has “not tried . . . to lard a lean book ‘with the fat of others’ works’” (p. 10). Sadly, this is too true. The publication could have been the one scholars have been waiting for. It could have synthesized more than thirty years of Canadian scholarship since Palardy’s publication, but instead it is a wasted opportunity. Some attempt could have been made, for instance, to identify bodies of work, either by region or by maker. This identification could have occurred through the analysis of construction techniques, through a scientific analysis of woods used in stylistically related pieces, or with a serious and systematic chemical analysis of pigments used. None of this scholarship appears in the book except in an amateurish and haphazard way.

Francis J. Puig
University of South Florida

1. Jean Palardy, The Early Furniture of French Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965). Fleming, incidentally, lists a large number of published articles in his bibliography, which add to the references on early Canadian furniture and technology since the publication of Palardy’s book. Fleming is identified as a collector and historian of Canadian furniture in the biographical material on the book’s jacket. See especially pages 121 through 124. Unfortunately, the analysis of these pieces is weak at best. Construction analysis is rudimentary, wood analysis is nonexistent, and provenance is generally not given. Detail photographs are also lacking.

2. Notably absent from this essay and elsewhere throughout the book is anything more than a passing mention of the British occupation of Canada after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended the French and Indian Wars. This treaty granted Canada and its territories east of the Mississippi River to Britain. At almost the same moment, the secret Treaty of Fontainbleau of 1762 granted to Spain France’s holdings west of the Mississippi River, thus virtually ending France’s empire in North America. The same pattern existed in the French settlements of the Mississippi River Valley in the eighteenth century. See Francis J. Puig, “The Early Furniture of the Mississippi River Valley, 1760–1820,” in The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, 1620–1820, edited by Francis J. Puig and Michael Conforti (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1989), pp. 159–61.

3. I refer the reader to a commode of curly maple and pine illustrated in Puig, “Early Furniture of the Mississippi River Valley,” p. 171. This piece of furniture, probably made in the Quebec region after the English occupation of Canada, is remarkably thickly constructed, but by no means unique given the many similarly constructed pieces in Quebec museums that this author has examined. In this instance, the shaped drawer fronts are close to three-inches thick in sections. With respect to the fine detailing referred to by Fleming, this piece, again like many others, has only two large dovetails instead of the four or five more commonly found on contemporaneous pieces made in the United States.

.
Kenneth Joel Zogry. “The Best the Country Affords”: Vermont Furniture, 1765–1850. Bennington, Vt.: Bennington Museum, 1995, 176 pp.: 56 color and 145 bw illus., bibliography, index. $55.00; $37.00 pb.

Charles A. Robinson, with an introduction by Philip Zea. Vermont Cabinetmakers and Chairmakers Before 1855: A Checklist. Shelburne, Vt.: Shelburne Museum, 1995. 126 pp.; 14 color and bw illus., index. $14.95.

“The Best the Country Affords”: Vermont Furniture, 1765–1850 provides a striking departure from recent patterns in the design and presentation of furniture exhibition catalogues. The latter usually begin with several essays, followed by a series of detailed, formulaic descriptions and analyses of a body of furniture, frequently grouped chronologically by form. Kenneth Joel Zogry stated a desire to produce a cohesive, “user friendly” publication, which would provide “an important contribution to the field that showcased the furniture and was aesthetically pleasing.” His solution was a geographical approach rather than one organized by furniture forms or arranged strictly chronologically; furthermore, “A conscious decision was made not to bog down the narrative or the notes with minute descriptions of construction or condition” (p. 7).

Zogry divides Vermont into five regions (the southeast, northeast, southwest, west central, and northwest). He introduces each region with a short chronological overview and a contextual framework for the furniture. This orientation is followed by a series of catalogue entries of furniture from the region, organized in an approximate chronology. When possible, Zogry “group[s] significant objects together, whether from the same shop tradition, town, or family,” when a grouping provides “a particularly interesting comparison” (p. 7).

Having just suggested the need for new approaches in furniture catalogues (see my review of Brock Jobe’s Portsmouth Furniture in Studies in the Decorative Arts 3, no. 2 [Spring-Summer 1996]: 139–40), I was especially intrigued with the approach taken in “The Best the Country Affords.” There are some major benefits to the design. In both essays and the catalogue entries, the pieces are put into geographic, economic, and social context both locally and regionally. Zogry continuously sought for the sources of the furnitures’ design and construction, looking at specific features of the individual pieces and backgrounds of the makers. In the process, he revealed a much more heterogeneous world than has been generally conceived of for Vermont, one that was quite at variance with traditional views regarding its furniture. These notions had generally postulated that there were few local makers and those that did exist created unsophisticated wares that were pale mimics of their urban counterparts—exotic folk art creations or essentially plain products only in part saved by the use of bright paints over local woods. (This same image has also influenced conventional thinking about Maine and New Hampshire furniture, with, of course, the begrudging possibility that Portsmouth might have had something more to offer.) Zogry found pieces ranging from the very plain to the highly sophisticated. Pieces frequently reflected outside influences but quite as often retained local features that emphasized the creativity and design concepts of the local makers. As was true elsewhere, factory practices affected styles and construction techniques, and although paint was often used for decorative purposes, so too were mahogany and rosewood veneers. This world, then, was more complex and sophisticated than has previously been thought.

Despite the diversity, patterns emerge from the text and pictures. In the eighteenth century, settlers moved into southern Vermont in increasing numbers, and clearly many brought with them traditions from Connecticut and New York. The latter would continue significantly to influence patterns in western Vermont. To the east, though, increasing influence came from eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire, especially as turnpikes and other overland routes opened the area. By mid-century, the railroad further strengthened ties between Vermont and eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire. That period also saw a rapid expansion of small furniture factories, especially in the central region of the state, which were providing substantial quantities of fairly unpretentious furniture as well as some relatively sophisticated and stylish objects. By that point, much of what was being made in Vermont echoed national patterns and exhibited fewer local characteristics.

There is much to be said for Zogry’s approach. It explicitly ties furniture to the overall societal matrix and considers specific construction and design details that illuminate overall themes. He also eliminates the blizzard of marginal data. Happily, one does not have to slog through facts about a replaced stretcher or a chalked number “632” on the back of a chest of drawers; nor is there great detail on whose auction hall or antique establishment the piece has moved through. The absence of such data is refreshing.

There is still room for improvement, however. Because of the fluidity in topics being presented (makers here, styles there, shop traditions further on), one tends to get lost. Complicating the presentation is the strict geographic patterning of the approach, while the information is everywhere bleeding over the rigid boundaries. To absorb fully all of the information, the reader needs to take careful notes and have both state and regional maps at hand. Zogry’s presentation is at times rather obscure, suffering from awkward writing and from ideas needing fuller explication. Finally, there are more than a few black and white photographs that are too dark and too small to be of major diagnostic use, and the index is totally inadequate.

Still, this publication is a pioneering work, employing a new approach, and it opens the way for further development. For example, the geographic approach has tremendous potential, but it might have been structured to allow overall analysis of the forces affecting the various parts of the region. For example, the discussion about the roles of turnpikes and other roadways into the region could have been done once thoroughly, rather than fragmented among three different sections of the book. Also, several themes could have been more rigorously pursued, such as the geographical and chronological patterns of New York or New England influence or the development of furniture factories throughout the region. This kind of discipline would have clarified the book’s purpose and eliminated marginal entries, such as the desk and bookcase on page 138 owned by James Wilson (1763–1855), who made globes, or the secretary on page 168 owned by Alexander Twilight (1795–1857), the first African-American to receive a college degree in America. Important as these men were, their stories add practically nothing to furniture history.

Also, a more concentrated look at the local characteristics of the furniture might have revealed social patterns not yet discerned. The conservative styles of “Northern Kingdom” furniture may tell us much about those peoples’ mindsets. Similar styles were apparently expressed in eastern Maine in the early and mid-nineteenth century, a period of serious economic challenge in that region. These features might reveal the views of people on the economic margin who felt they couldn’t take big chances, outlooks that were reflected in their very furnishings.

Kenneth Zogry has done much to bring furniture into a more central role in discerning social patternings. His efforts have opened new doors and suggested further ventures. Probably most important, Zogry has presented the first major work on Vermont furniture. That is no mean trick.

Charles Robinson’s Vermont Cabinetmakers and Chairmakers Before 1855: A Checklist provides a major body of information on the craftsmen who produced the furniture analyzed by Zogry. As anyone who has ever attempted such a checklist knows, the work of ferreting out the data and then organizing it into a presentable format is formidable at best. This publication is the type that others are glad to have and equally glad someone else prepared.

Vermont Cabinetmakers and Chairmakers is presented in a straightforward manner. In a preface Robinson describes the major sources he used, and he notes that, although more names could have been teased from sources such as deeds and probate records, it was time to get the material out to those who could use it.

An introductory essay by Philip Zea, curator of Historic Deerfield, follows the preface. Like Zogry, he notes the mismatch between traditional views and actual evidence regarding furniture manufacture in Vermont, stressing a surprising heterogeneity in products of the region due to various heritages, local factors, and so forth. Zea accentuates the importance of Robinson’s checklist by evaluating the origin of Vermont makers—the overwhelming body of immigrants came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire—information at variance with traditional suppositions of strong Connecticut and New York influences on Vermont furniture styles. Such findings, as well as implementing some of the suggestions above regarding Zogry’s approach, might bring a degree of order to the presently perceived heterogeneity of Vermont furniture patterns.

The checklist, which makes up most of the volume, is alphabetically arranged. The entries provide the pertinent data that has been located about each individual, which varies from a line of text to fairly extended paragraphs. Overall, the information will be of great help to scholars, dealers, and collectors.

The checklist could be improved, however, in a couple of ways. First, there is a need for a more standardized format relaying basic key information such as working dates, location, and the maker’s specific occupation (e.g., cabinetmaking, chairmaking, turning, and so forth). Supplementary material could then be added.

Second, the cross-referencing system is quite frustrating. For example, the entry for Harvey E. Babst directs the reader to Goodale and Babst; the Goodale and Babst entry further directs the scholar to “J. W. Goodale,” where the reader finally finds out that the firm of Goodale and Babst operated in 1851. Similarly, in the entry on Asahel Barnes, a cabinetmaker from New Haven, Connecticut, George F. Barnes is mentioned as his son. One then checks the biography for George F. Barnes and is directed to Asahel Barnes, Jr. Only then does the reader learn that the two men—George F. and Asahel, Jr.—were partners in the cabinet- and chairmaking business in Burlington during 1843 and 1844. There’s got to be a better way!

Nevertheless, the checklist is rich in important information. It will help identify the makers of many pieces of presently unidentified Vermont furniture. Like Zogry’s work, it will also provide scholars with important data with which to further research and analyze the furniture industry in Vermont and place it within the larger regional and national scene.

Edwin A. Churchill
Maine State Museum