1. For characteristics distinguishing Dutch chairs from English derivatives, see Adam Bowett, “Myths of Furniture History: Anglo-Dutch (Part II),” Antique Collecting 34, no. 8 (February 2000): 4–9. Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 40. See also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); Weatherill argues that “If social emulation were at work as a dynamic force behind people’s motivation in owning goods, then we would expect higher proportions of the most highly regarded group to own many [items], and we would also expect them to be the first to own the new things. Yet...this was not the case, for a higher proportion of professionals and tradesmen owned the goods associated with front stage areas of the house” (p. 195). For a more general objection to diVusion models on theoretical grounds, see Dell Upton, “Towards A Performance Theory of Vernacular Architecture: Early Tidewater Virginia As a Case Study,” Folklore Forum 12, no. 2/3 (1979). Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An Interpretive Catalogue (New York: W.W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 229–81.
2. R. W. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” Connoisseur 27, no. 3 (March 1951): 8.
3. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” p. 8. Since Symonds’ analysis in the 1950s, Peter Earle has questioned the importance of the Great Fire in initiating cane chair manufacture. In his analysis of middle-class estate records, the form appears only rarely in the 1670s and does not become common until the 1680s. This may, however, simply reflect a time lag between the introduction of the form and its appearance in the inventories of decedents, who might have owned the chairs for some time before the furniture came to be recorded. See Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 294.
4. Irene Scouloudi, “The Stranger Community in the Metropolis, 1558–1640” in Scouloudi, Huguenots in Britain and Their French Background (Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. 48–49; Penelope Corfield, “A Provincial Capital in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Case of Norwich,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, edited by Peter Clark and P. Slack (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 282; Christopher Hartop, The Huguenot Legacy: English Silver 1680–1760 (London: Thomas Heneage, 1996). Jonathan Israel, “England, the Dutch, and the Struggle for the Mastery of World Trade in the Age of the Glorious Revolution,” in The World of William and Mary, edited by Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 75. Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 198.
5. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 2: 25–26.
6. John Keymer, A Clear and Evident Way [1650], quoted in Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 76. On Mun, see Kustaa Multamäki, Towards Great Britain: Commerce and Conquest in the Thought of Algernon Sidney and Charles Davenant (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters, 1999), p. 83 V.; Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 93–94; Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1970), pp. 5–6; and Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 281–82. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: Thomas Clark, 1664; written 1623), p. 15. On the eVects of the Navigation Acts on the colonies, see Susan Previant Lee and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), chapter 2. For contemporary arguments about the importance of finished goods, see Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies (London: Joseph Hindemarsh, 1690), p. 5; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, chapter 7, passim.
7. Sir Josiah Child, A Discourse About Trade (London: A. Sowle, 1690; written 1660s), p. 4. John Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, or, A Dialogue Between Contentment and Complaint (London: Edward Croft, 1677), p. 5; Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies, p. 16. Carew Reynel, The True English Interest (London: Giles Widdowes, 1674), preface 4; p. 2. Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, pp. 5, 10.
8. Quoted in Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” p. 12. For further discussion of this document, see Margaret Swain, “The Turkey-work Chairs of Holyroodhouse,” in Upholstery in America and Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, edited by Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 54–55.
9. The rattan or cane used in such chairs might have come from a variety of sources, as the plant is native to China, India, Ceylon, and Malaysia. In all likelihood the canes used in English shops were bought from Dutch or Portuguese middlemen. On cane, see Gertrude Z. Thomas, Richer Than Spices (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), chapter 5; and Encyclopedie Methodique, Tome Quatrieme (Paris: Chez Panckouche, 1785).
10. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” pp. 13–14. The Joiners’ Company’s claim that “many thousands” of workers benefited seems dubious, but it is a figure substantiated by modern research. Peter Earle notes that “several thousand” people were employed in the furniture trade in London alone, concentrated in the area north of the Strand.
11. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 23. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London: Thomas Milbourn, 1690), pp. 34–35.
12. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 107–9. Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, p. 76. On the embrace of luxury trades within mercantilism, see also Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 190. Carole Shammas, “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 1 (1980): 18. Dudley North, Discourses Upon Trade (London: Thomas Basset, 1691), pp. 2, 14; Bernard Mandeville, “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), in The Fable of the Bees, edited by F. B. Kage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 102–5, 25. See also Herlitz Lars, “Conceptions of History and Society in Mercantilism, 1650–1730,” in Mercantilist Economics, edited by Lars Magnussen (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 111.
13. Ralph Davis, A Commercial Revolution (London: Historical Associations Pamphlets, 1967), p. 4. On the currency shortage, see Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, p. 231. Daniel Defoe, The True Born Englishman: A Satyr (London: n.p., 1700), p. 57. Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 13–26. John Bellers, Essays About the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations and Immorality (London: T. Sowle, 1699), p. 11.
14. Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); Rex A. Barrell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and ‘Le Refuge Français’—Correspondence (Lewiston/Lampeter/Queenstone, Eng.: Studies in British History, Volume 15, The Edwin Mellin Press, 1989). Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John A. Bernstein, “Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good and the Beautiful,” Eighteenth Century Studies 10, no. 3 (spring 1977): 306–7; and John A. Bernstein, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant (London and Toronto: Associated University Press and Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), p. 26. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 411 (June 21, 1712).
15. Kammen, Empire and Interest, p. 38; Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 19. The first Earl died in exile in Holland, after being imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1673 for his opposition to the accession of James II to the throne. Shaftesbury is quoted in David Solkin, Painting for Money (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 12. See also Klein, Shaftesbury and Culture of Politeness, p. 5.
16. Benno Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 264–66; Richard Randall, American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), pp. 162–64.
17. For the Winthrop family chair, see Patricia E. Kane, “Furniture Owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society,” Antiques 109, no. 5 (May 1976): 960–69.
18. For stamped and branded examples, see Roderic H. Blackburn, “Branded and Stamped New York Furniture,” Antiques 119, no. 4 (May 1981): 1130–45.
19. See Forman, American Seating Furniture, cat. nos. 55, 63.
20. Colin Streeter thought that the motif on this crest type might be based upon the Chinese ruyi, an abstraction of a mushroom. Forman repeats this idea in American Seating Furniture, p. 267, footnote; see also Philip M. Johnston et al., Courts and Colonies: The William and Mary Style in Holland, England, and America (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1988), p. 162. Johnson notes that if this is the case, then these chairs are the first instances of a Chinese motif appearing on American furniture.
21. For more on these early Boston Georgian chairs, see Joan Barzilay Freund and Leigh Keno, “The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture in the Late Baroque Style,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1997), pp. 14–16, figs. 20–24.
22. Neil D. Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Disappearance and Material Life in Colonial New York,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite and William N. Hosley (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1995), pp. 191–249. Kamil notes that in one case, William Gooch of Virginia complained to Parliament that Boston’s chair trade was in direct conflict with England’s own mercantile interests, which was of course true (p. 193). For a lively riposte to Kamil’s argument that New York chairs were made in competition with Boston imports, see Roger Gonzales and Daniel Putnam Brown, Jr., “Boston and New York Leather Chairs: A Reappraisal,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 175–94.
23. Freund and Keno, “The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture,” pp. 1–40. Of the chairs in the group with a known provenance, one descended to the Hancock family (Winterthur Museum); one was owned by Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard University (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard); and one was acquired by the Pilgrim Society from Marcia Alden Welch in 1883 and has been ascribed an Alden family provenance. On Boston’s mercantile class, see Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 67–76; Philip S. HaVenden, New England in the English Nation, 1683–1713 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 120; James Henretta, “Economic and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (1965): 75–92; reprint, Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). Margaret E. Newell, “A Revolution in Economic Thought: Currency and Development in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, edited by Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), pp. 1–21. |