Book Reviews

James M. Gaynor and Nancy L. Hagedorn. Tools: Working Wood in Eighteenth–Century America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xiv + 140 pp.; 26 color and 142 bw illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $19.95.

In the words of the authors, this book is not meant to be a detailed technical discussion of eighteenth-century woodworking tools “but rather a summary overview of how these tools came to be, how their users acquired and learned to use them, and how they influenced the working lives and products of woodworking artisans” (p. ix). Within this framework, James Gaynor and Nancy Hagedorn have made a significant contribution to our understanding of tools and their impact on the life and work of early American woodworkers. They have also added to an increasing body of literature on the question of tool ownership and its meaning for artisans in a host of trades. Much of their information is relevant to the experiences of other producing craftsmen. Silversmiths, for instance, encountered many of the same obstacles when attempting to amass shop tools, and their working tools defined their products in much the same way as did the tools of woodworkers. What is perhaps most impressive about this book is the extent to which the authors have based their analysis on well-documented examples of eighteenth-century tools. Most collections include few tools that can be dated with any precision, and by bringing together the best documented examples, Gaynor and Hagedorn have provided curators of such collections with valuable information for dating and cataloguing the objects in their care. They have also proffered ample data for scholars attempting to put those tools into a wider historical context. The emphasis of the book and the exhibition that it accompanied is on the experience of artisans working in Virginia. Although many of the tools included in the book were owned by Virginia woodworkers, the authors flesh out their treatment with tools owned elsewhere in America. Most of the mass-manufactured tools treated here are of English origin, but the authors have also included as many American-made tools as possible, as well as some intriguing examples of tools made by the artisans who owned them.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section, lavishly illustrated with tools, period prints and paintings, and advertisements and documents, puts tools and the artisans who owned them into broader perspective and clearly demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between tradesmen and their tools. Covering sixty-two pages, this section of the book includes chapters on “English and American Toolmaking,” “Tools for Sale,” “Tools and Work,” and “Tools and Products.”

The first of these chapters, “English and American Toolmaking,” explains the development of the English toolmaking industry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to the specialties of the principal manufacturing centers. The authors discuss the difficulties facing American toolmakers who attempted to compete with these inexpensive and well-made imports and explain that many Americans made tools or modified imported tools for their own use. The products of a few notable American artisans who worked principally as toolmakers—including Francis Nicholson of Wrentham, Massachusetts (began working 1728), Samuel Caruthers of Philadelphia (beginning in the 1760s), and Thomas Napier of Philadelphia (beginning 1774)—are pictured here, and the authors draw extensively on surviving documents regarding American tool manufacture.

“Tools for Sale” explores the sources of tools for American cabinetmakers, joiners, coopers, and instrument makers and illustrates several well-known and well-documented chests of cabinetmakers’ tools, including the Benjamin Seaton chest (English, 1797); the George William Cartwright II chest (Ossining, N.Y., 1819); the Thomas and Warren Nixon chest (Framingham, Mass., late eighteenth to early nineteenth century); the Duncan Phyfe chest (New York, ca. 1800–1830); and a chest of tools owned by an anonymous upstate New York craftsman, now at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown. The authors’ primary focus, however, is on the sources from which Virginia woodworkers obtained their tools. Although Gaynor and Hagedorn comment that there is little documentation of this process in Virginia, they proceed to provide an exhaustive treatment of what information does exist—advertising, bills, and so on. They also make excellent use of available documents on such often-forgotten issues as how apprentices obtained tools and the process (and price) of importing tools directly from England. They include an excellent description of merchant factors in Virginia and their business dealings with agents in England.

“Tools and Work” deals with all aspects of the topic, beginning with the process by which apprentices learned to use common tools and developed design skills. Gaynor and Hagedorn use extant tool kits to explore how the availability of certain tools controlled variations in the work carried out by different types of woodworkers, from the general purpose woodworkers of rural areas to the highly specialized artisans of the seacoast towns. They find that specialized tools allowed artisans to create complex objects with ease, giving them a competitive edge over their fellow artisans, and that these tools standardized production in ways that allowed apprentices to assist masters in making complex items.

“Tools and Products” takes this discussion further by examining how specific objects were made by using particular assortments of tools and how the technical preferences of individual workers affected their choice of materials as well as the look of the objects they made. The authors suggest that “the practical capabilities of tools also influenced consumers’ expectations regarding other product characteristics such as the uniformity of details” (p. 52). They further demonstrate how understanding the process by which an object was made helps us understand the decisions artisans made in allocating their labor. Finishing furniture, for instance, involved the use of a succession of planes, and cabinetmakers made decisions on how much to finish surfaces according to how visible the surfaces would be to the eventual customer. Such economies have been used by scholars to identify works from certain shops and regions, and here the study of tools helps us understand the decisions these artisans made.

The second section of the book is devoted to a detailed treatment of the design and evolution of several groups of tools—layout tools, chisels and gouges, saws, boring tools, and planes. The authors suggest that readers not familiar with basic tools and their uses consult this portion of the book first, a recommendation that even those fairly well acquainted with woodworking tools would do well to heed. In general, these discussions are clear and straightforward, with helpful illustrations that occasionally serve to explain the use or construction of a specific tool and that give helpful technical information to assist readers in dating tools themselves. These sections of the catalogue are extremely useful because they serve to elucidate the process by which these tools evolved and because they clearly demonstrate differences in homemade versus manufactured tools, English versus American tools, and early-eighteenth-century tools versus early-nineteenth-century tools. At times, however, it is possible for the reader to become confused because most “entries” attempt to describe tools that are grouped together in single composite photographs. The descriptors used to identify individual tools are not always consistent within a single discussion, and items grouped together in the same photograph are not necessarily treated in a consistent order (e.g., right to left, top to bottom). The authors undoubtedly believed that marks or other distinguishing features that would help readers understand the text would be visible in the final printed halftones. Unfortunately, sometimes these marks just do not show up well, either because the pictures are dark or because they are smaller than the authors anticipated. More clarity might have been achieved if each photograph in this section had been given a caption to accompany the narrative paragraphs.

I found only this one minor flaw in an otherwise important achievement, however. Tools: Working Wood in Eighteenth-Century America is a book that everyone interested in early American artisans from all producing trades—not just woodworking—will find fascinating. Those with a special interest in woodworkers and their tools will find it indispensable.

Barbara McLean Ward
University of New Hampshire


Katherine S. Howe, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, Simon Jervis, Hans Ottomeyer, Mark Bascou, Ann Claggett Wood, and Sophia Riefstahl. Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1994. 272 pp.; 133 color and 167 bw illustrations, appendixes, chronology, bibliography, index. $60.00.

The furniture of the New York City cabinetmaking firm Herter Brothers first gained public attention in the 1970 Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Nineteenth-Century America” and its accompanying catalogue. Featured prominently in that landmark show were an ebonized and inlaid wardrobe and an ebonized and inlaid bedroom suite, all 1969 gifts to the Metropolitan, and part of a blond maple bedroom suite from Jay Gould’s mansion, Lyndhurst.1 After that 1970 debut, Herter Brothers quickly assumed a widespread reputation as the quintessential maker of American aesthetic movement furniture during the 1870s and 1880s. Although the work of Herter Brothers remains the benchmark against which all other artistic furniture of this period is judged, no detailed study of the firm existed prior to Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age, written to accompany an exhibition that originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.2

As the first substantive examination of Herter Brothers, the catalogue seeks to place the Herters within a larger international context, discuss the firm within the New York furniture-making and interior design trade, and examine a “highly select and refined” body of about fifty Herter objects made between 1858 and 1883 (p. 6). The focus throughout is upon the lives and influence of Gustave Herter (1830–1898) and Christian Herter (1839–1883), who were personally involved with a cabinetmaking business in New York during that twenty-five year period. The book begins with three essays by European scholars who seek to link the work of the Stuttgart-born and trained Herters to contemporary developments in the European furniture trade. Unfortunately, these essays are uneven: Simon Jervis’s description of England’s pivotal role in furniture design in the 1860s and 1870s and Marc Bascou’s review of the French styles of the period—what Christian Herter could have seen in Paris in the late 1860s and early 1870s—shed little new light on the Herters’ careers and are, in fact, summarized well at various points within the text and catalogue entries. Much of the current literature, such as Henry Hawley’s article on a chair in the Cleveland Museum of Art, already talks about these various stylistic influences.3 The authors of the catalogue under review thus could have simply incorporated the stylistic discussion into the body of their text and into the entries on the individual objects.

Hans Ottomeyer’s essay on the context of German furniture-making shops after guild and trade restrictions were relaxed around 1830 sheds new and important light on American furniture, and on other decorative arts, of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In Germany during the second quarter of the century, the development of large shops, staffed by highly skilled specialists trained under the old guild-enforced, small-shop tradition and working for a competitive national market, led to a distinctive design philosophy that stressed the combination of different decorative techniques such as carving, inlay, marquetry, and metal or ceramic mounts. As a result, artistic success was not judged by stylistic unity but by explicit celebration of lavish materials, exquisite craftsmanship, and extraordinary detail. Bombast reigned over stylistic coherence or restraint. Ottomeyer’s essay thus offers valuable insight into the approaches and values of skilled craftsmen such as the Herters and Anton Kimbel. When economic and political disruptions provided the catalyst for their emigration in 1848, these German furniture makers brought highly developed skills and a specific craft-based sense of design with them to New York City.

Katherine Howe’s introductory chapter on the Herters builds upon Ottomeyer’s essay, tracking down the brothers’ early careers in Württemberg before emigration and then demonstrating how they used their specific German artisan heritage in New York City. Drawing upon the brothers’ biographies and the stylistic development of documented Herter objects, Howe lays out four distinct periods in Herter Brothers history: (1) 1848–1858, when Gustave was working with several other cabinetmakers (for example, Erastus Buckley and Thomas Brooks) on monumental pieces of furniture in historically derivative styles popular in France; (2) 1858–1864, when Gustave established his own firm, specializing in the production of baroque and Louis XIV furniture with heavily carved ornament and the supervision of lavishly ornamented interior furnishings; (3) 1864–1870, when Christian joined the business and became the chief designer, with a particular bent for Second Empire forms embellished with a variety of decoration such as carving, marquetry, porcelain plaques, and gilded mounts; and (4) 1870–1883, when Gustave returned to Germany and Christian ran the firm, turning away from French styles to English and Anglo interpretations of Japanese styles and making extensive use of marquetry and ebonizing. By noting the changes in the firm’s leadership in conjunction with the changing appearances and styles of its products, Howe draws upon the discussion in Jervis’s and Bascou’s essays on the internationalism of design during this period, but she grounds her discussion within the work of the Herter firm; for example, she points out the importance of Christian’s visit to London, Manchester, and Birmingham in the early 1870s. Her discussion, therefore, supersedes the two earlier essays.

Howe’s introduction to the Herter firm is followed by two essays that discuss the actual Herter business in terms of the shop floor and the salesroom. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources including city directories, insurance maps, Dun & Bradstreet credit records, and census data, Catherine Voorsanger provides a richly textured depiction of the furniture trade in New York City and identifies the Herter firm as one of the small number of first-class cabinetmakers in New York, distinct from either mid-level furnishers or wholesale “slaughter” shops. The latter category, by far the majority of furniture firms in New York City, was centered in a lower East Side district called “Kleindeutschland” and relied extensively on German craftsmen. Solidly and meticulously researched and rich in comparative material, Voorsanger’s essay discusses Herter business practices within the context of the economic cycles of the period, the widespread availability of relatively cheap skilled labor, and the increased interest in upscale merchandising along Broadway’s “Ladies Mile.” She deftly combines an eye for shop-floor detail with an awareness of the larger economic context. This thorough study of the furniture trade nicely complements Charles Venable’s study of the silver business and should facilitate the further study of other New York firms such as Leon Marcotte, Alexander Roux, and Pottier & Stymus.4

In contrast to Voorsanger’s tightly focused essay, Alice Frelinghuysen takes on two large topics—patronage and the business of interior decoration—in a more diffuse, more descriptive, and less analytical essay. Each of these topics deserves specific focus and investigation in a separate essay. The discussion of the interior furnishing aspect of the Herter business more logically should follow the Voorsanger essay and should go beyond the mere cataloguing of commissions and variety of wares offered by Herter. Establishing the types of interior decorators working in New York City at this time and comparing Herter with Alexander Roux and Leon Marcotte, as well as with the upholsterers and furnishers of the next level, would have shed more light on Herter’s role in the city’s decorating trades. Fuller exploration of the setup of the different decorative trades within the Herter shop and how the internal operation might have changed over time, patterns of hiring outside specialists such as Giuseppe Guidicini and Pierre-Victor Galland, influential relationships with different architects, and interaction with other interior decoration firms and importers would all help to provide a better sense of the company’s changing business strategy. Was the Herter interest in total interior decoration part of their German artisan heritage, or did the firm market their decoration services more aggressively in the 1870s, just after they had moved their showroom to the Ladies Mile of Broadway? Was their interest in Artistic Houses, published in 1883, part
of this promotional strategy? Was there any relationship between the richness of the 1870s work and the weak position of skilled craftsmen in the deflationary economy of the 1870s? Comparison with other decoration firms and a better analysis of the firm’s strategies and operations would result in a much richer essay that would resonate well with Voorsanger’s contribution.

The role of patronage also deserves more sophisticated and sustained analysis in its own essay. Frelinghuysen briefly speculates about the identity and aspirations of the Herter clients on pages 81 and 93 but does not systematically explore all clients in this one paper in order to probe the values and motives of the self-made, self-conscious railroad and hotel men. Were they excluded by, or did they feel inferior to, those established elites who possessed taste? Did they turn to the elaborate work of Herter to create their own distinct form of cultural property, a form of capitalist trophy? Greater comparison with other new monied capitalists and established New Yorkers such as John Taylor Johnston or Robert W. de Forest (both of whom served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and both of whom patronized Leon Marcotte) would have made Frelinghuysen’s essay less hagiographic and provided a more realistic context.

The catalogue of the forty-two major pieces of furniture in the exhibition begins with a helpful introduction that serves as a connoisseur’s guide to Herter furniture: a discussion of woods is followed by a brief explication of the cabinetmaking techniques found on the furniture and a useful discussion of the chronological evolution of the firm’s carving, marquetry, inlay, mounts and hardware, painting, and gilding. The entries provide extensive documentation of the objects and their stylistic influences and include good color photographs of the objects, sometimes accompanied by color or black-and-white details. When several objects from one commission are discussed (for example, the Ruggles Morse house in Portland, Maine, of 1858–1860; the LeGrand Lockwood house in Norwalk, Connecticut, of 1868–1870; the James Goodwin house in Hartford, Connecticut, 1871–1874; the Mark Hopkins house in San Francisco, 1875–1880; and the William H. Vanderbilt residence in New York City, 1879–1882), the authors have included a discussion of the commission accompanied by period photographs of the house and its appropriate interiors. Most of these important photographs are given at least a half page, but unfortunately, some of the most evocative interior photographs, such as the Ruggles drawing room or the Lockwood drawing room, are reproduced as only one-quarter-page illustrations.

Following the entries are several pictorial appendices that present photographic details of the characteristic types of marquetry, carving, hardware, and marks found on Herter furniture. Although these images testify to the beauty of Herter work, they are not really linked to the body of the catalogue. Instead of merely providing a simple encyclopedia of some of the elaborate decorations, it might have been more effective to use the details to support arguments in the text. For example, the technique of cutting out marquetry, discussed on page 178, allowed for different light and dark contrasts of the same design. It might have been helpful to show details that demonstrated such an effective practice. Following the pictorial appendixes, Sophia Riefstahl’s chronology of the Herters and their firm provides a good succinct timeline for the firm’s evolution and activity and follows the story up to 1907, the last time the firm is listed in the city directories.

Although no personal or business papers relating to the Herter firm in the 1858–1883 period have survived, the authors of this catalogue have produced a helpful history of the business by mining a variety of other source material—papers of patrons; public documents such as census and credit records, insurance maps, directories, and period literature; and the artifacts themselves. The time necessary to conduct such widespread research and the cost of assembling and traveling the accompanying exhibition make the possibility of another major Herter exhibition unlikely for some time. It is therefore important to examine some of the weaknesses of the catalogue.

One troubling aspect of the publication is the emphasis upon the uniqueness of the Herter furniture. Throughout the book, the products of the Herter shop are extolled for their creative individuality, the result of an American environment that encouraged the highest form of creativity away from the guild restrictions of Europe. Such an approach seems to be somewhat heavy-handed, American exceptionalist chauvinism, for Ottomeyer’s essay underscores how closely the Herters’ attitudes related to the German practices and aesthetics of the period. Howe and Voorsanger also suggest that Marcotte and the firm of Pottier & Stymus offered products of comparable quality and embellishment but packaged in a different style. The point is not so much that the Herters’ work is the best or most exceptional but that the quantity of surviving works and the documentation of their commissions offer the best window into the first-class New York cabinetmaking practices of this period. The concern for American uniqueness also seems to have prevented the authors from making intriguing comparisons and interpretations, particularly in regard to patronage. For example, Howe’s depiction of Christian Herter as an aggressive hunter of design trophies could have been better integrated with Frelinghuysen’s brief characterization of the self-made, but culturally insecure, patron and discussed within the growing literature of post-processural material culture.5

The emphasis upon the objects with greatest artistic merit, that is, the showiest, also distorts the picture of the Herter firm as a business. The work lacks an example and discussion of one of the many plainer bedroom suites of bird’s-eye maple that come up frequently at auction and appear to be one of the firm’s bread-and-butter works. Why did the firm produce so many bedroom suites? Did the ebony suites retain their fashionable, modern, European association after 1876? Were there changing notions of bedrooms during this period, or did the Herters concentrate on that genre because it offered the opportunity to maximize the profitability of good design and skilled ornamentation since the same form could be executed in maple or ebonized cherry, dressed up with milled ornament such as moldings and turnings, and given distinctive marquetry whose negative image could embellish another suite? The Herter firm always delicately balanced custom and stock forms and decoration, oftentimes using the custom example as a prototype. The focus on the grandest individual commissions also skews the understanding of the overall Herter business. In addition to large-scale private commissions, the Herters worked on institutional projects such as the Seventh Regiment Armory and on commercial work such as bank interiors and the Reed & Barton display at the 1876 Centennial, as well as offering individual pieces of furniture for sale at their store; yet, the discussion of these elements is divided up among Howe, Voorsanger, and Frelinghuysen. Such a separation precludes a discussion of interconnections, such as the role of bank interiors in attracting new-monied clients, the role between commissions and store sales, or the motive behind Herter working on the armory.

Such dispersion of central themes and the duplication of others, such as the spread of international design—a common shortcoming of multi-authored volumes—weaken the overall scholarly impact of the catalogue. The catalogue lacks a central thesis, other than the exceptional beauty of the Herter products, to which each part can contribute in a clear and consistent fashion. There is considerable overlap between a number of the essays and between the Howe and Frelinghuysen essays and the catalogue entries. The broad topics of Frelinghuysen’s essay and her discussion of the Herter firm in the post-1883 period especially underscore the need for a stronger editorial hand in the production of this volume. Careful, coordinated shaping and modeling of the individual essays would have produced a more effective, interpretive volume that would document the objects in the exhibition and provide invaluable information on the firm that made them.

Finally, I was intrigued that the Herter project had its genesis in the 1980s, another period during which both a new group of wealthy and powerful art patrons rose and sought to assert themselves and a class of furniture designers such as Michael Graves and Wendell Castle began to produce furniture distinguished by the use of lavish materials, an emphasis on exquisite craftsmanship as a form of artistic expression, the layering of extraordinary detail, and an exploitation of historical references. As Castle succinctly put his design philosophy, “More is more.” One does not have to harp on the parallels between the 1980s and 1870s, but it might be helpful to draw ideas from the consumerism literature of the 1980s to shed light on the earlier period. Newly wealthy individuals like the Hopkins, Goulds, Lockwoods, and other Herter clients certainly viewed their patronage of Herter goods and services as an instrument of economic growth and cultural coup that gave them a group identity and confirmed their rise to elite status. Apparently they had found it difficult to crack the establishment of taste, personified by men such as William Shepard Wetmore and John Taylor Johnston, who favored antique furniture or the showy but more restrained work of Leon Marcotte.6

Although Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Guilded Age contains some interpretive shortcomings, the landmark monograph does provide an accurate, helpful overview of one of the major American cabinetmaking firms. It documents several important domestic commissions such as the Ruggles, Hopkins, and Vanderbilt houses and provides the foundation and the departure point for subsequent analyses of the other leading New York firms of the period. Future studies of Marcotte, Pottier & Stymus, Roux, and other firms and research into the business practices of interior decoration should draw upon the important work of Howe, Voorsanger, and Frelinghuysen.

Edward S. Cooke Jr.
Yale University

1. 19th-Century America: Furniture and Other Decorative Arts (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), cat. nos. 209–12.

2. Several articles have appeared on specific aspects of Herter Brothers, but the two most complete sources for the firm prior to this publication under review remain a small exhibition pamphlet by David Hanks and references within a larger exhibition catalogue for an exhibition on the aesthetic movement: Christian Herter and the Aesthetic Movement in America (New York: Washburn Gallery, 1980); and Doreen Bolger Burke et al., In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).

3. Henry Hawley, “Four Pieces of American Furniture: An ‘Aesthetic’ Sidechair,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 10 (December 1982): 330–32, 338–39.

4. Charles Venable, Silver in America, 1840–1940: A Century of Splendor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

5. For example, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Ian Hodder, ed., The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

6. For example, see Deborah Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Davira Taragin, Edward Cooke, Jr., and Joseph Giovannini, Furniture by Wendell Castle (New York: Hudson Hills, 1989), esp. pp. 60–94.


Michael L. James. Drama in Design: The Life and Craft of Charles Rohlfs. Buffalo, N.Y.: Burchfield Art Center, Buffalo College Foundation, 1994. 104 pp.; 85 color and bw illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, checklist of exhibition. $30.

Drama in Design: The Life and Craft of Charles Rohlfs is the first comprehensive study of the personal life and creative career of Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936) and is the culmination of over a decade of interest in Rohlfs by author Michael L. James, an independent scholar in Buffalo, New York. This richly illustrated book, published in conjunction with the 1994 exhibition “The Craftsmanship of Charles Rohlfs” at the Burchfield Art Center, Buffalo, will prove to be an important reference work, even if some of its assertions about Rohlfs’s place in the arts and crafts movement and the influences on his work are questioned.

In a 1900 address to an arts and crafts conference, Rohlfs explained that “the things produced in the glow of enthusiasm are the things that have stood the test of time because they have been natural to the producer”
(p. 93). His quotation aptly describes his own idiosyncratic furniture. It received wide recognition in his lifetime, but it was then left unexplored until the 1970s when scholars became interested in the American arts and crafts movement.1 James contends that lack of information about Rohlfs has caused his principles and motivations to be poorly understood and has consequently left him unrecognized by the general public. James states in his introduction that his goal is to elevate Rohlfs’s status as an artistic furniture designer (p. 9)—a reputation once accorded him and still, the author asserts, entirely deserved.

Drama in Design presents a great deal of new information on Rohlfs.2 Each succinct chapter reveals previously unknown details of his life and knits a fascinating tale that well reflects his “glow of enthusiasm” for all his endeavors. The text follows a biographical format—the opening chapters detail Rohlfs’s early life and career, the text then explores his creative nature as manifested in furniture, and it closes by outlining his personal and civic efforts.

James fully recounts Rohlfs’s acting career and his collaboration with his wife, novelist Anna Katharine Green, topics only briefly mentioned in earlier published information. Rohlfs began his artistic career as a cast-iron stove and furnace designer in New York City while attending night classes at Cooper Union and pursuing his first true passion, acting. Rohlfs’s 1877 stage debut was followed by a brief tenure with the Boston Theater Company. Unable to attain significant roles, however, Rohlfs retreated to a design career and continued his self-study in acting—a pattern that continued throughout his early career. By 1880, Rohlfs garnered some respectable reviews and consequently attained roles in traveling performances and held the lead role in several of his own productions. Critics responded equivocally to his later performances, citing his “peculiar interpretation” and display of “real dramatic power” (p. 29). The same assessment might be made of his furniture, which suggests the intimate and heretofore undocumented association between Rohlfs’s theatrical and furniture-making careers; drama was essential to both.

James chronicles Rohlfs’s cabinetmaking career from the earliest indications of his interest in furniture in 1887 through the development and growth of his company. Rohlfs initially made furniture for his own apartment, but interest in his creations resulted in numerous commissions. Rohlfs soon outgrew his modest attic work area and opened his first shop in Buffalo, where he and his family had settled in the late 1880s.

“The Sign of the Saw,” the most extensive chapter in the book, explores the production of Rohlfs’s furniture, its distinguishing characteristics, and the international recognition it achieved. When Rohlfs’s business expanded, he no longer constructed the works but limited his role to designing furniture. He continued, however, to assert his artistic philosophy in the production process. He referred to his workmen as “fellow-laborers” and believed their sentiments were integral to the manufacture of the work: “to produce artistic furniture,” he said, “they ‘must be in sympathy and work with the feeling that they are part of the plan’” (p. 57). Unlike his contemporaries, Rohlfs maintained a close relationship with the fabrication of the object. After he completed the initial design, a scale model of the object was presented to Rohlfs for approval. The manufacturing process included hand and machine labor and resulted in aesthetically unusual, even whimsical, forms, distinguished by Rohlfs’s sinuous motifs. Similar processes and enthusiasm were part of the production scheme for other wares by Rohlfs, such as lamps and chafing dishes.

Rohlfs’s work found increasing favor among an international audience, as James’s account documents. Rohlfs participated in numerous national and international expositions. His acclaim was so far-reaching that he received accolades from European royalty and numerous commissions for entire room suites. The most well-documented Rohlfs interior is the house he and his wife constructed in 1912. Drama in Design contains outstanding images of the house. They depict a diverse group of Rohlfs’s objects in the setting for which they were intended—he also designed the interior of the home including wood and plaster work and light fixtures.

The book concludes with two chapters that summarize Rohlfs’s participation in various arts-related organizations, the patents he developed during his lifetime, and the last decades of his personal life. These chapters are visually rich, and the images, combined with the wealth of details, lend insight into the personality of a designer who was, and is, often considered eccentric. The final section of Drama in Design reprints five speeches and interviews, including “True and False in Furniture” (an address given to a 1900 arts and crafts conference in Buffalo) and a 1902 speech given to an arts and crafts conference in Chautauqua, New York. These selections illuminate Rohlfs’s beliefs and document that he never lost his flair for dramatic presentation. The closing pages contain a bibliography and a checklist of the exhibition at the Burchfield Art Center.

A closer look at some of the key assertions in Drama in Design reveals its limitations. The chapter “Sources of Rohlfs’ Style” presents information on the stylistic influences on Rohlfs, a topic that has surfaced but has not been developed in prior publications. James suggests apparent “concessions to derivation” in Rohlfs’s work, including assimilation of Moorish, medieval English, and Oriental motifs. He also acknowledges previously made connections between Rohlfs’s work and that of architect Louis Sullivan and designer Edward Colonna but asserts them to have been unlikely; rather, James argues, Rohlfs drew on “ideas absorbed over a lifetime,” which manifested themselves in a fresh and unique manner in his work. James also refutes the connection of the furniture to the mission (or arts and crafts) style; Rohlfs himself claimed to prefer “my own style (not ‘Mission’)”
(p. 44). James contends that “‘the product of natural ideas’ aptly summarizes Rohlfs’ work, as nature was the primary inspiration for his craft.” He supports this assertion with a thorough discussion of Rohlfs’s “reverence for wood grain” as manifested in the arresting carved embellishment found on the furniture.

Although Rohlfs’s work illustrates a persuasive naturalistic inspiration, combined with some of the aforementioned aesthetics, James too readily accepts Rohlfs’s assertion that “natural ideas” and his own creative genius were the sources of his designs. James easily dismisses other potential effects, noting that “it is tempting to speculate on the possible influences and connections among the multitude of artists and craftsmen . . . [but] it is difficult to distinguish casual threads from a collective exchange and merging of ideas” (p. 44). Yet with such a great quantity of artistic activity in upstate New York, combined with Rohlfs’s design training, New York City upbringing, and extensive European travels a decade earlier, it seems implausible that he could have worked so free of other influences.

In the introduction, James expresses his intent to place Rohlfs in the context of the arts and crafts movement, but by arguing so persuasively that Rohlfs’s work is difficult to categorize, he undermines this goal. James maintains, “Although some of Rohlfs’ work does resemble the Mission style, the majority of his furniture speaks for itself in disputing that connection” (p. 44). He contends that Rohlfs’s work may be more appropriately “cited as an American expression of L’Art Nouveau, or . . . a hybrid of that style and American Arts and Crafts” (p. 44). He offers no support for these claims by references to individual works, however, and although the entire book is well illustrated with photographs of the period and the furniture, at no time does the text cite specific images. It leaves the interpretation of the works solely to the reader. References to Rohlfs’s house are in the text, for example, but James does not discuss the specific images.

James claims in the introduction that Rohlfs’s furniture relates to “the art furniture of today” and that he hopes greater understanding of Rohlfs’s life and craft “will establish his place in the Arts and Crafts Movement.” Unfortunately, the book leaves both tasks undone. James discusses Rohlfs’s philosophy in the context of the arts and crafts movement, noting, for example, that Rohlfs “identified himself with the arts and crafts philosophy of the time” and that “his ideas strongly parallel those of John Ruskin.” Readers would have been given a deeper understanding of Rohlfs’s position in the movement, however, if James had incorporated this discussion into the text and had compared Rohlfs’s work and philosophy with that of his arts and crafts colleagues integral to the thesis. Further, Rohlfs explained that he was not a reformer, yet his speeches to arts and crafts societies included in the appendixes strongly promote the rhetoric of the movement. He also adamantly distinguished his work from the mission style, yet later we learn that he drew on the aesthetics of the arts and crafts movement for the interior design of his own home. According to the introduction of the book, Rohlfs’s “ideas, closely aligned with English Arts and Crafts principles, evolved over time” (p.10). To what extent Rohlfs influenced other reformers or designers, and to what degree he was influenced by the English or American stylistic vocabulary of the movement (in the use, for example, of natural materials and exposed joinery), are not completely addressed.

Despite these limitations, Drama in Design offers ample new information on the art and life of Charles Rohlfs. It is well presented, thoroughly researched, and abundantly illustrated. James’s efforts represent the advancing scholarship initiated by earlier ground-breaking exhibitions and catalogues. This study should certainly help bring to light additional examples of Rohlfs’s work. More importantly, however, James’s text makes an enigmatic character, his arts, and his philosophy more accessible to a general audience through a judicious balance of personal information and art historical research.

Anna Tobin D’Ambrosio
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute

1. Previously published information on Rohlfs includes: Robert Judson Clark, ed., The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876–1916 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 28–31; Wendy Kaplan, “The Art that is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987); Coy Ludwig, The Arts and Crafts Movement in New York State: 1890–1920s (Hamilton, N.Y.: Gallery Association of New York State, 1983). See also Michael L. James, “The Philosophy of Charles Rohlfs: An Introduction,” Arts and Crafts Quarterly 1, no. 3 (April 1987): 14–18; Michael L. James, “Charles Rohlfs and the ‘Dignity of Labor,’” in The Substance of Style: New Perspectives on the American Arts and Crafts Movement (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, forthcoming).

2. James attained access to the collection of Rosamond Rohlfs Zetterholm, Charles Rohlfs’s granddaughter, which contains archival papers and photographs. This collection was James’s primary source.


John R. Porter, editor. Living in Style: Fine Furniture in Victorian Quebec. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1993. 527 pages; 60 color and 490 bw illustrations, bibliography, index. $95.00.

Victorian Quebec—what potential for cultural collision in those words. On the one hand, the adjectival term (defining, modifying, possessing?) evokes the long-lived queen whose name is synonymous with a weighty package of cultural and design values exported around the world by Britain at the height of its power. The other term, however, defines Canada’s separatist province, ancient heartland of New France, where French has long been the dominant language and where license plates still bear the evocative slogan, “Je me souviens.”

The juxtaposition of these words, nevertheless, is not hypothetical. French Quebec has been part of British Canada for over two centuries. Like other places dominated by Britain, it, too, underwent the process of Victorianization. The evidence of this process is still clearly visible on its urban landscapes. This book now tells us that corroborating evidence can be found inside the buildings as well. Editor John Porter and his associates demonstrate convincingly that there really is Victorian furniture in Quebec; furthermore, some of it is pretty remarkable.

Neither of these messages will be universally welcome, for Quebec’s accepted design history has, at least in some quarters, long been dominated by emphasis on early French traditions. Porter explicitly states that one of the purposes of Living in Style is to counteract common stereotypes about Quebec as a land of habitants, of rural descendants of the early French settlers, somehow living outside of time, adhering to venerable French ways, and free from the corrupting influences of British imperialism and, later, the invasive cultural expressions of the industrialized United States. As attractive and ideologically functional as these stereotypes may be, they misrepresent or ignore much of Quebec’s material culture of the nineteenth century and later. There can be no doubt that traditional French-inspired design continued into the nineteenth century, as Jean Palardy (Les meubles anciens du Canada français, 1963) and others have demonstrated. Still, there can also be no doubt that the style of international capitalism, which is another way of describing Victorianism, became increasingly prominent in nineteenth-century Quebec. A major accomplishment of Living in Style may well be its willingness to speak the obvious truth about cultural and design change in culturally conflicted Quebec.

Living in Style reveals that the story of furniture in nineteenth-century Quebec is in many ways like the story of furniture in the eastern United States. We see gradual transitions from hand to machine production, from small shops to large factories, from local production and consumption to national and even international networks of exchange. There is, though, an important difference as well, for Quebec had a caste system of sorts that finds no exact parallel in the States. There, the upper reaches of society and commerce were dominated by an English-speaking, Protestant minority, while the French-speaking, Catholic majority constituted something of an underclass. The most wealthy patrons and the most prestigious furniture manufacturers were thus, with some exceptions, English-speaking. What impact this situation may have had on furniture production or preference, however, is never directly addressed in this volume, and that omission strikes me as somewhat odd.

The ideological barriers to frank examinations of British imperialistic culture in Quebec may explain much that is odd about this book, for I have to admit that I find Living in Style a rather difficult book to assess. If I were more fully versed in Quebec political discourse, I might have a better understanding of the conditions that spawned and shaped this ambitious production. From my distance in the States, I can only describe the freely commingled strengths and weaknesses of this volume with the hope that my commentary will be helpful to others seeking some evaluation of this work. Frankly, I wish I liked it more.
Living in Style is an elegant, massive, and very heavy volume—over seven pounds, in fact. Design, printing, and paper are all of the highest quality; this book must have been very expensive to produce. Leafing through the pages of the book is most enjoyable, for they are richly adorned with hundreds of well-printed images, both in color and black and white. Reading it from cover to cover is another matter, however. As I made my way through the hundreds of pages, I wondered if this book might be the product of yet a different kind of cultural conflict than the one described in its text.

Living in Style is the outcome of a joint venture, with prominent parts played by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Museé de la civilisation in Quebec City, and the Université Laval. Editor John Porter was joined by fourteen other contributors, including conservators, curators, historians, and art historians, several of them graduate students at Laval when the book was written. In the preface to the book, ranking officers of the three collaborating institutions speak proudly of supporting “scholarly research on a subject situated at the point where art and material culture meet.”

“Where art and material culture meet”—the phrase not only has a nice ring to it but also seems generous and open-minded. What it reveals, of course, are the different stances and intellectual orientations of the two museums involved. Although the phrase suggests parity of the two perspectives, it also points to a confusion of purpose that seems to plague the entire volume. Is this the catalogue of an art exhibition? Is it an essay on material culture? Curiously enough, while it is nominally both, it turns out to be neither. Although we are treated to vast masses of data and seemingly countless essays and papers, the furniture itself seems largely ignored, given neither the customary celebratory treatment of the art museum nor the more contextualized examination and analysis of a material culture study. Since the authors may be surprised by this assessment, I will describe the organization and contents of this volume at some length and then comment in detail on what seems to be missing from this aggressively lavish production.

The text of Living in Style is arranged into four major sections: The Context, The Users, The Furniture Makers, and The Furniture. Each of these major sections contains between eight and fifteen separate entries, including survey essays newly written for this publication; brief studies of particular figures, buildings, furnishings, or phenomena; and reprints of period texts of several sorts. The more sweeping or survey essays are printed on white paper; the more focused, on gray. Like a good exhibition, the book is color coded. So far so good.

The quality of the essays, however, varies considerably, as does their relevance. The first section begins with a history of Quebec society in the nineteenth century, sketching the broad contours of a century of domination, conflict, and social and cultural conservatism. This essay on white paper is followed immediately by four short works on gray paper, each describing the contexts for which extravagantly expensive pieces of Victorian furniture were produced. We get a glimpse of the furniture made for Hugh Allen, the richest man in Canada in the 1860s and 1870s. From a reprint of an article published in 1866 we learn about a lavish mirror frame created for the steamship Quebec but now lost. Other entries tell us about a bedroom suite constructed for the visit of the Prince of Wales to Montreal in 1860 and a large settee installed in a reception room at Université Laval in 1859. We nevertheless learn little beyond the fact that these objects exist or existed. There is little analysis, little interpretation.

The next white-paper essay, on the arts in nineteenth-century Quebec, begins to reveal some of the structural and intellectual problems that hobble this book. In the first place, the relevance of a chapter dealing primarily with painting and sculpture to a book on furniture is not immediately apparent. The final sentence of this essay notes that “home interiors and furniture naturally evolved along the same lines” (p. 78), but that case is not made here or elsewhere. This essay, like many others in the book, suffers from a lack of explicit integration into a central thesis or even a dominant story line. Essays follow one another like letters in the alphabet, but linkages between them are slight at best. We might surmise that they possess relevance to the alleged subject through association or proximity, but the burden remains on readers to puzzle out how one chapter relates to the others and how, together, they illuminate the topic of “fine furniture in Victorian Quebec.”

I suspect that the art chapter was included because one of the sponsoring institutions is an art museum, which brings us to another unresolved, even unacknowledged problem with this book. The subtitle of Living in Style includes the ambiguous term, “fine furniture.” The term is never clearly defined. I understand it as meaning expensive furniture that art museums are willing to exhibit. How, then, can the authors claim to reconcile a material culture approach to the study of furniture with the cultural biases of contemporary art museums? If the work specified that the study was of furniture of Victorian Quebec’s ruling elites such a reconciliation would have been possible, and the study could have had real merit; but no such candor or sophistication informs these pages. Instead, we struggle along under the delusion that art and material culture are happily married and that this study rests on an objectively selected sample of cultural production. Not so. We never learn the ideology behind the determination of which objects to include and which to exclude. We have no idea how many well-documented objects were passed over because they were not considered “fine.” We do not know which documents, catalogues, photographs, or inventories were brushed aside because they helped us understand furniture inappropriate to this book.

I mentioned candor and sophistication. Lack of candor may be less a problem with this publication than lack of sophistication. Although there are some exceptions I will discuss shortly, a good deal of this book strikes me as naive and out of touch. Parts of it could have been written thirty years ago. Texts typically generalize from secondary sources instead of particularizing from data at hand. Authors often seem uncomfortable with their material and unfamiliar with other writing on related subjects. Few if any of the essays acknowledge studies of the furniture of other regions or address ongoing discussions or problems within the history of furniture. In short, this book seems to have been written in a vacuum. As such, it does little to sweep away stereotypes of isolated Québécois, and that is unfortunate.

Too much of this book is blandly descriptive and derivative. As such it adds only minor details to our understanding of cultural change in nineteenth-century North America. Some of the essays, however, have real merit. The most original and useful part of the book, at least as I see it, is the section on the furniture makers. John Porter provides a helpful overview of transformations in the furniture business in nineteenth-century Quebec. Rénald Lessard uses census data from 1871 to reconstruct a cross-section of the furniture trade. His essay deals not only with the large metropolitan firms that dominated the trade but also with the more than three hundred smaller operations scattered around the province employing one, two, or three people. Although these little firms were abundant, their share of the market was slight. Quebec’s three largest firms were responsible for one-third of all production in the province.

Even in this valuable essay problems emerge, however. A full picture of the furniture industry includes both ends of the spectrum. Here we get a verbal description of the entire phenomenon but no images of the products of these smaller shops. In this curious and unequal meeting of art and material culture, material culture may get an essay or two, but art gets most of the images.

In the same section, Jean-François Caron’s account of William Drum and the advent of industrialization provides exactly the kind of particularized data missing in other sections of the book. Although its focus is on a single manufacturer, and Caron makes little attempt to compare Drum to other manufacturers in Canada or the States, the essay is informed, capable, and mature, and it generates a real sense of confidence in its author.

I wish I could say the same about the final section of the book, the one that alleges to deal with the furniture. After four hundred pages of other material, I was more than ready to enter into deep and meaningful communion with the furniture itself, but, alas, disappointment was to be my lot. This book turned out to be a furniture version of Waiting for Godot.

What do readers actually encounter in the furniture section? A short essay explains that Quebec furniture is based in large part on design ideas generated elsewhere, including France, England, Germany, and the United States; another essay describes patented furniture and novel materials; there is commentary on woods, veneers, and finishes, on construction techniques, and on metal furniture; a highly derivative essay speaks of styles; and a discussion exists on decorative motifs. Little of this narrative directly confronts the abundant and excellent images, which decorate the pages like so much wallpaper. Even the caption data accompanying the images is not particularly reassuring or rewarding. An upholstered armchair with carved caryatid arm supports in the style of Jelliff is represented as the work of Marius Barbeau, born in 1883. If so, this attribution is noteworthy. A Gothic-style chair with upholstered seat, made of an unidentified wood, is ascribed the date of 1900 but is virtually identical to chairs made in this country in the 1840s. Is this date accurate? A pedestal table, apparently ebonized and gilt with a marquetry top, would date from the 1870s on this side of the border. Can it really have been made between 1880 and 1900 in Quebec? Dates in general seem on the late side. Perhaps they are accurate, but because the authors do not share their documentation with us, we have no way of knowing. Perhaps they are not aware that dates are themselves cultural data. Elsewhere, a laminated rosewood chair of the sort associated with Meeks is reported to be by Belter. Other captions are unsatisfying in various ways.

The discussion of comfort and innovative materials gives ample evidence of American and foreign penetration of the Quebec market. The text mentions the plywood furniture of Gardner & Co. and illustrates a Hunzinger chair. We encounter papier-mâché furniture from England, bentwood goods from Thonet and Kohn of Vienna, and wicker or rattan chairs, many of which, I suspect, came from Heywood-Wakefield in this country. We are left to speculate, however, on how rare or common any of these goods were.

This book is, then, strangely unsatisfying. Its grand scale and glorious production led me, at the outset, to anticipate something mature and interpretive, but form seems to have triumphed over content here. Art and material culture may have met, but, keeping alive an old Quebec tradition, that meeting has not been on an equal footing. Material culture has come off badly. One of the basic tenets of material culture inquiry has been ignored here, for although material culture study may involve contextualization of goods, it also typically relies on a close analysis of those goods. Context we have plenty of here, at least in a general way, but object analysis is almost totally lacking. Consequently, after more than five hundred pages, the furniture still remains elusive, beyond my understanding. I really do not feel that I know much about Quebec furniture, only a lot about this book, which is not the same thing. Perhaps the fault is entirely mine, but I suspect that much of the responsibility can be attributed to the derivative and diffuse character of this luxurious but undisciplined book.

Still trying to figure out why I learned so little, I finally recognized that, although there is a more or less logical order to the various episodes of the text, there is none whatsoever to the images. They are scattered over the five hundred plus pages of the book without regard to date, style, form, or any other organizing principle that I could discern. I am probably not the only one who will therefore find it difficult to get a cognitive grip on the material. To make sense of the random data, it must be organized in some way. Without order, as arbitrary as it may be, comprehension is difficult. Here we find hundreds of pieces of a picture puzzle, randomly paraded before us. Some of the individual pieces are surely fascinating, but it is extremely difficult to figure out from these pieces what the assembled picture might look like. At the end of this book, I still had little idea how Quebec furniture changed over time, how it varied according to region, social class, or taste culture, when and how the most prominent forms developed and changed, or much of anything at all concrete. A very basic understanding of how learning takes place has been ignored in organizing this book. Actually, art and material culture people tend to be visually oriented. Logically, then, the images should have formed the core of the book, and the text arranged to conform. This book was apparently put together backwards.

For me, the best thing about Living in Style is the inclusion of some sixty wonderful period photographs from the Notman Studio of Montreal. Notman images have been published before, but their full potential as documents of domestic life has not yet, as far as I know, been fully exploited. Including them here was a good idea, but more can be done. I offer, then, a modest proposal to our friends in Montreal. Seek funds from agencies in Canada and the United States interested in supporting comparative cultural studies. With those funds, bring together a circle of knowledgeable people from Canada, the States, France, and England to examine and analyze the content of the most detailed and best documented of the Notman photographs of furniture and domestic interiors. Turn the cumulative insights of this group into an exhibition and a book. Both will be worthy successors to Living in Style.

Perhaps it is best to think about this book as a beginning exploration of relatively unknown material. If the package seems too lavish for the contents and we learn too little about too much, we can attribute both to the enthusiasm of discovering new terrain. If future products emerge, whether they take the shape I have suggested or some other form, we will know that this book has had the impact that I think its creators hoped for. This work is, after all, a first attempt. Creative and inquiring minds looking through this book will be able to frame a host of questions that will require further exploration, and that is exactly as it should be. Sometimes the greatest accomplishment of introductory studies is their offspring. From that perspective, the profusion of topics, references, objects, and images included in this book will be beneficial, for the suggested lines of exploration are abundant and alluring.

Kenneth L. Ames
New York State Museum


Timothy D. Rieman and Jean M. Burks. The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. 400 pp.; 117 color and 283 bw illustrations, bibliography, glossary, index. $75.00

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Barnes and Noble, another book on Shaker furniture has appeared in the shop window. It’s not as though the world has been lacking for literature on the subject: over the years we have seen a stream of books on the furniture of this communal sect, including, for example, Shaker Furniture, Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture, The American Shakers and Their Furniture, Illustrated Guide to Shaker Furniture, Drawings of Shaker Furniture, The Book of Shaker Furniture, The Shaker Chair, and Shaker Furniture Makers, to say nothing of the scores of magazine articles, dozens of exhibition catalogues, and hundredweights of volumes of color plates, all about the Shakers but dwelling chiefly on their furniture. Could there possibly be anything more to say? Could anyone possibly come up with one more original title?

Yes, and yes. At 400 pages and 5.2 pounds, The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture is the best (and biggest) book on the subject. Authors Timothy D. Rieman (woodworker, historian of craft technology, and coauthor of The Shaker Chair) and Jean M. Burks (adjunct professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, and author of Documented Furniture at Canterbury Shaker Village and of Birmingham Brass Candlesticks) have created a comprehensive regional and chronological study of the furniture produced by members of America’s oldest communal society. Theirs is the first book to embrace the full range of Shaker furniture made in communities from Maine to Kentucky, from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

What has taken furniture historians so long to come to terms with Shaker furniture? How hard could this task be? The Shakers’ communities numbered fewer than twenty, populated by a membership of probably no more than 20,000 souls over the course of 220 years. What could be so elusive about country furniture made and used in self-contained communities that the task of distinguishing its regional characteristics and identifying its makers could have sustained a minor industry of book production?

Plenty, it seems. The Shakers had the gift to be simple, and the stylistic analysis of furniture can be tough going when the subject’s most distinctive feature is its lack of ornament. A comparative analysis of construction techniques can be just as hard when the makers of this furniture espoused uniformity as a virtue. Even the role of documentary evidence is limited in supporting field research in Shaker materials. Although the Shakers wrote extensively about their spiritual lives, they showed an annoying lack of interest in the material world, and their records yield relatively little mention of their furniture and the men and women who made it. What is more, the provenance of Shaker furniture is not always what it seems at first look. As the authors of this new book repeatedly demonstrate, not all furniture in Shaker villages was of Shaker manufacture. Some was brought along by converts when they joined a community, and some the Shakers went out and purchased. Of the furniture actually made by the Shakers, some migrated from one community to the next as needs dictated, confounding collectors who assumed that tracing an object to a specific community also determined its place of origin. These complexities and subtleties of Shaker material life often eluded early writers (my favorite example being the recent conclusion that, in Shaker parlance, the term “clothes pins” probably refers to the ubiquitous pegs mounted on the walls of their rooms, thus laying to rest the canard about Shakers inventing laundry clothespins). In comparison with those earlier books, however, The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture is characterized by a sophisticated methodology of furniture scholarship, informed by unprecedented access to research materials in Shaker collections.

In the course of this study the authors examined well over a thousand pieces of furniture. On page after page of their handsome book are excellent illustrations and knowledgeable descriptions of an encyclopedic variety of chairs, tables, beds, clocks, counters, chests, cupboards, and cases, many published here for the first time. Throughout, the authors support their findings with impressive written and pictorial evidence from virtually every archival source imaginable. Over the ten years it took them to conduct their research, they also drew upon a wave of important new scholarship in the field. Their comprehensive book synthesizes authoritative information from such diverse sources as June Sprigg’s observations on original finishes, Jerry Grant’s biographical study of Shaker cabinetmakers, Priscilla Brewer’s work on the historical demography of Shakerism, Steven Stein’s examination of the philosophical underpinnings of the Shaker experience, and the research of the late Br. Theodore E. Johnson and of the late Edward F. Nickels, whose community-based studies of the furniture of the Maine Shakers and the furniture of the Kentucky Shakers were presented at the ground-breaking symposium on Shaker furniture held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1982.

The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture is divided into two parts. In the first section, the authors set the stage by describing the Shaker experience in America. The Shakers’ origins and their daily life, the cultural context of Shakerism, Shaker design, and the tools and technology of nineteenth-century America are all discussed here and all extensively documented by historical references. Those readers familiar with Rieman’s article on Shaker built-in furniture in the spring 1995 issue of Home Furniture or with Burks’s article on the evolution of design in Shaker furniture in the May 1994 issue of Antiques will recognize the individual contributions of the authors to this book. Rieman the woodworker interprets historical process through the toolmarks Shaker cabinetmakers left on their work. His precise mechanical drawings of case pieces illustrate his analysis of the patterns and proportions that characterize Shaker furniture, and in words recorded in the journals of the nineteenth-century Shaker cabinetmaker Freegift Wells, he takes us step by step through the construction of a single piece of furniture from green lumber to finished bookcase.

Burks the historian relates specific pieces of Shaker furniture to designs in commercial furniture pattern books and to comparable furniture produced by the Shakers’ contemporaries in nineteenth-century America. The concept that the Shakers were influenced by their surrounding cultural environment is illustrated in side-by-side comparisons of Shaker furniture with its non-Shaker counterparts. Though these comparisons occur inconsistently and are lamentably few, they do effectively refute the simplistic perception of the Shakers as unique beings existing in a cultural vacuum.

In their second section, the authors tighten their focus to identify the actual furniture made and used by the Shakers. Wisely, they have organized this part not primarily by form but by form within a geographical region, demonstrating how the furniture within a bishopric (the Shakers’ term for individual villages linked by geography and administered under a central authority) shares common characteristics. Following the model of furniture study developed in the 1970s, they start by identifying specific elements of architectural woodwork extant in original Shaker buildings. Having recognized the local vocabulary of furniture making, the idiosyncrasies of joinery, turning, and molding and of woods, finish, and hardware, the authors proceed to identify related features in a variety of forms and styles of freestanding furniture, which can then be ascribed to each community. In the course of their research, the authors also encountered numerous pieces signed or otherwise marked by their makers (in apparent violation of Shaker law), strengthening the attributions to specific craftsmen and expanding the list of known Shaker furniture makers to more than 250 names.

The authors make an important contribution in identifying furniture from outside the Shakers’ “classic” period of from 1820 to 1840. Anyone who hasn’t read a Shaker furniture book since the late Robert F. W. Meader concluded his 1972 Illustrated Guide to Shaker Furniture with a discussion of “the horrors of Victorianism” is in for a big surprise here. Starting with the frontispiece, where a plain, painted washstand made ca. 1840 in Enfield, New Hampshire, is paired with a ca. 1890 Grand Rapids–inspired desk made by Br. Delmer Wilson at Sabbathday Lake, the authors make clear their intention to encompass the entire range of Shaker furniture—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Along with superstars in the league of the celebrated $200,000 work counter purchased at auction in 1990 by Oprah Winfrey, they also document some of the rare early and stylistically undeveloped Shaker furniture as well as the fancier furniture inspired by changing tastes in Shaker communities after the Civil War. The authors are also to be commended for eschewing some old standards in favor of illustrating previously unpublished examples (though I do wonder about the fairly weird tripod stand with a “possibly unique” birdcage [fig. 127, p. 188], which, despite its unlikely appearance and the apparent absence of any provenance, is attributed to the Enfield, Connecticut, community, presumably on the basis of lathe turnings alone). From village to village, the authors are so conscientious about documenting even the wallflowers of Shaker furniture that one can forgive their occasional excursion into such airy captions as, “Beautifully constructed of heavily figured curly maple, this is one of the finest Western Shaker case pieces extant (p. 291).”

Rieman’s excellent photographs of Shaker furniture are augmented by his detailed drawings. Among my favorites is a diagram clearly explaining the workings of a wonderfully complicated mechanism for locking simultaneously the five drawers of a sewing case (p. 180). This book is also richly illustrated with historical images—period photographs, wood engravings, and watercolor renderings from the Index of American Design. When these pictures are integrated with the text, they enrich the authors’ presentation by serving as the visual evidence of Shaker history. When the authors illustrate historic photographs or a Shaker “spirit” drawing without any accompanying explanation, however, as they sometimes do in the introductory section, these images are left stranded outside the interpretive structure with their potential as historical evidence unrealized. Because historical images are employed so effectively elsewhere in the book, certain sections suffer by comparison when these images are used as decoration.

This book is by and large of a descriptive nature. Though several times it crosses the threshold into interpretation, using furniture as a means of revealing Shaker history, it generally adheres to the authors’ stated goal “to develop useful criteria to help identify Shaker furniture and, when possible, to determine the community of origin, the construction date, and the name of the maker (p. 11).” The authors accomplish this task splendidly. Not only do they decipher Abner Allen’s signature on the back of a drawer, thereby finally setting the record straight and expunging the apocryphal “Abner Alley” from the list of Shaker furniture makers, but they make a creditable attribution of a whole group of furniture based on the characteristics of this one signed chest (pp. 190–91).

Authors Rieman and Burks have done an exemplary job of factoring the complicated and elusive corpus of Shaker furniture down to its primary elements. It’s all here: the cabinetmakers, the woods, the construction techniques, the signatures, the finishes, and the communities of origin. This book is a storehouse of the information that has eluded generations of students of Shaker furniture since Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews published their pioneering article on the subject in 1928. With such an enormous amount of facts firmly in hand, one would expect The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture to be the last word on the subject; but this book reveals just enough about the Shakers themselves, their yearning for perfection, their ambivalence about conformity, to open the window to larger questions about the place of material objects in Shaker life. For the Shakers, furniture was never an end in itself, of course, and the social historians among us await a study of what meaning their furniture held for them. Such abstractions, however, were never the purpose of this book. The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture delivers on its promise to serve up the facts, and in that regard, it is hard to imagine how it can be surpassed.

Robert P. Emlen
Brown University

Philip Zea and Donald Dunlap with measured drawings by John Nelson. The Dunlap Cabinetmakers: A Tradition in Craftsmanship. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. 210 pp.; 24 color and 68 bw illustrations, numerous line drawings, index. $49.95.

In the rarefied, often fastidious, and sometimes arcane world of eighteenth-century furniture, the work of John and Samuel Dunlap, and other cabinetmakers they trained and inspired, continues to delight the eye and refresh the spirit. Lively, bold, and unpretentious, this furniture of south-central New Hampshire survives in great numbers and attracts deserving appreciation and study.

Dunlap furniture had been recognized and associated with the Dunlap name long before Charles S. Parsons, a retired textile manufacturer turned decorative arts researcher, authored the seminal exhibition catalogue The Dunlaps and Their Furniture in 1970.1 That catalogue unlocked the potential for broad and diverse study of Dunlap furniture by illustrating and discussing some one hundred objects and summarizing the Dunlap cabinetmakers’ lives and community. More importantly, Parsons reprinted John Dunlap’s account book (entries dating from 1768 to 1789), his estate inventory, indentures, and plans for pulpits, and he provided information on tools and templates still in the family’s possession along with several tables, tabulations, and graphs. Parsons’s thoroughness, exceeded only by the expanded personal archive he bequeathed to the New Hampshire Historical Society upon his death in 1988, has served subsequent scholars well as they return to the Dunlap material to investigate subject areas that Parsons never developed fully nor perhaps imagined.

The other key publication on the Dunlaps is Donna-Belle Garvin’s “Two High Chests of the Dunlap School.” This careful and systematic documentation of two objects establishes most of the fascinating historical circumstances now associated with the Dunlap school and its furniture: relationships between and among masters, apprentices, and journeymen, including account-book payments to one individual on behalf of another; furniture sales to women; terminology (much of which is based on Parsons’s work); use of mahoganizing stains for maple and of colorful paint and gilding to highlight pediment details; and specific construction details and anomalies and their association with individual makers.2

The most recent entrée is a fully illustrated work by two authors of markedly different backgrounds: Philip Zea is a curator, and Donald Dunlap, a descendent of the Dunlap family of woodworkers, is a contemporary furniture maker. Combinations of such different perspectives are too rare in current scholarship. Granted, any collaboration requires nurture and compromise to bring the project to closure, but such efforts offer great promise for creativity and synergy. How much better, for example, are works that balance perspectives of curators and conservators, specialists and populists, inventive and conventional outlooks?

The authors, who speak with a single voice, introduce their work as a study of the Scotch-Irish through their furniture. They emphasize the importance of “place” as “the most telling component of cultural history” (p. 3). Author Donald Dunlap (hereafter called Donald to distinguish him from his several Dunlap forebears) is woven into the study as a modern representative of the region. The book is divided into three parts: a description of Scotch-Irish (whom the authors call “Scots-Irish”) settlers in eighteenth-century New Hampshire, an account of the furniture from that time, and a “catalogue” of fourteen contemporary recreations by Donald, accompanied by brief comments on the history of the form. The first part adequately summarizes secondary works addressing regional Scotch-Irish habitation and more general settlement patterns. The section on the furniture discusses Dunlap products on their own merits and in relation to other groups of furniture from the region. The third section, consuming three-quarters of the book, provides details, instruction, measured drawings, and sprinklings of folksy observations and preferences that personalize Donald and his work for practicing furniture makers and clients. The last section seems to be written for a Fine Woodworking audience, in contrast to the conventional furniture history readership of the first two sections.

To fathom the depths of New Hampshire English-speaking culture, and thereby to gain better understanding of its material culture, it is necessary to look below the surface of apparent uniformity to find a Scotch-Irish subculture. One of the few readily apparent differences between the Scotch-Irish and their Anglican counterparts is that the Scotch-Irish worshipped in Presbyterian rather than Congregational churches. The vitality of their religious community is firmly demonstrated with the First Parish in Londonderry (now East Derry), which regularly attracted 500 to 600 communicants, high numbers indeed in rural New Hampshire, to biannual celebra-
tions of the Lord’s Supper throughout the 1720s and 1730s.3 To ask whether Scotch-Irish cultural ties and traditions influenced the material culture of this region, a very inviting assumption, is a deserving question and is one that the authors raise, at least implicitly.

Zea and Dunlap track with a broad brush the New Hampshire Scotch-Irish subculture through town names and settlement patterns predating 1740. To extend their subject into the time of the furniture they discuss,they follow Parsons and Garvin in their use of primary references from Dunlap accounts and from the rich Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford,N.H., 1754–1788. The degree to which the Scotch-Irish assimilated into a broader English-speaking culture is not resolved (p. 14). As this reviewer observed previously with specific reference to Dunlap furniture, definition of any Scotch-Irish subculture may rest almost entirely on material culture analysis.4

Zea and Dunlap open their analysis of the Dunlap brothers’ Scotch-Irish origins and resulting implications for furniture study by reaffirming visual relationships already published between Dunlap furniture and the 1695 joined chair by Robert Rhea, a Scotch immigrant to New Jersey. These visual relationships, although separated by two generations of cabinetmaking and representing strikingly different regions, nevertheless suggest that the imaginative Dunlaps may have drawn on design traditions from their Scottish homeland at the time of their parents’ migration.5 The authors then introduce other examples of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American furniture that has or might have Scotch-Irish origins, one of which is a desk-and-bookcase by John Shearer of Martinsburg, West Virginia. Its heavy pediment, supported by a bold egg-and-dart molding, recalls contemporary Dunlap pediments. Regrettably, visual analysis yields no further linkages, and the authors fall back on the crutch of speculation, noting that these inadequately understood yet fascinating objects “may prove Scottish rather than simply bizarre” (p. 40).

Questions regarding the Scotch-Irish qualities of Dunlap and other furniture remain unanswered. Immigration statistics confirm the formidable presence of the Scotch-Irish throughout the colonies, with New England concentrations in southern New Hampshire and central Massachusetts. Furniture historians continue to catalogue eighteenth-century furniture of Scotland, Ireland, and northern England. Stronger historical ties must be established between these objects and the furniture of the Dunlaps, Shearer, William Sprats, and others before design features such as paired small drawers flanking a central one can be accepted as Scotch-Irish motifs (pp. 24, 154).6 Discovering who in America trained the Dunlaps would not only help bridge the hiatus between late-seventeenth-century Scottish design sources and late-eighteenth-century Dunlap products but might also reveal some of the motives that sustain cultural identity or inspire assimilation.

The ranging essay on the furniture ends abruptly with the statement that, by 1810, “the visual heritage of the old generation had passed away” (p. 45). What happened in rural New Hampshire that could cast away such strong expressions of tradition and cultural identity? This question becomes all the more problematic in light of the many woodworking Dunlap brothers, cousins, and nephews of John and Samuel that populate historical records during the 1810s and 1820s; moreover, chests bearing flowered ogee molding and cabriole legs might be dated in the mid-1810s (p. 95, n. 165). Furniture historians might thus expect several Dunlap features to remain in use for years to come.

Donald Dunlap finds inspiration for his modern creations by recalling the generations of Dunlap woodworkers who settled in his hometown of Antrim after 1812. He conjures an image of rural craftsmen who, having found a design solution that works, are loath to change, no matter what others might produce. There may be nothing fanciful or romantic about this image. The Maskell Ware family of chairmakers in southern New Jersey, for example, suggests the possibility of an intriguing and instructive parallel. They did little to change their product from the 1790s until well into the twentieth century, although George Sloan Ware (1853–1940) did substitute a motor for foot power to operate his lathe.7

Donald’s modern work does not attempt to reproduce exactly Dunlap, or even eighteenth-century, furniture. In addition to using modern tools to rough out the work, which is then finished with hand tools, Donald introduces different internal framing structures, uses different fasteners, cuts mortises differently, and takes whatever other steps he thinks useful to speed his work. He is outspoken about the use of modern tools, saying pointedly that Major John would have plugged in his table saw if he could have (p. 47). He shares freely many technical aspects of construction and design, as well as assorted tips and observations that have come from his furniture-making career.

Unlike the twentieth-century Ware chairmakers, Donald appears not to belong to an unbroken woodworking tradition. He and Zea remain remarkably unaware of, or at least silent on, the subject of Donald’s own sensibilities as a cabinetmaker participating in a recreated tradition of handwork, nor do the authors reflect on Donald’s own aesthetic experiences, reactions, and means of expression. An interview might have disclosed meanings and values that he has discovered by participating in what appears to be a genuine revival. More specific to his craft and his artistic intentions, what does it mean to him to create, through adaptation, forms such as dressing tables and basket-weave china tables that the Dunlap’s never produced? Why does he emphasize further the “exaggeration [that] is the heart and soul of Dunlap furniture” (p. 79)? Readers might recall the new insights into craft processes that came from Michael Owen Jones’s detailed study of contemporary furniture makers in The Hand Made Object and Its Maker (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

The text is heavily footnoted, with all of the notes appearing at the end, making inconvenient the lack of a bibliography or short-title index. The book would also have benefited from better editing for diction and style, especially the propensity for alliteration that is ineffective, intrusive, and irritating. Nonetheless, readers should come away from The Dunlap Cabinetmakers with increased awareness of the Scotch-Irish and their contributions to furniture making as well as a heightened sense of opportunity for further research into a deserving area of study.

Philip D. Zimmerman
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

1. Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1970.

2. Historical New Hampshire 35, no. 2 (summer 1980): 163–85. Another article of note is Ann W. Dibble, “Major John Dunlap: The Craftsman and His Community,” Old-Time New England 68, nos. 3–4 (winter-spring 1978): 50–58.

3. Philip D. Zimmerman, “Ecclesiastical Architecture in the Reformed Tradition in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, 1790–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1985),p. 86, n. 60. Records of the First Church in Derry, N.H. (1726–1808). Major John Dunlap designed and built a pulpit for one of the Londonderry congregations in 1783 (Parsons, p. 45ff.).

4. Published by the town, 1903. Philip D. Zimmerman, “Regionalism in American Furniture Studies,” in Perspectives on American Furniture, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), p. 36.

5. The visual relationships and hypothesis first appear in ibid., pp. 33–38.

6. Interestingly, this distinctive drawer configuration, which is common in New Hampshire but appears throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut, is rarely encountered in Dunlap furniture.

7. Deborah D. Waters, “Wares and Chairs: A Reappraisal of the Documents,” in American Furniture and Its Makers: Winterthur Portfolio 13, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 167.