Adam Bowett. English Furniture, 1660–1714: From Charles II to Queen Anne. Woodbridge, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002. 368 pp.; numerous illus. $89.50. “I have attempted to write this book from first principles,” Adam Bowett writes in the preface to this new history of early English furniture, “and, in the main, from primary evidence—bills, inventories, and of course, the furniture itself” (p. 10). He holds fast to this self-imposed limitation throughout, picking carefully along the upper reaches of courtly furniture in search of secure footing. Bowett’s aim is not a cultural narrative but a chronology of documented and hence datable pieces, against which other objects may be judged. The narrow, laser-like focus of this exercise may prove disconcerting to material culture scholars who have been schooled in interdisciplinary theoretical models, and even those in the relatively conservative field of furniture connoisseurship may find Bowett’s subject matter to be bafflingly circumscribed. He provides no information about vernacular traditions or regionalist comparison, and very little about broad social context—only the lineage of the most advanced furniture of the day. It would be easy to dismiss Bowett’s book as out-of-date. With its old-fashioned title (are we really still marking time by monarchs in the twenty-first century?) and Antique Collectors’ Club imprint, it seems like it could have been written thirty years ago. The fact remains, however, that it was not; and it badly needed to be written. Certainly, it would have been possible for Bowett to write a more broad-minded book—by including even a cursory account of the recent scholarship published under the auspices of the Regional Furniture Society, for example. But even so, this book fills a huge gap in the literature, and it does so admirably. Until now there has been no reliable account of the furniture style that most furniture historians still call “William and Mary.” Many readers of this journal, I suspect, would be hard pressed even to define the term “scriptor,” though that furniture form was nearly universal in the aristocratic interiors of late seventeenth-century England. Here, though, is a full accounting of the scriptor, its construction and evolution, and an explanation of how it gradually transformed into the desk-and-bookcase we all know so well. In his reconstruction of such developments, Bowett draws largely on bills submitted to wealthy patrons by top tradesmen such as Richard Price, Gerrit Jensen, and Thomas Roberts (a chair maker who provided Queen Anne’s coronation throne). He supplements this rich trove of information with other documents, ranging from national export figures to Joiners’ and Upholsterers’ Company Minute books. Throughout, his treatment of these texts is unstintingly exhaustive. He even extracts new insights from such chestnuts as John Stalker and George Parker’s Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (1688) and William Salmon’s Polygraphice (1672), which he affectionately prizes for its “endearing, kitchen sink quality” (p. 62). Bowett’s explication of period finish recipes is wonderfully detailed—unless you are a professional conservator, you’ll never need to look further on the topic—and he includes a helpful index of woods used in furniture of the period (similar to, but more comprehensive than, a list he compiled for Amin Jaffee’s recent book Furniture From British India and Ceylon [2001]). For its tabulation of useful information alone, then, Bowett’s book deserves to find a place on every decorative art historian’s shelf. But the volume is also unexpectedly absorbing (if not entirely satisfying) on the level of method. When testing extant furniture against textual evidence, Bowett applies a combination of hard-won expertise and good old common sense. For American readers his no-nonsense prose style will be eerily reminiscent of the writings of the late Benno M. Forman, who, like Bowett, possessed a seemingly instinctive ability to get inside the head of the period craftsman. Bowett’s book is filled with offhand observations that, in the aggregate, do a great deal to explore the mindset of the English cabinetmaker. Typical of his elegant argumentation is a passage on unusual three-part desk-and-bookcases, in which the desk and the lower drawers are set within separate carcasses. Bowett reasons that this was done so that different specialist workers in the shop could execute these portions of the piece simultaneously. The molding between each piece allowed for a margin of error when it came time for the various makers to fit their components together into a unit (p. 223). In a similar vein, Bowett notes that the famous black, slim clock cases that house the works of Ahasuerus Fromanteel could not have been made by a specialist clockmaker, as has often been assumed. His logic is disarmingly simple: the tall-case clock form itself was new, and the skills necessary to make it complex. Fromanteel’s cabinetmaker must have been well versed in other forms, and surely would not have stopped making those forms once he had learned to make clocks (p. 46). This is as inductive as Bowett gets. Unlike Forman, he never resorts to ingenious guesswork; because of the ever-present backdrop of documentary evidence, he doesn’t need to. His factual conclusions therefore have a degree of authority that would be impossible to match in the American context. Readers will be amazed and gratified to see how Bowett is able, for example, to pin down the introduction of “floral” marquetry to the years between 1664 and 1670, based on subtle differences between two editions of John Evelyn’s book Silva (p. 55). He is also able to date the introduction of turned cane chair stiles to 1690, the appearance of tassel feet and fully-raked back legs on such chairs to 1709, and the concept of a “desk and bookcase” to 1698 (see pp. 255 and 220). Bowett is equally helpful when parsing period terminology. He notes that chairs that are today called banister backs, because their backs are composed of baluster-shaped half turnings, were actually called “rib-back” chairs in England. This is significant because period references to banister backs could well be caned chairs; indeed, Bowett cites two bills for “Cane chairs” which also had “bannister backs”—meaning simply that they had turned banister-shaped stiles (p. 234). Nowhere is Bowett’s attention to documentary detail more rewarding than in his discussion of the impact of continental manufacture. In general, he is much less inclined than previous writers have been to stress the contributions of the Huguenots who emigrated from France and Holland to England. He begins by noting that the word “foreigner,” which appears often in Joiners’ Company documents, does not mean an immigrant craftsman, but simply someone who was not a member of the guild: “This is why the majority of foreigners listed in the Company’s Minute books had English surnames” (p. 31). Furthermore, Bowett writes, there were only nineteen cabinetmakers listed in the parish records of London’s Huguenot churches between 1660 and 1713, and of these, only one achieved any known prominence. This evidence calls into question the contention of scholars such as Gervaise Jackson-Stops, who have portrayed the Huguenot population in London as a key ingredient in England’s post-Carolean cosmopolitan makeover. Bowett is most contentious on this point when he cuts through the mythology surrounding the figure of Daniel Marot, a Huguenot who has been credited as being tremendously influential on the basis of his published engravings of furniture designs. Bowett’s examination of the bills furnished to the court of William III reveals no furniture by Marot, however, and even Marot’s Livres of designs were unlikely to have been very important in London, given that “No English edition was produced and . . . only one complete edition is known to survive in an English collection” (p. 188). Other Frenchmen such as Francis Lapiere and Jean Poitevin were probably much more significant than Marot in the English context. The fact that they were probably not Huguenots may make their story less romantic to the modern mind, but as Bowett says, “the important point is not that particular craftsmen were Huguenots or Catholics, but that they were French” (p. 34). Bowett’s text bristles with such welcome skepticism, and he always focuses tightly on the particulars of a given question. On the whole the book is perhaps too particular for casual perusal; though Bowett claims it was “written for the non-specialist reader” (p. 11), it is difficult to imagine that anyone but the truly committed will pore through it cover to cover. Here and there he even adopts the format of a reference work, as when he resorts to itemized lists when describing the typical construction of cabinets during a given period. All this density makes the book feel a bit wonkish, an effect that is exacerbated by the uneven photography, which ranges from superlative to truly awful (many chairs are pictured with either their crest rails or their front stretchers badly out of focus). Such idiosyncrasies can be excused given Bowett’s intentions—this is, after all, a book of analysis, not synthesis. More disappointing from the American perspective is the lack of a comprehensive context for the documented pieces that Bowett takes as his subject. There is very little furniture in the book that could be considered a direct counterpart or precedent to furniture made in the New World. Apart from a few pages on middle-class cane chairs, Bowett gravitates exclusively toward elite artifacts—and he is neither apologetic nor defensive on this point. He argues that for purposes of establishing chronology, it is useless to pretend that stylistic periods were homogenous and unified across social classes. Rather, he writes, periods are best defined in terms of “marker goods” such as “looking glasses, pendulum clocks, upholstered and caned chairs, oval tables and walnut or olivewood furniture” (p. 25). This is a good theory, as far as it goes, but it is useful only for describing and identifying the inception of a style, not for discussing its impact on the broader culture. Bowett occasionally falls prey to glibness on this score, as when he writes of the furnishings made for William III: “There were relatively few men who could afford to build on this princely scale, but just as the minor apartments at Hampton Court were equipped with walnut and japanned furniture rather than lacquer and gilt, so more modest houses could be furnished less lavishly but no less fashionably” (p. 184). If this comparison—between separate rooms of a king’s palace on the one hand, and entire social classes on the other—seems too pat, it is because Bowett has little to say about the world outside the English country house. Some of the forms introduced at Hampton Court may have appeared shortly thereafter in the homes of courtiers, but what happened next? If we care anything about Bowett’s chronological sequencing, then surely we also care about the answer to that question. But to infer even the dating (much less the interpretation) of the vast majority of surviving furniture on the basis of the information presented here would be a difficult task indeed. Bowett actually implies that it would be impossible to do so reliably, because new furniture forms percolate downwards chaotically, in what he calls a “halting interaction between fashionable and vernacular culture” (p. 25). Bowett does make a few attempts to suggest the overall complexity of this interaction, as when he observes that “the same pressures that induced a townsman to buy a set of caned chairs for his parlour might have the reverse effect on a countryman” (p. 25) or when he isolates japanning as a stylistic innovation that “narrowed the gulf between the super-rich and the merely well-off, for how many people could reliably tell the difference between true lacquer and good japanning?” (p. 22). For the most part, however, Bowett never strays far from the royal bills. He leaves the messy process of extrapolating from his carefully assembled chronology to others. Had he chosen to do this himself, it would have required him to venture quite a bit further into the realm of the speculative, but his book would have been far stronger for it. The dust jacket of English Furniture, 1660–1714 modestly notes of Bowett: “This is his first book and he is still learning.” My own vote would be that in his next effort (which, as he teasingly reveals in a footnote on page 289, will cover the next “phase” of English cabinet work), he might apply his formidable skills to a broader range of material evidence. In the meantime, we Americans should be glad to have this important book, and draw conclusions from it as best we can. Glenn Adamson The Chipstone Foundation