Jeremy Adamson. The Furniture of Sam Maloof. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum and W. W. Norton, 2001. xviii + 270 pages, 212 color and bw illus., bibliography, index. $60.00. Ursula Ilse-Neumann et al. Made In Oakland: The Furniture of Garry Knox Bennett. New York: American Craft Museum, 2001. x + 228 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., chronology, artist’s statements, exhibition history, bibliography. $75.00. If scholarly coverage is any accurate measure, then two Californians—Sam Maloof and Garry Knox Bennett—now can be said to rank among the most important furniture makers in American history. They are the subjects of full-length studies published last year by the nation’s leading craft museums, the American Craft Museum in New York City and the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. The books are to be welcomed enthusiastically, for several reasons. First, their sheer size and accomplishment mark them as milestones in the publishing records of the sponsoring institutions. This is particularly true in the case of the American Craft Museum, which has lately distanced itself from a previously cogent identity. At one time, the museum was the only major institution in the country devoted to the enormous subject of contemporary craft. As others have sprouted across the country—first the Renwick in the 1970s and more recently the Mint Museum of Craft & Design in Charlotte, North Carolina—the American Craft Museum has moved away from its mandate. Many of the shows the museum has originated in the past five years have presented such topics as Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass and early modern European porcelain—topics, in other words, that are done far better elsewhere. So a project devoted to Garry Knox Bennett, an honest-to-goodness studio furniture maker, is a welcome return to the museum’s original mission. That two contemporary furniture makers should have books of length, quality, and seriousness devoted to them is a matter of celebration, and not only for studio craftspeople and their partisans. If furniture history is a meaningful intellectual discipline, it cannot have an end date. Museums across the country typically sever furniture made after a certain date (1820 in some places, 1920 in others) from the steady flow of historical development and influence. These two monographs offer readers the opportunity to see contemporary work that rivals antique furniture in terms of complexity, interest, and quality. A third attraction of the two books is suggested by their simultaneous publication, which invites comparison. Maloof (see fig. 1) and Bennett (see fig. 2) are antithetical in both personality and style. Maloof is so unassuming and low-key as to be almost precious, and has lived out his long career in a pastoral lemon grove. Bennett is crude and hilarious—both in person and as a designer—and is steeped in the rough urbanism of Oakland. That decorative arts scholars can value such mutually exclusive qualities says a lot for the field. Rigorous and objective analysis has heretofore been the exception rather than the rule in twentieth-century furniture studies. Perhaps it is the legacy of modern design itself that causes historians to take sides “for” or “against,” whether the subject is art deco, mass-produced davenports, or handmade studio work. As the historiography of eighteenth-century material demonstrates, however, it is only when advocacy subsides that clarity can be achieved. The old days of “good, better, best” are mostly behind us in the study of the colonial era, at least within the academy. But it is only recently that the heterogeneity of modern furniture has come to be seen positively. Jeremy Adamson’s authoritative study of Maloof is as good a point of entry into that principle as any book ever written on the subject of modern furniture. The account, like the subject, is somewhat old-fashioned. It is both chronological and biographical, describing the arc of Maloof’s career from graphic illustrator to beginning designer-craftsman to master furniture maker. Throughout these stages Maloof comes across as an unvarying quantity, a given. Though the tides of fashion shift around him, his work plods unerringly forward from decade to decade. The furniture emanating from the little shop in Alta Loma remains largely unchanged (see fig. 1) except for a few formal developments that are agonizingly slow in the making. Thanks to extensive and glorious photography by longtime Maloof associate Jonathan Pollock, the reader can trace the incremental improvements in the design of a single furniture form over five decades. There are, for example, no less than nine examples of Maloof’s two-seater settees illustrated, none of which differs radically from a formula that was formulated in the 1950s: low arms, sculptural back rests, scooped Windsor-type seats. Spindles and upholstery may come and go, and the legs may have more or less flare, but it is astounding how much the walnut settee of 1967 (fig. 122, p. 133) looks like the striped maple settee of 1987 (fig. 192, p. 228). This would seem to make poor material for an exhaustive study. Indeed, if one only looks at the pictures, The Furniture of Sam Maloof can seem like too much of a good thing. But Adamson manages to use Maloof’s slow and steady production of forthright, user-friendly furniture as a sounding board for the craft movement as a whole. The original title for the volume was Sam Maloof and the American Craft Movement, and it is a pity that the Smithsonian abandoned that wording. It would have implied the catholic breadth that Adamson achieved. Throughout he seems to have assigned himself responsibility not only for the craftsman himself, but for everything that impinged on Maloof’s consciousness as well. We get pages of information on seminal moments such as the formation of the American Craftsmen’s Council, the 1969 traveling craft exhibition “Objects: USA,” and the passage of the critical journal Craft Horizons in favor of the more market-oriented American Craft. In many cases, Adamson provides the most thorough account of such events that has yet seen print. Partly this can be attributed to the book’s foundation of excellent research materials, many of which were collected by Maloof’s wife Alfreda over the years. We learn exactly how many pieces of furniture Maloof produced year by year, and how much money he made doing it. We read about the assistants who passed through Alta Loma and their roles in the shop. And we get exhaustive treatments of the response to Maloof in the press and later in museums. Such hard data is very rarely included in monographs on craftspeople; its presence here is an important reminder that the skillful arrangement of facts can be the most effective form of analysis. But the most important factor in Adamson’s success is his method, which is to measure the craft world by the yardstick of how that world measured Maloof over time. The book’s balanced account of the shift towards a more “arty” and commercial crafts scene is a good example of this technique. He tells this story through the lens of an ongoing dialectical tension between Maloof’s lovely and finely joined functional pieces and the more adventurous sculptural furniture of Wendell Castle. Castle’s working technique involved gluing stacks of boards together and then going at them with a chainsaw to make impressive but ungainly behemoths. The contrast could not have been more overt, and yet the two makers were consistently included in the same exhibitions. This tension ended in the late 1970s, when Maloof was “promoted” to the role of éminence grise, a “living treasure” and the reigning “dean of American furniture makers.” Of course this beatification was a victory for Castle, or at least for Castle’s conception of furniture, because it consigned Maloof to the past. By describing the rhetoric of those who celebrated Maloof at this critical turning point, Adamson conveys more about the issues at stake than he could through more direct means. There is one significant drawback to this approach, however. The Furniture of Sam Maloof circles around an absent center, which is the answer to the question: “What does Adamson really think of Maloof?” This answer never comes, which is hard to pull off in 250 pages of analytical prose. Adamson indicates the contradictions and limitations of Maloof’s career, but only by implication. He refuses to judge, letting the reader decide how much to believe in the myth that has been constructed around Maloof. Sometimes, this withholding can be frustrating. Before one has read very far into the book it is evident that Adamson is far too incisive to take at face value the unassuming naïveté for which Maloof is famous. Many readers will become impatient for him to call a spade a spade. This is especially true when Adamson fails to subject the self-promotional 1993 book Sam Maloof: Woodworker to analysis, calling it “honest, revealing, and...unpretentious” (p. 194); or when he uncritically recounts one of Maloof’s favorite chestnuts. Take, for example, the tale of Wharton Esherick’s injunction to Maloof to “stick to your convictions and don’t stray from the way you work and believe,” delivered at the 1957 ACC Asilomar conference (p. 69). Much is obviously at stake here. The story functions as a figurative passing of the torch from one great maker to another, just as the new craft movement is getting underway. It also invests Maloof with the imprimatur of authenticity and moral uprightness; but of course, it is Maloof himself who has propagated the event and made it part of his own legend. On balance, though, Adamson’s decision not to question his subject’s motives comes across as a sound one. After all, those readers who are inclined to view the maker’s humility as thinly cloaked egotism are tacitly given all the evidence they need. Similarly, those who see Maloof’s furniture (wrongly) as little more than warmed-over Scandinavian modern are given ample ammunition. Adamson painstakingly recounts the story of a commission Maloof received from the New York industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (p. 36). Having ordered one of the Danish designer Hans Wegner’s armchairs, Dreyfuss found that it did not fit underneath the dining table he had just ordered from Maloof. He therefore asked Maloof to rebuild the Wegner chair and to also create a set of five exact replicas with lower arms. Most historians would be tempted to pounce on this narrative as a kind of smoking gun, especially since Maloof’s furniture immediately took a turn toward more organic lines shortly thereafter. That Adamson does not do this is a measure of the care in his scholarship. For after the Dreyfuss experience, Maloof went on to become a member of a Los Angeles–area community of furniture designers. He thus defined himself more in reference to these lesser-known figures—men like Kipp Stewart, Hendrick Van Keppel, and Ernest Inouye—than Wegner, Aalto, or other far-off Scandinavians. Here, as often, Adamson resists the quick answer, and the book is better for it. The American Craft Museum’s study of Garry Knox Bennett, Made in Oakland, is another kettle of fish, but it also achieves a pleasantly indeterminate complexity. In this case, the density of the scholarship is achieved by dividing the book among four writers of profoundly different outlooks: philosopher Arthur C. Danto; decorative arts historian Edward S. Cooke, Jr.; Ursula Ilse-Neumann, the curator of the exhibition accompanying the book; and John Marlowe, an old friend of Bennett’s from the heyday of the California subculture. The book opens with an essay titled “Philosophizing With A Hammer” by Danto, who has made himself something of a fixture in the contemporary craft literature. Danto’s proper field of study is aesthetics, not art history. Consequently his writings on specific artists and craftspeople often have the breezy enthusiasm of the amateur. He tends to make drastic and sweeping claims about contemporary art, to the chagrin of art historians and the delight of art students and others who need a quick handle on a dauntingly complicated subject. This is true of his contribution here. In fact, the placement of the essay in the book’s pole position suggests that it is meant for readers who only want twenty pages of lively commentary before skipping to the pictures. Danto clearly feels no obligation to explore the historical or artistic contexts of studio furniture. Instead, he emphasizes a few objects, notably Bennett’s notorious Nail Cabinet of 1979. This is a tall display cabinet made of padouk, with a large nail driven unceremoniously into its front. Danto says, rightly, that Bennett “built the cabinet in order to disfigure it,” and that the nail was “a gesture of liberation.” Bennett made the piece at a time when fine craftsmanship was in danger of becoming an end in itself among studio furniture makers. The periodical Fine Woodworking, beginning in 1975, inaugurated an era in which discussion of technique threatened to overwhelm the conceptual, stylistic, and ideological issues relevant to studio work. Bennett had little patience with this trend. (To this day he gleefully shouts “What kind of glue do you use?” when a furniture maker finishes a lecture.) Danto presents this widely accepted view of the Nail Cabinet well. He even passes along an interesting reading by Fine Woodworking editor John Kelsey, in which the structure of the Nail Cabinet itself is seen as subversive. For the record, none of the supposedly iconoclastic joinery details seem inconsistent with the work of an inexperienced furniture designer, which Bennett was at the time. It is also worth noting that Bennett had a lot of help with the construction from two local cabinetmakers. Nonetheless, one should give credit to Danto for taking a craft-based argument seriously. It is harder to be patient with his claim that by making the Nail Cabinet Bennett “declared that the entire structure of insider criticism was irrelevant to the art of contemporary furniture.” This is a problematic assertion. First, the nail was itself a piece of insider criticism, as Danto acknowledges. It was aimed squarely at the prevalent trends in contemporary furniture, and on the basis of Bennett’s own testimony does not seem to have been intended to be read as much more than that. It’s fine to suggest that the gesture had greater implications than were initially obvious, but Danto’s version of Bennett’s intentions is just bad art history. Second, the implication that “insider criticism” needed to be cleared from the table, opening the way to full-fledged artistic postmodernism, is disturbing. Currently the studio furniture community is still working hard to develop its internal dialogue, a conversation that will have the sophistication of art criticism but will also specifically address the concerns of furniture. Danto wants to invest Bennett’s piece with the paradigm-shattering quality of Duchamp’s ready-mades, which is a noble goal. In his haste to do so, however, he implies that furniture will need to escape its own category in order to be interesting—a notion that Bennett’s oeuvre flatly contradicts. The next essay in the book comes from a diametrically opposite position. Edward S. Cooke, Jr., is a longtime supporter of contemporary furniture; he curated a seminal 1989 showing of the material at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is currently planning a follow-up exhibition. He is also a frequent contributor to this journal and a professor of art history at Yale University. In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I studied with him there until recently. But I would like to think that if I had never met the author I would still find Cooke’s essay, “The Urban Cowboy as Furniture Maker,” to be a welcome about-face from Danto’s overreaching. Like Jeremy Adamson, Cooke has done his homework. His account of Bennett’s development as a maker steers an unpredictable course, beginning with a brief summary of the west coast arts and crafts movement. He singles out such figures as metalsmith Dirk Van Erp, architect Bernard Maybeck, and ceramist Frederick Rhead as examples of a locally oriented, intentionally simplified style that stood in opposition to the “rigidly academic” work then practiced on the east coast. These values were transmitted to the San Francisco art scene of the 1950s, in which raffish beatniks like Wally Hedrick and Bruce Connor flourished, and thence to the Bay Area’s 1960s “Funk” movement in ceramics and sculpture. It is debatable whether Bennett had ever heard of, much less been influenced by, these historical precursors when he started out. That is not Cooke’s point, though. He is establishing groundwork for the argument that Bennett’s eclectic and anti-establishment stance is a matter of cultural as well as personal history. It is tempting to see him simply as a radical child of the 1960s, since he built up his wood skills by constructing his own teepee-shaped house and made his money by fabricating and selling drug paraphernalia. But calling Bennett a hippie does not explain the acuity of his mature work. This is where the value of Cooke’s carefully laid foundation becomes clear. As we read of Bennett’s early use of plastics and painted surfaces, we are reminded of the anti-academic leanings of earlier Bay Area art. And when we learn that he has always avoided making chairs—the traditional test form for any furniture maker—it rings true with what Cooke has described as Bennett’s “oppositional attitude,” inherited from previous generations of similarly minded artists. Cooke refines this point, however, by putting Bennett into strategic contrasts with other makers. Many of these, such as the comparatively little-known Jack Hopkins, J. B. Blunk, and Sterling King, are also self-styled rebels from the California counter-culture. Many of the others are not, however, and it is enlightening to notice how Bennett’s careful handling of his own ideas resembles that of an ostensibly conservative maker such as Judy McKie. This broad studio furniture context gives the reader a balanced account: Cooke presents Bennett not only as an impulsive enfant terrible but also a consummate professional, who has adroitly managed his own artistic and marketplace development. After the analyses provided by Danto and Cooke, the reader is prepared to dive in to the specifics of Bennett’s furniture. As curator, Ursula Ilse-Neumann was in a good position to provide that information, and made the intelligent decision to let pictures lead the way in her section of the book. The structure is simple but effective. After focusing attention on a specific example of a form, such as a table or bench, Ilse-Neumann gives us a creatively arranged photo essay on the maker’s exploration of that form type. This gives the reader the opportunity to see the development of particular core ideas. Unlike Maloof, Bennett is a fountain of invention, so even the photographs of the finished pieces have something of the air of pages in a sketchbook. The effect is exactly opposite to the similarly exhaustive coverage of Maloof’s furniture. A few of the formal and conceptual possibilities evident in Bennett’s work are brought to fruition, notably his tendency to base an entire composition around a single joint (as in his trestle tables) or a bandsawn cartoon profile (as in his benches and sideboards). In many other cases, ideas are picked up, used once, and then abandoned. In Eames Chair of 1984, Bennett bisected one of Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic LCW chairs with a planar board and painted the halves black and white. In Tangarry Chest of 1991, he exploited the syncopated façade of a traditional Japanese tansu, placing more than thirty irregular doors and drawers into a single case piece. And in 1996, as if to demonstrate the depths of his creativity, he created one hundred assemblage lamps for a single gallery exhibition. One can imagine the current generation of young furniture makers mining these images for some time to come. The only real regret in Ilse-Neumann’s portion of the book is that she is obliged to give special attention to the new work that Bennett created for the American Craft Museum exhibit. These “tablelamps” lack the integration of form and concept characteristic of his work, and in some cases even seem to have been thrown together for the occasion of the exhibition. But, as Ilse-Neumann writes, Bennett will soon “be off in a new direction, and no one can predict where that will lead.” Indeed, since the book’s publication he has already made a series of chairs that attest to his continued artistic vitality (fig. 2). The book concludes with a section of back matter that must rank as one of the great documentations of a contemporary craftsperson. The centerpiece is a set of eleven manifesto-like artist’s statements written by Bennett’s self-described “long suffering friend” John Marlowe in 1986. Bennett used to send these texts to galleries and collectors with an explanatory note, thereby exempting himself from the process of explaining his work himself. It is a measure of the persuasiveness of these texts that many over the years have taken them to be authentic (indeed, Arthur Danto quotes extensively from Marlowe’s writings as if they were Bennett’s in his essay in this very volume). Designed to be funny, self-contradictory, and provocative rather than informative, they are an apt symbol of Bennett’s desire to both rebel against and dominate the contemporary furniture scene. Also included in the back matter is an exhibition history by Elizabeth Bard, and an extremely helpful illustrated chronology no less than twenty-seven pages long, lovingly compiled by Marlowe. A short note at the end of this timeline reads: “Additional information for this chronology provided by Sylvia Bennett.” In fact, this is an absurd understatement, since Sylvia—Garry’s wife—preserved the ephemera of her husband’s career in a manner rivaling the archival accomplishments of Alfreda Maloof. Unlike Alfreda, who carefully preserved Sam’s history but tragically did not live to see the publication of the Renwick volume, Sylvia Bennett also shepherded Made in Oakland to publication. It cannot be sufficiently stressed how much both projects owe to these two women. Therein lies an important question for furniture scholars: at what point will we begin to treat contemporary work seriously enough that the family members of the makers do not have the primary responsibility to record the crucial facts? One hundred years from now, historians will know about Maloof and Bennett exactly what we today would like to know about George Hunzinger, John and Thomas Seymour, or the anonymous “Garvan carver” of Philadelphia. So the decorative arts field can be thankful for these two impressive books. But if we do not see them as a challenge, then we have missed the point entirely. Glenn Adamson Chipstone Foundation Clive Edwards. Encyclopedia of Furniture Materials, Trades and Techniques. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. x + 254 pp.; 24 color and 148 bw illus., bibliography. $134.95. Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. New York: Scribner, 2000. 173 pp.; line drawings, glossary, index. $22.00. One way of measuring the maturity and viability of a field of scholarly endeavor, perhaps, is through an assessment of the number and quality of its standard reference works—those essential tools that should reside on or near everyone’s desk. In the field of American furniture, there are not many such works—some general dictionaries of decorative arts, the magisterial but venerable Dictionary of English Furniture, some collection catalogues and pictorial surveys, and a few more or less unsatisfactory encyclopedias are all that come to mind quickly. Thus the English historian Clive Edwards has advanced the cause of the study of old (and more recent) furniture tremendously in his new Encyclopedia of Furniture Materials, Trades and Techniques. He courageously attempts to define and summarize every subject—from abrasives to zippers—related to the making of “British and American furniture and furnishings of the period 1500–2000.” Although the emphasis is mainly on British work before about 1920, the coverage is indeed broad, and the student of American furniture will find much of interest and value here. The intended audience for this work is the furniture historian, broadly conceived, including collectors, curators, dealers, conservators, and students. It is not a “how-to” manual for the practicing woodworker, nor is it an attempt to summarize the evolution of design and aesthetics for the traditional art historian, although both groups would profit from having the book nearby for ready consultation. Rather, Edwards has provided us with a highly useful guide to furniture woods and other materials; to construction techniques and processes, including joints, adhesives, finishes, and so forth; and to the principal craft specialties within the large umbrella of furniture making, including the carver, joiner, gilder, marquetry worker, frame maker, upholsterer, and others. He also supplies entries for most furniture-making equipment, from hand tools to power-driven machinery. Some style terms, such as art deco, art nouveau, and baroque, are included but are dealt with (in accordance with the book’s ground rules) rather quickly. Others, such as mannerism and collector’s terms such as Queen Anne and Chippendale, are omitted. One of the strengths of the book is the grounding of its entries in period sources, allowing for the discussion of a given term to be anchored in time. As might be expected, much of the documentation cited is from English materials. More emphasis is naturally placed on the historical aspects of a given topic than on more recent developments, but the coverage is nevertheless extensive. Carefully chosen illustrations supplement the text, although in some instances (as with the discussion of various joints), the inclusion of line drawings would have enhanced the text. Selected references are given for most of the longer entries, and a useful bibliography of both primary and secondary sources is included at the end of the volume.1 Almost every term one could think of finds a definition here, although I searched without success for cake, an upholsterer’s term, stack lamination, a process used by studio furniture makers such as Wendell Castle and Jack Rogers Hopkins in the 1960s, drawer blade, and a few others. However, if you want or need to know what a fat bag is (in terms of furniture), or what xulopyrography, domes of silence, atomic wood, or beaumontage happen to mean, this is the place to start. But perhaps the book’s greatest strength is not so much the short definitions of obscure words (which in any event can be found in most good dictionaries), but in its longer narratives that provide capsule summaries of more well-known, but complicated to explain, processes and crafts. These provide a quick spot check of the state of our current understanding of the anatomy of the field, and will be of enormous assistance in manifold ways to students of all kinds. Specialists in various topics may find nits to pick here and there, but overall the Encyclopedia accomplishes its audacious goal in a superb manner. Obviously, most research will not end by checking the Encyclopedia, but much of it will begin there. Many of Edwards’ subjects, to which he can only devote a page or two, might easily occupy a full volume. Such is the case, for example, with the five paragraphs (p. 191) he gives to screws and screwdrivers, a subject that Witold Rybczynski expands into an entire volume in One Good Turn. In the kind of book perhaps only an established and well-known author could get published, Rybczynski rambles on a bit about his attempt, in response to an editor’s question, to determine the best tool of the last millennium. After considering a variety of hand tools—most of which date much farther back in antiquity—he settled on the humble turnscrew (as screwdrivers were initially known, although the term doesn’t appear in Edwards). He allows us to follow his research, which begins with the Oxford English Dictionary and then moves on to many period books, including Moxon, Roubo, and Diderot’s encyclopedia. He digresses (always entertainingly) about various side trips along the way, such as his visit to the collection of Henry Mercer at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, or to the arms and armor gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much of his research, however, was book-centered, rather than object related, which is unfortunate, since he could have learned quite a bit very quickly in a few hours with a curator or conservator of old furniture. But it is always a pleasure to follow the thought process of a great scholar, and Rybczynski doesn’t disappoint. In fact, he has a good deal of interesting material on various screw types, such as those invented by Peter S. Robertson and Henry F. Phillips, that Edwards simply doesn’t have room to discuss. An astonishing statement made by Rybczynski concerns the screw-making factory established by the brothers Job and William Wyatt in 1776 near Birmingham, England. Using a process they patented in 1760, they developed machinery for making screws that could be operated by children and completely eliminate the workmanship of risk. Thus, he claims, “their factory was the earliest example of an industrial process designed specifically to shift control over the quality of what was being produced from the skilled artisan to the machine itself” (p. 87). Quite an achievement for the humble screw. Although the Edwards volume and the Rybczynski essay are at opposite ends of the literary spectrum, each reminds us in its own way of the importance of understanding tools, materials, and craftsmanship when evaluating an example of furniture as a work of art or as material culture. Gerald W.R. Ward Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1. The bibliography is weighted toward English sources (no American cabinetmakers’ price books are cited, for example) and has its share of minor slips in citations: C. Hummel is given as C. “Humell”; J. L. Fairbanks as “J. C. Fairbanks”; D. Fennimore as “E. Fennimore”; and so forth. The list of periodicals has a curious omission (The Magazine Antiques) and doesn’t include some more recent technical periodicals, such as Fine Woodworking (published since 1975), that contain useful articles on twentieth-century furniture making. Paul J. Foley. Willard’s Patent Time Pieces: A History of the Weight-Driven Banjo Clock, 1800–1900. Norwell, Mass.: Roxbury Village Publishing, 2002. xviii + 358 pp.; 638 color and bw illus., biographies, appendices, bibliography, glossary, index. $89.95. Simon Willard is unquestionably one of the most celebrated names among students of the American arts. He was acknowledged by early generations of popular writers on American decorative arts as “the most famous... among American clock-makers” (Frances Clary Morse) and “the finest exponent of American mechanical genius” (Wallace Nutting). Willard clocks are pictured in most surveys of American decorative arts, in every survey of American clocks, and have a high profile in museum galleries and in the marketplace. Willard’s patent timepiece, the “banjo clock,” is among the most original and successful American innovations in the field of decorative arts. Paul Foley’s study of the form, Willard’s Patent Time Pieces, deserves two places in any library of American decorative arts; first, as the best monograph on the subject of patent timepieces yet produced and, second, as a rich and thorough compilation of biographic references to federal-era craftsmen in the Boston-Roxbury area. The first would constitute an impressive resource on its own, but combined with the second, the reader has the opportunity to construct a vivid and authentic picture of a teeming, productive crafts community that was in the forefront of many aspects of the new American culture. The study of American clocks can be frustrating. Thomas S. Michie, in his very useful interpretive bibliography, pointed out the scarcity of good interpretive clock studies and the prevalence of anecdote in the literature. In his book, Paul J. Foley combines rigorous connoisseurship, excellent photography, and the research methodology of a social historian to create a document that will serve both as a valuable reference and as an exemplar for future clock studies.1 Simon Willard made eight-day clocks and timepieces the way the English made watches. The component parts of Willard’s eight-day clocks were fashioned and finished by specialists working in disconnected shops (as far away as Lancashire), and the final product was warranted and sold by the clockmaker. This methodology is in marked contrast to the single-shop or traditional manufacture practiced by makers like Daniel Burnap of Connecticut (1758–1838) or the distinctive and well-documented, vertically integrated Dominy shop on Long Island. The division of labor among many shops is clearly seen in patent timepieces, where the movement, dial, cast brass ornaments, hands, painted glasses, case, and gilt wood ornament were all made in separate shops. Foley has undertaken with admirable success the daunting task of considering the timepiece in its polyglot complexity over a century of production in a variety of New England communities.2 Willard’s Patent Time Pieces is organized into seven parts, plus six appendices, a bibliography, glossary, and index. Part I, “History and Background,” discusses the Willard family of Grafton and Roxbury and some of their timepiece forms that predate the patent timepiece (1802), and introduces and describes the patent timepiece with a splendid early example in the American Clock and Watch Museum. The photograph on page 3 of a timepiece movement is the first of many such views in the book, clearly photographed to allow for easy comparison. For those unused to looking behind dials, these privileged views will be a revelation; the nearly 650 illustrations in this volume will have a lasting value as by far the best visual index of the form in print. On page 9 is a list of eleven journeymen and apprentices who assisted Simon Willard in timepiece production during the patent period (1802–1816), a provocative introduction to the complex shop structure behind these timekeepers.3 Part II, “Patent Timepieces: 1800–1840,” pictures and describes more than sixty timepieces from a variety of manufacturers, beginning with Simon Willard and continuing with other Roxbury makers; makers from Boston, Charlestown, Concord, and the North and South shores of Massachusetts; from Newport, Rhode Island, and from New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. Included in this section are some sidebars, among them an incisive discussion of marketing and prices which is illustrated with the first of many reproductions of newspaper advertisements. These illustrations point out an admirable part of the author’s methodology—his scrupulous use of newspapers and court records—and combine (with others in the volume) to form another unique resource of real value. In parts III and IV Foley addresses some variations on the patent timepiece. Part III includes three patented variations: Lemuel Curtis’ patent timepiece, now commonly called a girandole clock; Daniel Munroe’s patent suspension, an adaptation of a silk pendulum suspension found on some French table clocks (this variant perhaps was never actually patented); and a remarkable movement by Harrison Gray Dyar that employs helical gears. Part IV includes timepieces with variations in the case design—thermometers in the waist glass, “elegant harp pattern” timepieces, which are commonly called lyre clocks, and timepieces with stenciled cases—and with variations in the movement, including alarm and striking movements. Part V, “Production Timepieces: 1840–1900,” includes later timepieces like those made by Howard and Davis in Boston. In the movements of these timepieces may be found evidence for the introduction of machine tools into the clock finishing process. The first five sections make up a volume well worth having, but are only half of Willard’s Patent Time Pieces. With parts VI and VII, Foley expands his discussion to include the myriad crafts and craftsmen necessary to timepiece manufacture. Part VI, “Ornamental Painters and Cabinetmakers,” is filled with new information on the mostly anonymous hands behind painted clock dials and glasses in New England, many of whom were general ornamental painters who worked on looking glasses and other forms as well. This section is illustrated with more than forty lower glasses from timepieces, and here again the reader has a discrete resource that is not reproduced anywhere in the literature. Foley has been assiduous in his choice of examples to illustrate, and the reader can have a high degree of confidence that those illustrated here are genuine. They deserve careful study. Much of the information on cabinetmakers, particularly in Boston and Roxbury, will be new even to specialized readers. Part VII, “Biographies of Patent Timepiece Makers, Ornamental Painters, Cabinetmakers, and Allied Craftsmen: 1800–1900,” will put any student of American decorative arts of the federal period in Foley’s debt. He has assembled from “city directories, newspapers, census records, vital records, family genealogies, account books, town histories, land deeds, probate records, and civil court records” (p. vii) biographical information on more than one thousand New England craftsmen, most of whom worked in the first half of the nineteenth century. This section is illustrated with more than eighty dial signatures carefully chosen for their authenticity. Dial signatures are perhaps even more treacherous than painted glasses, and the reader has another chance here to benefit from Foley’s first-rate connoisseurship and superior photography. Paul Foley’s enthusiasm for the subject is evident throughout Willard’s Patent Time Pieces and, as he points out (p. viii), “[a] study like this is never finished.” In the hundreds of excellent photographs of clock movements is a rich trove of evidence about the shop structure underlying these timepieces. On page 41, Foley suggests the reader “[c]ompare the movement in the signed Taber timepiece in Fig. 86 with those in Figs. 95, 98, and 323.” The comparison reveals that the same brass clockwork founder, steel forger, and clock finisher or clockmaker was at work on genuine timepieces by Elnathan Taber and Simon Willard, Jr. Similarly, comparison of figs. 36 and 39 reveals, in two genuine contemporary timepieces by Simon Willard, differences in the castings and forge work (great wheel drums, pendulum keystone, T-bridge, and steel click or pawl) and differences in the finishing (plate shape, tooth form, and steel screws). Many similar comparisons can be made in this volume (and at present, nowhere else) because Foley has hunted down the examples, verified their authenticity, removed the dials, and photographed the movements carefully to reveal the salient details. Clock movements can be analyzed in good Morellian fashion as successfully as drawer construction or ornamental carving, since the clock finishers were as subject to the tyranny of training and tools as any other craftsman, but they rarely are; Foley’s book will make that exercise possible for a much wider audience. The heterodyne shop practice revealed in the movements is corroborated in the biographical entries. For example, in the entry (p. 278) for brass founder Thomas Lillie (1789–1848) may be found the information that he advertised clock work as early as 1807; that he was in partnership with brass founder John Andrews making “Castings of any description” including “Clock Work, &c.;” and that “Orders and Patterns for Castings of any kind, left with Ezekiil Jones...will meet immediate attention, and where will be kept constantly for sale, Clock and Timepiece Cast Work, superior to English, and at less prices.” Ezekiel Jones’ (ca. 1788–1826) entry (p. 272) includes the probate inventory of his shop, which included “53 time piece glasses...26 time piece movements...29 time piece Trimming Sides [brass side ornaments]...28 Time piece Tins...24 Patent Time piece cases...128 Empty Boxes for Time pieces,” and much more, suggesting his trade was that of a horological supply merchant. Hundreds of such connections are revealed by a study of Foley’s entries, creating a vivid image of the true nature of American clockmaking. Despite their fame and appeal, Willard’s clocks continue to occupy a peculiar nether region for historians. British horologists have long regarded clocks of that period as factory-made, and therefore of no interest. American economic historians tend to view them as handmade, and therefore inapplicable to the study of the onset of industrialization, for which they may instead use the example of Eli Terry. Further definition of the niche that Willard and related craftsmen occupied and helped create may well contribute to an understanding of issues like the development of the machine tool industry in New England; the role of capital in this process; the changing nature of labor; rural aspects of New England industrialization; and economic and geographic mobility. For furniture historians, Willard’s Patent Time Pieces not only belongs at the head of the list of resources to be used in any future study of New England clocks, but will be useful to everyone interested in federal-era decorative arts. David Wood Concord Museum and Robert C. Cheney Brimfield, Massachusetts 1. Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America, 1630–1920: An Annotated Bibliography, edited by Kenneth L. Ames and Gerald W.R. Ward (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1989), pp. 283–306. 2. For a helpful overview of English watch making, see Leonard Weiss, Watch-Making in England, 1760–1820 (London: Robert Hale, 1982); Robert C. Cheney, “Roxbury Eight-Day Movements and the English Connection, 1785–1825,” Antiques 157, no. 4 (April 2000): 607–15; Penrose R. Hoopes, The Shop Records of Daniel Burnap (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1958); Charles F. Hummel, With Hammer in Hand (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1968). 3. Foley’s glossary at the end of the volume includes many of the terms he uses to describe the timepieces, though not all; readers unfamiliar with clock terminology might also want to consult the glossaries in Philip Zea and Robert C. Cheney, Clock Making in New England, 1725–1825 (Sturbridge, Mass.: Old Sturbridge Village, 1992) and Stephen P. Petrucelli and Kenneth A. Sposato, American Banjo Clocks (Cranbury, N. J.: Adams Brown Co., 1995). Wendy A. Cooper. An American Vision: Henry Francis du Pont’s Winterthur Museum. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 2002. 214 pp.; 150+ color and bw illustrations, checklist, index. $35.00. Winterthur is a wonderful place. That may sound trite but it is true. There is nothing quite like it. Winterthur has its imitators, surely, but it has no peers. Winterthur is, simply put, the greatest collection of early American decorative arts anywhere. I had the privilege of working at Winterthur for some seventeen years. Few days go by when I do not wish that I still had access to that extraordinary collection. Even now, when looking at quirky New England eighteenth-century chairs, I can still visualize details of similar chairs at Winterthur that Benno Forman and I examined and argued about in his office a quarter of a century ago. I say all this to alert readers that I was once a Winterthur insider and know something about the place. Furthermore, I am predisposed to think positively about it and, at least at the outset, to give the benefit of the doubt to any product that emanates from it. An American Vision is a celebratory volume produced to coincide with and serve as a souvenir of an exhibition of Winterthur highlights on view at the National Gallery in Washington from May 5 to October 6, 2002. The timing was not accidental. The year 2002 marked the Winterthur Museum’s fiftieth anniversary and the DuPont Company’s two hundredth. Appropriately, the company was one of the supporters of the project. Anniversary ventures are a tricky business. How does a museum with nationally ranked education programs mark such an occasion? What balance of celebration and cerebration is appropriate? Hard to be quite sure. On average, anniversary projects tend to fall a bit short on substance. It may simply be the nature of the genre. An American Vision was both an exhibition and a publication. I did not see the exhibition at the National Gallery, although I have seen, repeatedly and at close hand, many of the objects included in it. The exhibition may have been quite lovely but, as we all know well and sometimes regret, exhibitions are ephemeral while publications endure. This publication is also lovely, but that, alas, is pretty much the end of it. The best features of An American Vision are easily identified. The first is Winterthur Director Leslie Greene Bowman’s graceful biographical sketch of Henry Francis du Pont and of his creation of Winterthur. The second is the superb collection of spectacular photographs, most taken by Gavin Ashworth, adorning the volume. It is a very pretty book and most enjoyable to leaf through. Reading it is another matter, however. And here we return to the dilemma of what an anniversary publication should be. Wendy Cooper, either of her own volition or someone else’s, produced five short thematic essays dealing with, in this order, early settlement, Asian impact on the West, the rococo, the Pennsylvania Germans, and American classicism. A pretty ambitious undertaking for a text of only about eighty full pages, I think, and one that frankly just does not work well. She should have offered either more or less. This is one instance in which the middle option, in contrast to what we learned in childhood from the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, is not “just right” at all. I have no desire to dissect Cooper’s text in any detail. Suffice it to say that it is superficial, simplistic, and unfocused. The subtleties and nuances of the American historical past are completely and consistently swept away. Sometimes the text is outright wrong, as when it claims that rococo equals Chippendale and that Chippendale equals rococo. And sometimes it is inconsistent or unclear, with historical and art historical commentary interrupted by unnecessary and, I think, inappropriate fawning over H. F. du Pont. Most sadly, the book offers no ideas. And that is both unfortunate and avoidable. The book did not have to take this form. There are alternatives. One would have been to offer less text and more pictures, to celebrate the visual splendors of the place without the pretense of doing much more. I have in hand a handsome volume that offers a useful model. The long and clearly descriptive title is A Concise History of Glass Represented in the Chrysler Museum Glass Collection. Written by Nancy O. Merrill and published by the Chrysler Museum in 1989, this little gem is roughly the same size as the Winterthur publication. Here and there it provides a page or two of historical background or overview, but the bulk of the book is taken up with photographs of objects accompanied by captions, some long and some short. The result is an attractive and useful volume that can also be a handy reference. I think it is demonstrably superior to An American Vision and would have required even less effort at Winterthur to produce. Another route altogether would have been to insert a few ideas into the volume. Now I recognize that there are those in the field of decorative arts who love ideas and those who do not. It is my sense, however, that the museum-visiting public includes a goodly number of educated people who are not afraid of ideas and, indeed, embrace them. These are people who, for example, read the New York Times, the small-circulation cultural commentary magazines, and books that are overtly and unapologetically ideational. There are millions of such folk in this country. An American Vision could have decided to talk to them. I am not suggesting a deep philosophical treatise here, just a text that invites its readers to muse, reflect, and contemplate, to make connections between Winterthur and the things in it and their own world. Some of these matters are quite basic. Consider possession, for instance. The text refers repeatedly to H. F. du Pont’s buying but does not suggest why possession itself might hold such appeal or what it might mean. Charles F. Montgomery maintained that the best way to learn about a category of goods was to buy one. Still sound advice. Integrating ideas of self-education through acquisition or of a personal odyssey of growth into this text might have added nuance to an understanding of du Pont, who, despite the fawning—or perhaps because of it—does not come off as a particularly attractive character here. Was du Pont an antiquarian? What is antiquarianism and what might it be all about? Bill Hosley has useful—and typically impassioned—things to say on this topic in his article “Regional Furniture/Regional Life” published in the 1995 volume of American Furniture (pp. 3–38). Hosley also talks to the importance of place. Furniture historians and other decorative arts scholars are highly attentive to place. It might have been useful to talk a bit about why this is and what it might mean. Everyone has some understanding of place. The topic is familiar, accessible, and, treated correctly, profound. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing as an informed and friendly outsider, has brought a new humanistic perspective to the study of American decorative arts. Her chapter (pp. 108–41) on Hannah Barnard’s cupboard in The Age of Homespun (New York: Knopf, 2001) is a notable achievement, combining local history, genealogy, a sensitivity to the many-layered meanings of objects, and woman’s awareness and perspectives. Better than many others, Ulrich has been able to bring people of the past back to the objects they once owned and lived with, creating a picture replete with all the cares and complexities that are part of human lives. Even if Cooper had missed The Age of Homespun, she might have extracted something from Ulrich’s warm-up piece, “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts,” which also appeared in the 1995 volume of American Furniture (pp. 39–68). Following Ulrich’s model, An American Vision might have offered a bit more biography, mused on the importance of memory, or, better still, meaningfully acknowledged difference in the American past. Ann Smart Martin has a wonderful article in the Winterthur Portfolio laying out consumerism as a framework for studying American material culture and decorative arts. Useful ideas could have been extracted. Richard Bushman has written a fine book of several hundred pages about the refinement of American life. Some of the large transformations he describes could have been sketched in here. Richard Lawrence Greene has a provocative article in Antiques about fertility symbols on Hadley chests. A bit of that could have been woven it. Maybe most to the point, considering the fact that Cooper wrote an entire section on the rococo, something from the article, “The Rococo, the Grotto, and the Philadelphia High Chest” by Jonathan Prown and Richard Miller in the 1996 issue of American Furniture (pp. 105–36) could have been incorporated. In fact, it should have been. But nothing is there. An opportunity lost.1 In the end, An American Vision is a disappointment. It offers no inspiration, because it takes us nowhere, except maybe backwards. By avoiding virtually all ideational scholarship in and relevant to our field, it trivializes what we do. Instead of summarizing all that is best in decorative arts scholarship, it exemplifies much of what is worst. And that really is unfortunate. I could write more but my assessment would only grow bleaker, for there is yet more that is disappointing about this publication and, perhaps, the strategies and perspectives behind it. Instead, let me conclude by noting that museums have had a tendency in recent years to grasp at opportunities for funding or publicity that take them away from their appointed courses. These side trips, which often require considerable staff time and additional resources, can have unanticipated consequences, either damaging to reputations or simply, when all is said and done, making no difference whatsoever. The lesson is that sometimes what seems to be a good deal really is not. The trick here, as in so many other aspects of life, is to learn to resist temptation. Kenneth L. Ames Bard Graduate Center 1. Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, nos. 2/3 (summer/autumn 1993): 141–57; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Richard Lawrence Greene, “Fertility Symbols on the Hadley Chests,” Antiques 112, no. 2 (August 1977): 250–57.