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It would be easy to dismiss Bowett’s book as out-of-date.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





Thomas Moser, with Brad Lemley. Thos. Moser: Artistry in Wood. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002. 192 pp.; numerous color and bw illus. $60.00.

Thomas Moser may arguably be the best-known contemporary American furniture maker working outside the production or contract field. Through advertisements in magazines like The New Yorker, retail stores in major urban centers (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Charleston, and Washington, in addition to Freeport, Maine), and institutional work (especially for university libraries), Moser and his traditionally based contemporary hardwood furniture have maintained high visibility for the past fifteen years. He produced the book under review with the intention of conveying “the thinking behind the aesthetic and structural design choices I have made” (p. 60). He charts his development as a maker, then follows with chapters on his preference for cherry wood, his design aesthetic, and his notion of craftsmanship. Lavishly illustrated with images of his furniture—environments as well as single works and details—the format also includes sidebars on particular topics such as his failures in toy manufacturing, the development of a special form like the deacon’s bench, and an homage to George Nakashima. The overwhelming use of color images, in which the saturated auburn hues of cherry dominate, and the celebratory journey from humble beginnings to worldwide appreciation link this volume to a genre of seductively illustrated autobiographies of contemporary woodworkers such as Sam Maloof and George Nakashima, a link Moser seems to desire.1

Moser views himself as the lineal descendant of the nineteenth-century vernacular cabinetmaker, one who employed a skilled economy to make simple, well-proportioned, utilitarian forms of local woods. When he first left his academic job and opened a shop in 1972, he parlayed knowledge of historical furniture and antique restoration to build pine case pieces and tables in federal-period and Shaker styles, often using paint as a finish. In 1976 Moser grew concerned about imitation, realizing that by copying the work of old New England craftsmen, he was merely “enhancing their stature, not our own” (p. 48). Yearning to build a market niche on more than his “workmanship, sharp tools, and quick hands,” Moser made a conscious decision to create his own aesthetic, celebrating black cherry, with an oil finish, as the primary wood and ash as a secondary wood for spindles, turned legs, and drawer linings. Like the studio furniture makers of the 1950s, he responded favorably to the warmth, depth, and translucence of cherry and began to use it to make comfortable, durable, and traditionally constructed (dovetailed carcasses and drawers, mortise-and-tenoned panels, etc.) furniture loosely inspired by federal and Shaker examples. In 1980, in response to the increased appreciation of furniture made during the arts and crafts movement earlier in the century, Moser began to incorporate visible joinery as part of his design aesthetic. Such an interest in explicit workmanship may have also developed from the studio furniture field’s devotion to technical virtuosity in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Moser’s firm expanded beyond its rectilinear vocabulary and began to explore more curvilinear work.

Although an autobiography can often cross the line into boosterism and promotional claims, Moser’s volume contains some elements of interest to furniture historians. His chronicle of the early years of his shop provides insights into the motivations and decisions of many who pursued craftwork in the 1970s as an alternative career. The frustrations and limitations of white-collar work, even university teaching, and the allure and satisfaction of making things and integrating thought and action are key to his story. The most obvious and consistent theme in the book is his sense of the role of craftsmanship. Neither an impractical romantic hung up on the moral value of handwork nor a self-indulgent maker who spends thousands of hours creating “a frivolity for the elite few” (p. 146), Moser expresses very specific opinions on the need for keeping a production mentality while making what William Morris referred to as “good citizen’s furniture.” This sort of work is unpretentious, timeless, functional, and geared toward the human body. Establishing his first shop in New Gloucester, Maine, right near the Shaker community of Sabbathday Lake, Moser lauds the Shakers as the historical standard for this approach and seeks to update that same philosophy. It is no surprise that just as the Shakers relied on the circular saw and extensive outwork systems to make their work efficient and economical, Moser has embraced labor saving equipment like a computer-guided core cutter to shape his plank seats, justifying the use of such mechanized tools in conjunction with finishing handwork as the proper balance of efficiency and inefficiency. He acknowledges that some critics see this as a compromise of principles, but he lays out a shop floor mentality in which the fast production of parts with an eye to quality and safety should be wed to careful skilled handwork in the assembly and finishing stages. Drawing inspiration from Danish cabinetmaking firms that he visited, Moser even set up his shop with these two elements separate.

Another striking aspect of Moser’s story is his commitment to hiring and teaching a wide variety of help. Over the years he has employed people with advanced degrees as well as working-class Mainers, and he has consistently hired women. Many people found their true calling as craftspeople, with twenty-three going on to start their own furniture business. In Maine you can construct a family tree of Moser employees who have taken some aspect of the Moser philosophy and developed their niche in a small shop situation, whether producing Shaker inspired work (Chris Becksvoort), arts and crafts (Kevin Rodel), or even batch production (Doug Green). Others have developed personal styles in small shops in Maine (Bill Huston and Lynette Bretton) or moved to Vermont (Jim Becker) or even Seattle (Stewart Wurtz) to set up small shops offering similar lines. In this manner, the Moser shop has served as an important training ground for northern New England small-shop furniture makers and as a catalyst for the field’s growth. However, Moser does not acknowledge that his influence as a teacher was greatest in the first fifteen years of his business, when his shop relied heavily on skilled workmanship to achieve efficiency.

In his emphasis on the personal qualities of workmanship and teaching, Moser offers a selective history of his firm that links his work to that of prominent contemporary woodworkers like George Nakashima or more historical figures such as the Shakers or Gustav Stickley. The book’s format, plethora of color images of details, and language of craftsmanship reveal Moser’s intention to be considered as an equal to studio furniture makers and to earn a reputation as a consummate designer-craftsman. However, the emphasis on process and workmanship obscures other aspects of the Moser operation, particularly its evolution from small shop to production shop similar in scale to Danish firms like Johannes Hansen, who manufactured much of Hans Wegner’s work. Employing more than a hundred workers and enjoying sales that exceeded fifty-eight million dollars in 1998, Moser oversees a large sophisticated plant (approximately sixty-five thousand square-feet) with some skilled furniture makers but a greater number of specialized workers. He first expanded his manufacturing and retail operations in the mid-1980s, but initially found it difficult to sustain such a widespread endeavor. In about 1990, he developed a more profitable arm of his business—corporate and library commissions. The images in the volume and the role of his son Aaron as manager of “corporate and institutional selling efforts” (p. 56) suggest that these large commissions play an increasingly important role in the firm’s economic health, but there is little discussion of them in the text. Even a partial list of clients suggests the success of this venture: the J. Paul Getty Trust Center, the law school libraries at Yale and UCLA, the arts library at Harvard, the libraries at the University of Pennsylvania and Seton Hall University, the Thoreau Institute Library, and the offices of The New Yorker.2

Moser’s misreading of the English design historian David Pye is instructive in placing Moser somewhere between the studio furniture maker and the contract furniture industry. Whereas Pye extolled the virtues of the “workmanship of risk,” Moser misquotes him and celebrates the “manufacture of risk” (p. 160), revealing his approach to the field. Like his contemporary Charles Webb in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Moser emerged from a studio furniture background and benefited from employing a number of individuals interested in craft as an alternative career, but in the mid-1980s he changed directions. He consciously sought to parlay the look and values of the individual shop in the manufacturing realm. Moser’s work itself does not compare favorably to that of studio furniture makers like Walker Weed, Sam Maloof, or George Nakashima who preceded him; it seems stiff, derivative, and overly self-conscious. While the individual work suffers when compared to that of some designer-craftsmen, the designs and workmanship of the library and institutional work rise above the standard millwork usually found in those locations. It is in the realm of manufactured craftsmanship that Moser has really made his mark and will be remembered. It is unfortunate that his book does not lay out that particular story in greater detail, distinguishing between the earlier and later phases of his firm. The book is less a history of the firm than Moser’s treatise on craftsmanship that telescopes or blurs that history.3

Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
Yale University

1. George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections (Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd., 1981); and Sam Maloof, Sam Maloof, Woodworker (New York: Kodansha, 1983).
2. Studio furniture makers are independent producers, either self-taught or academically trained, who work in small shops or studios. While these makers use machinery, and may employ assistants or specialists, they produce a limited number of works. Their work is often custom-made for commissions, or sold through galleries, specialized shows, and personal connections with buyers. For additional insight into the term and its historical development, see Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Gerald W. R. Ward, and Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, with the assistance of Pat Warner, The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940–1990 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2003). See Zachary Gaulkin, “The Many Sides of Thomas Moser,” Fine Woodworking, no. 128 (January/February 1998): 70–73. A 1984 small, largely black-and-white catalogue available at the Cumberland Avenue store in Portland, Maine, asserted that all Moser furniture was made with historical joinery and that “there is no mass production in our workshop. Each item of furniture is built entirely by one or by small groups working together and orders are filled, each in their turn.”
3. See David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968; reprint, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971).





Bradford L. Rauschenberg and John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture of Charleston, 1680–1820. Frank L. Horton Series. 3 vols. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Old Salem, Inc., and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2003. Vol. 1, Colonial Furniture. Vol. 2, Neoclassical Furniture. Vol. 3, The Cabinetmakers. xxxv + 1388 pp., numerous color and bw illus., maps, appendices, bibliography, concordance, index. $325.00.

The much-anticipated work of Bradford L. Rauschenberg and John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture of Charleston, 1680–1820, lends proof to the adage, good things come to those who wait. After more than twenty years of fieldwork and research, the authors have produced a monumental tome. Composed of three volumes with more than one thousand pages, it features hundreds of color and black and white photographs of more than four hundred pieces of furniture plus maps, appendices, bibliography, concordance, and index. Weighing nearly sixteen pounds, the book is a goldmine of information for furniture scholars, collectors, and dealers interested in the Carolina Lowcountry’s unique material culture. As the preface by Gary J. Albert notes, it combines “Rauschenberg’s tenacious research skills and mastery of microscopic wood analysis” with “Bivins’ encyclopedic knowledge of all American furniture forms and unique insight into an artisan’s approach to construction” (p. ix).

Recognizing that an opus of this size cannot be produced in isolation, the authors acknowledge generously the many individuals and institutions whose support, both financial and otherwise, made the book possible. The research was partially funded by the Research Tools and Reference Works program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chipstone Foundation provided valuable support for the expense of extensive color photography. The book has been published as part of the Frank L. Horton series, an endowed fund created by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) especially for the publication of monographs on southern crafts and craftsmen. Previous titles in the series include John Bivins, Jr.’s The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina (1988), Benjamin H. Caldwell, Jr.’s Tennessee Silversmiths (1988), and Harold Eugene Comstock’s The Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region (1994). As the fourth and most recent installment in this distinguished series, The Furniture of Charleston symbolizes MESDA’s ongoing commitment to the serious study of southern material culture.

In the first few pages, Brad Rauschenberg provides furniture scholars with a noteworthy anecdote for the historiography of their field. For decades, the renaissance of interest in southern furniture has been attributed to the reaction sparked by a comment made at the 1949 Williamsburg Antiques Forum by Joseph Downs, curator of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that “nothing of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” Rauschenberg demonstrates that Milby Burton (1898– 1977), then director of the Charleston Museum, had addressed this issue fully eight years earlier in a 1941 interview with a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper. In his published remarks, Burton decried the established biases of both “the Plymouth crowd and the Jamestown crowd” and made the pithy remark that he was “so damned tired of hearing the Boston crowd infer there was no silver or furniture making in the South” (p. xxvi).

Published in 1955, Milby Burton’s book Charleston Furniture, 1700–1825 launched the first serious examination of Charleston’s early furniture production. For decades, the subject then lay dormant until 1986, when John Bivins penned a significant article, “Charleston Rococo Interiors: The ‘Sommers’ Carver,” in the fall issue of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Since then, interest in Charleston furniture has skyrocketed, both in scholarly venues and in the marketplace. Important monographs in recent issues of this journal have included Luke Beckerdite’s analysis of the French Huguenot influence on South Carolina’s seventeenth-century furniture, Thomas Savage’s research on Martin Pfeninger and Charleston’s pre-Revolutionary German cabinetmakers, and John Bivins’ discussion of Scottish, German, and Northern influences on Charleston’s post-Revolutionary cabinetwork (each in American Furniture 1997), as well as an examination by Maurie D. McInnis and the author of this review of the New York City cabinetmakers Deming and Bulkley and their impact on Charleston’s nineteenth-century furniture (American Furniture 1996). Similarly, in Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (1997), Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown shed new light on a number of pivotal Charleston objects, and, in recent years, a distinguished coterie of southern scholar-dealers—Sumpter Priddy, Deanne Levison, Milly McGehee, Harriett and Jim Pratt, and George Williams—have made groundbreaking discoveries in the realm of Charleston furniture studies. Today, The Furniture of Charleston stands on top of this mountain of research, which collectively presents a powerful tribute to the life’s work of Frank L. Horton and the research resources he has created at MESDA.

As the introduction states, this book is not simply “a catalog” of the Charleston furniture in MESDA’s collection; rather, it is a highly detailed analysis of the cabinetmaking industry in a sophisticated urban center, Charleston, and a compilation of the known furniture it produced. Arranged chronologically, the first two volumes move from the colonial period in volume one to the neoclassical period in volume two, and each volume carefully analyzes the construction and stylistic features that allow shop groups to be identified. In the section on neoclassical bedsteads, for example, a chart examines the characteristics of forty surviving bedsteads and suggests the presence of seven distinct shop groups that either employed or contracted with at least six turners and three carvers between the years 1785 and 1815 (p. 805). Throughout the book, the authors succeed in building important relationships between the individual objects and the region’s supporting documentation. So, while Charleston’s most famous cabinetmaker, Thomas Elfe (ca. 1719–1775), remains elusive without the discovery of a single signed, labeled, or documented example of his production, the authors’ expert analysis showcases his surviving day books for the years 1768 to 1775 and how they illuminate the intricacy of Charleston’s early cabinet trade.

Through furniture, the authors illustrate how Charleston evolved from an early outpost of the British colonial empire into a thriving capital and cultural center. Founded in the late seventeenth century by an assortment of British, French, Dutch, German, Swiss, and Sephardic Jewish settlers, Charleston became a place where by 1740 Eliza Lucas Pinckney could say, “the people live very Gentile and very much in the English taste.” Deeply imbued with British style, Charleston’s colonial furniture reflects the city’s rising level of sophistication. Charleston’s eighteenth-century cabinet wares typically feature paneled backs, full or three-quarter length dustboards, center drawer muntins, and other construction characteristics that typify urban British craftsmanship. By 1770 Charleston possessed one of the most professional and diverse cabinetmaking communities in British North America. Composed of English, Scottish, French, German, Swedish, and African American professionals, Charleston’s cabinetmakers fashioned some of the finest furniture produced in early America. The Edwards library bookcase, for example, with its complex construction, triple serpentine form, polychrome marquetry and ivory inlay, made in Charleston between 1770 and 1775, is, as the authors describe, “unparalleled in American furniture” (p. 168). In his 1997 article on this piece and its relationship to the German-born cabinetmaker Martin Pfeninger (d. 1782), Savage explains how it presents “a synthesis of British and Continental structural and decorative features within the context of Charleston taste and patronage.”1

After the Revolution, Charleston’s urbane consumers continued to support talented emigré craftsmen. In the city’s post-Revolutionary economic and cultural environment, Scottish furniture makers such as Robert Walker (1772–1833), who arrived in 1793 with copies in hand of Thomas Sheraton’s The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book and The Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, competed with German- and English-born craftsmen like Jacob Sass (1750–1836) and John Ralph (ca. 1743–1801), whose businesses had been established in Charleston some twenty years earlier. As Germanic features first seen in the Edwards library bookcase continued well into the 1790s (see fig. 1), and Scottish furniture forms such as the double-top sideboard became relatively commonplace in Charleston (see fig. 2), the city’s neoclassical furniture expressed the happy coexistence of these disparate styles. By the early nineteenth century, Charlestonians could boast a cosmopolitan culture that combined their native-grown society with imported influences from abroad as well as those from the northern states, most especially New York and Massachusetts. The authors fully describe the impact of imported northern-made furniture on early nineteenth-century Charleston’s cabinet trade, how it influenced local styles and led to the industry’s eventual decline.

While the organization of these first two volumes seems innovative, it is perhaps not likely to be repeated. Each piece of furniture is assigned a unique number based on the period (early, colonial, neoclassical), the form (case furniture, tables, chairs, beds), and finally the sequence in which it appears in the book. So, for example, the first colonial-period table is CT-1 and so forth. Each piece is then catalogued with a complete discussion of its primary and secondary woods, dimensions, construction details, markings or inscriptions, and provenance. Honed by MESDA’s many years of field research, the descriptions of construction seem particularly excellent, and the concordance allows readers to find every page on which a particular piece might be mentioned. However, due to the page design and layout, this reader found the overall organization frequently difficult to follow, and to track a particular detail, it was sometimes necessary to use all three volumes simultaneously, flipping pages from volume one to volume two to the references to a specific cabinetmaker contained only within volume three.

The third volume features a comprehensive biographical dictionary of all the furniture-related craftsmen discovered by MESDA’s documentary research on the Carolina Lowcountry. With more than six hundred artisans listed, it cites all the known references to each one found in the region’s court records, newspaper advertisements, directories, and manuscripts, both published and unpublished. Also included are photographs of all the known signed, labeled, or documented examples of an artisan’s work. The volume contains three appendices: an alphabetical listing of tradesmen, a chronological listing, and tradesmen clustered by street address intended, as Rauschenberg notes, to provide “a rare glimpse into the relationships and evolution of artisans and partnerships, as well as the rise and fall of business” (p. 871). Unfortunately, this volume does not include a fourth appendix that divides the furniture-related artisans into their specific subcategories: joiners, turners, cabinetmakers, chair makers, carvers, painters/ gilders, upholsterers/paperhangers, picture-frame makers, even Venetian blind makers. An appendix of this kind would have underscored one of book’s main points, the complex and increasingly specialized nature of Charleston’s cabinetmaking community.

However, the darkest lining in the silver cloud of this book was undoubtedly the death of the co-author, John Bivins, in August 2001. A swashbuckling figure in the American decorative arts, John was a consummate craftsman and scholar. During his career at MESDA, he served as the director of restoration and as the curator of crafts, and, later, as the director of publications, editing two journals, The Luminary and The Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, during a golden age of that museum’s institutional history. John was the author of numerous books and articles including those cited previously in this review, Long Rifles in North Carolina (1968), and The Moravian Potters in North Carolina (1972), which he also co-authored with Rauschenberg.

As a teacher, John inspired students to enter the museum field, and as a colleague, he shared his research and opinions generously. Perhaps the greatest tribute to John’s career will be how The Furniture of Charleston inspires future generations to advance the study of the topic he loved so well. For an example, one need only consult pages 102 to 113 of the first volume. Here, the authors illustrate two quintessential Charleston pieces, a mahogany desk-and-bookcase with cypress and a mahogany and mahogany veneer double chest with cypress and white pine secondary woods (see figs. 3 and 4) made between 1750 and 1765. Each bears the cipher “WA” stamped on the bottom of the lower cases. The ciphers are identical, and the authors predict that their discovery will lead to an eventual attribution to the cabinetmaker William Axson (ca. 1739–1800), based on “matching marks” seen on the brickwork at Pompion Hill and St. Stephen’s churches, where Axson is known to have worked, and as “he was the only Charleston cabinetmaker with those initials that was active in the 1750s and 1760s” capable of producing such stylish wares. However, Rauschenberg and Bivins conclude that:

Which American furniture student is now prepared to accept the authors’ challenge? By completing such a comprehensive encyclopedia of Charleston furniture, Brad Rauschenberg and John Bivins have guaranteed that questions such as these will occupy the minds of America’s furniture scholars, collectors, and dealers for decades to come.

Robert A. Leath
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

1. J. Thomas Savage, “The Holmes-Edwards Library Bookacse and the Origins of the German School in Pre-Revolutionary Charleston” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Founation, 1997), p.107.