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ARTS, COMMODITIES, AND ARTIFACTS
The American Decorative Arts, 1630-1820
Ann Smart Martin
This exhibition presents an array of American decorative objects from
1630 to 1820 and studies them simultaneously as arts, commodities, and
artifacts of daily life. The goal is to tell stories not only of furniture,
pottery, and prints but also of the people—makers and users—behind
them. During the nearly two centuries covered in the exhibition, the colonies—and
then the new nation—underwent remarkable changes in social relations,
economic patterns, and cultural ideals, all of which found expression
in changing forms of production and consumption. Makers of American furniture
borrowed from and transformed mostly British styles to produce attractive,
often beautiful, products in a competitive commercial market. A broad
cross section of the American population became more avid consumers, and,
at the top, wealthy elites embraced new ideals of refinement that were
disseminated from Europe and were conveyed through behavior, objects,
and environment. This led to extraordinary changes in the kinds of social
practices and objects that constituted everyday life. Nonetheless, although
most wealthy Americans keenly followed style and fashion from abroad,
the American population was comprised of multiple ethnic groups and lived
under differing social conditions. How things were made, looked, and used
is part of the evolution of becoming a new nation.
The objects in this exhibition are drawn from the Chipstone collection
of early American decorative arts. The collection began with the personal
choices of Stanley and Polly Stone, but once a professional curator was
hired, the Chipstone Foundation expanded their collection and provided
support for scholarship in early American material culture. The collection
is concentrated on three of the most important forms of American decorative
arts, dating from about 1630 to 1820. During this period, European cultural
influence and trade relations were strong, so the American decorative
arts are defined by what was used here as well as what was made here.
The most significant part of the collection is American furniture, mostly
made in New England and the mid-Atlantic regions. England’s mercantilist
economic policies discouraged colonial competition with home industries
or crafts. Yet because transportation costs for furniture were high and
raw materials were readily available, most furniture used by Americans
was made here. The majority of the examples in the Chipstone collection
are fine, highly ornamented products following the styles of Europe, modified
and expressed in England, and created in America by immigrant English,
European, and native-born artisans. Less numerous in this collection but
as important are examples of the products of separate ethnic groups or
more rural places. Because this furniture was made in America, it permits
a closer view of American woodworkers as artists and businessmen and of
their roles as interpreters of style and hence culture.
The second focus of the collection is English ceramics. British potters
continually competed against their European counterparts. In the seventeenth
century their European rivals were often more successful, when, for example,
German stoneware flooded the English and American markets. Within a century
the British ceramic industry was the world leader. Against such highly
competitive and technologically advanced industries making easily transportable
goods, few American potters could compete in any but the more utilitarian
wares. Hence the most stylish and commonly used table and dining wares
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were imported. Ceramic technology
and style changed according to an increase in potters' skill, varying
consumer taste and social practices.
Third, the Chipstone collection contains important examples of English
and American prints and needlework. Like many ceramics, prints were at
least partially mechanically reproduced in multiple copies. Extremely
popular forms of art, they were both decorative and informative. That
latter, more directly useful function ultimately allowed American printmakers
to compete with their English rivals in the production of American scenes
of people and places. Needlework, similarly for display and beauty, was
not created by professionals but by young women as part of their domestic
training. Ceramics, prints, and needlework then are especially effective
evidence of the evolving uses and meanings in the world of goods.
The American decorative arts ultimately tell about the culture that produced
and used them. This exhibition examines makers by looking closely at style
(how things look), construction (how things are made), and artisans as
both artists and businessmen. It then looks at users by examining the
popularity of forms and changing social practices. It is difficult to
categorize these concepts neatly. An artisan’s work was tied to a
patron’s preference, for instance, and aesthetically pleasing products
also had to perform a task. The decorative arts are ample evidence of
the complexity of early American life. They also demonstrate two dramatic
tensions. While tied to British fashion and style, colonists maintained
strong regional preferences, not American ones. Most wished to be part
of English culture, while economic, social, and cultural realities pulled
them further apart. Coming together and breaking apart is the ultimate
story of our national heritage--the process of becoming Americans.
MAKING THE WORLD OF GOODS
In a 1784 treatise entitled “Information to those who would Remove
to America,” Benjamin Franklin described American society and the
type of person who would best fit and prosper in the new nation. He pointed
to the lack of extreme disparities of wealth that could be found in Europe:
the new nation was characterized by a “happy Mediocrity” of
neither too many rich nor too many poor. He saw little need for artists
whose work was not practical. Without a class in America that lived idly
on rents or incomes, few would pay the high European prices for painting,
statues, and architecture--works of art he called more curious than useful.
Indeed, those American “natural geniuses,” he reported, had
moved to Europe for a market for their art. In contrast, Franklin asserted
that artisans would find a welcome home. He wrote that “there is
a continual Demand for more Artisans of the necessary and useful kinds
who supply Cultivators of the Earth with Houses, and with Furniture &
Utensils of the grosser Sorts which cannot so well be brought from Europe.”
Such “tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic Arts”
would find ready employment and be well paid for their work. The wide
availability of land siphoned off many industrious individuals to farming
and thereby kept wages high and provided a ready market to support the
training of young boys as apprentices in the crafts.1
Not only would artisans find a market for their work and raise themselves
to a happy wealth, but also would receive a measure of respect. A man’s
status or honor of birth in an esteemed family had a value in Europe,
Franklin wrote, “but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to
a worse Market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning
a Stranger, What is he? but What can he do?” He added,
“the People have a Saying, that God Almighty is himself a Mechanic,
the greatest in the Universe; and he is respected and admired more for
the Variety, Integrity, and Utility of his Handiworks, than for the Antiquity
of his family.”2
Franklin’s late eighteenth-century categorization of artists and
artisans, art, and art objects fits surprisingly well with modern scholarship.
The mechanic arts of Franklin’s phrase—such as furniture, pottery,
and decorative prints—are now called the decorative arts, but still
denote those things useful as well as ornamental. Like Franklin, modern
scholars distinguish these household objects from those “Works of
Art that are more Curious than useful,” such as paintings, sculpture,
and architecture, deemed today as “high arts.”
Decorative arts objects were made in this period for an evolving commercial
market. To be successful, an artisan had to produce an object that pleased
an aesthetic, came at an appropriate price, and aided in the performance
of a function or task. All three aspects are part of the ideal of value
and combine to help us understand the way things look and the way things
are made.
Art Objects
Decorative arts objects encode cultural assessments of what is beautiful
and stylish--in essence, what is attractive in an appropriate form. Stylistic
preference developed within a finely tuned dynamic between external sources
and local and individual taste. Because well-to-do Americans wanted to
be considered cosmopolitan and fashionable, artisans frequently touted
their up-to-date knowledge from England.
Styles from abroad came in three major ways: the importation of particular
objects, the influx of artisans trained in particular techniques and styles,
and the importation of published design sources. If artisans came from
such established style centers as London, the adoption of the latest British
styles and techniques was rapid. A London-style, joined- furniture tradition
was established in Boston with the arrival of Ralph Mason (by 1635) and
Henry Messenger (by 1641). Both men trained sons, grandsons, and apprentices
in a tradition that lasted until 1700. These early objects were precisely
English in the London style--made by Englishmen for an English taste.
They used exotic woods prized for their color and grain, like Spanish
cedar and Virginia walnut. They were in the latest style, with elaborate
architectural details (including applied spindles and moldings) that show
the influence of northern Europe on English design. They incorporated
the newer technique of dovetailed construction, rare in New England pieces.
Both the chest (fig. 1)
and the folding table (cat. 91)
in this exhibition are fine examples of the strong Mason-Messenger tradition
established and upheld through family linkages. The products of this Boston
shop tradition eventually became a less purely London design.3
On the other hand, even within Britain, there were regional varieties.
In the Chipstone collection is a joined chest (fig. 2)
made sometime in the last third of the seventeenth century and attributed
to the shop of Thomas Dennis of Ipswich, Massachusetts (1638-1700). The
carving on the chest is remarkably similar to contemporary Devonshire
examples that were painted and had carving picked out in various colors.4
Nonetheless, American-made furniture seldom replicates English examples.
Colonial conditions alone prevented direct copying as a regular practice.
Houses of wealthy Americans, for instance, were rarely the size of great
English homes, so American furniture was often of a small scale and size.
As important was the relationship of materials and labor. Natural resources
in Europe were declining as population was rising. In America, the vast
tracts that needed to be cleared meant that wood for fuel and building
was readily available. This is clearly demonstrated in the way wood was
processed into furniture in the seventeenth-century colonies. Wood stock
was usually sawn into appropriate dimensions in England. In seventeenth-century
America the stock was more often riven (split) from sections of logs,
with large portions wasted, before being further reduced and shaped with
finer tools. Riving was a quick one-man job; sawing required two laborers.
Wood was cheap and labor was expensive. The stiles, rails, and panels
of the Dennis joined chest show this technique.
Nor did all Americans want to replicate English products. While British
influences were the most profound, large numbers of Europeans of different
ethnic heritages—especially Germans and French Huguenots fleeing
persecution, recruited as good settlers, or simply looking for a better
life—led to further cultural blending and influences not experienced
in England. Just as in the Moravian settlement depicted in catalogue 18,
these groups often clustered themselves together in close-knit communities.
This grouping led to strong ethnic preferences, and certain objects have
quite distinctive methods of manufacture or motifs. The New York leather
trunk (fig. 3)
in the Chipstone collection is a dovetailed box and lid that has leather
embossed with geometric panels, vines, birds, and animals—details
commonly found on Dutch, Swiss, and Germanic decorative arts. These ethnic
groups often used objects and styles to express their distinctiveness
from a larger Anglo-American culture. Hence, their methods of production
and styles of furniture changed little.
Stylistic preferences emerged because style is integrally linked to culture
and therefore sensitive to social, economic, and political conditions.
The varied economic and cultural backgrounds of inhabitants of the New
World help explain some ways American furniture and furnishings are different.
More subtle aesthetic variations arose from local and regional preferences.
In cities, although furniture was closely linked to European styles, its
design evolved in subtle, yet distinctive ways. Each city contained many
furniture shops with differing design and construction techniques, but
training practices and consumer preferences limited variation. As important,
only a few carvers worked in each city, so carving is a key indicator
of a particular regional style. Ball-and-claw feet, although
a minor detail, thusenable us to cluster furniture-makers into urban groups.
Three card tables, all made between 1755 and 1775, in Newport, Boston,
and Philadelphia demonstrate these local practices. Card tables made in
Newport were distinctive compared to those made in other urban places:
the one shown in catalogue 21
has blocked and recessed front areas of its front rails similar to the
center tablet and friezes of chimney pieces. Its cabriole legs have angular
knees, rear pad feet that rest on small disks rather than the floor, and
semidetached talons (fig. 4).
The Charlestown, Massachusetts, example attributed to Benjamin Frothingham
(cat. 20)
is notable for the remarkable original needlework on its playing surface
(fig. 5). It
too shows architectural qualities, but a drawer in the front rail breaks
up the planar surface. Its ball-and-claw feet are rounded and have two
talons sharply raked back. Card tables with rounded corners and deep rails
were popular in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia table in catalogue 22,
probably owned by Philadelphia merchant Thomas Willing, is profusely carved
across the rails and has rounded corners, with ball-and-claw feet that
are slightly flattened with sculptural talons and wide webs. As important
for the regional identification is the carving that cascades across the
rounded corners (fig. 6).
As a general rule, Philadelphia furniture of the revolutionary generation
is often more highly carved than that of many other cities. London-trained
immigrants arriving in Philadelphia after 1750 brought the newest styles
and highly developed skills and were welcomed by a wealthy population
that embraced stylized rococo carving.
How quickly a furniture style changed in a particular place is one index
to open cosmopolitan attitudes expressed in new ideas. Furniture production
changed little in more isolated societies defined by ethnic affiliation
and in small pockets of local preference in smaller towns and rural areas.
For example, in western Massachusetts material evidence suggests a society
that looked inward; from 1680 to 1740, nearly 250 remarkably similar chests
with drawers, chests of drawers, cupboards, boxes, and tables were produced
there that are extant. The most common form, dubbed the Hadley chest early
in this century for the town where they were first identified, is puzzling
because it remained the same for so long, whereas other forms were constantly
changing. The tulip-and-leaf design expressed in this chest at Chipstone
(fig. 7) is
one distinguishing element of these designs. As Boston leaped forward
in the 1730s, rural artisans in Massachusetts were ending sixty years
of relatively little change. The solution to this mystery brings the maker
and the user together in a complex story. One man, William Pynchon (1590-1662),
held enough land and wealth to dominate Springfield, Massachusetts, the
town that he founded, and several outlying towns by the middle of the
seventeenth century. William and his son sponsored numerous public projects
and, at one time or another, employed many of the area joiners. Such shared
patronage gave a certain impetus to shared forms and techniques. In addition,
the isolation of the region along with the tight family ties of local
woodworkers led to standardized shop practices and a local sense of what
was beautiful—what was attractive in an appropriate form. Finally,
it is to the form itself that the story turns. Many of these chests were
probably made as dower chests, to hold and transport the sets of household
linens and other goods made by young women in preparation for setting
up a new household at marriage. Because of this celebratory ritual function,
more traditional forms were perhaps valued.5
Thus, the idea of a single style that links the way things look to a particular
time is riddled with contradictions. The Dunlap chair (cat. 6),
for instance, was made in New Hampshire between 1770 and 1790 but shares
few design elements with contemporary chairs. A Philadelphia chair of
high rococo decorative style (cat. 5)
was made around the same period. Although dissimilar, each was considered
attractive to its maker and owner.
A second complication in understanding local interpretations of aesthetics
is that design impulses from abroad were not uniform. Even following the
styles of England meant selecting forms and motifs from various sources.
More variety is evident by the middle of the eighteenth century, exemplified
by popular ceramic forms and designs. Fascination with the exotica of
East Asia led to the popularity of Chinese-derived or inspired decorative
elements. Other influences evident on decorative objects are the more
visible classical world, such as the newly excavated site of Pompeii,
and the Enlightenment interest in the scientific classifications of flora
and fauna. A consumer could choose a ceramic decorated with flowers (cat.
66)
or fossils (fig. 8)
or shaped like a pineapple with a fanciful serpent handle (fig. 9).
As often, they might select western forms decorated with Asian motifs,
such as the cream jug adorned with a “foo dog” (a Western misnomer
based on a Chinese lion called a shih-tzu) (cat. 69)
or a brown stoneware mug made by the English potter John Dwight in a German
form enameled with Chinese figures (fig. 10).
This mixing and borrowing of design elements from different cultures is
articulated clearly in printed design sources. Thomas Chippendale’s
The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director, first published
in 1754, is probably the most famous design source of the eighteenth century,
giving rise, of course, to the term “Chippendale style.” The
book recorded prevalent styles as much as proposing new ones and presents
a cornucopia of styles based on different motifs and ornaments—some
in the “French style,” others in the “Gothic” style,
both understood by contemporaries to mean the “modern” more
rococo style, blending with the classical past. Others were called the
“Chinese” style. Furniture-makers rarely copied these designs
directly. The back and front legs of a Philadelphia chair made around
1765 (fig. 11)
are clearly copied from Plate 14 in the 1762 edition of the Director.
More often, artisans took bits and pieces from these designs and recombined
them in new ways. The maker of the Philadelphia chest-on-chest working
between 1765 and 1775 (fig. 12)
may have taken the finials from a plate of the Director even though
it matches no complete design.
Ultimately, a decorative arts object is attractive for many reasons. When
decorative arts scholars speak of an object’s style, they are summarizing
a complex blending of cultures expressed in aesthetics and craft techniques
that both unify and distinguish groups of people in a particular place
and time.
Commodity
The artisan’s success and the patron’s pleasure were mediated
in another way. In the marketplace, catering to the appropriate market
meant that some producers specialized in high-end wares for the most wealthy,
others for the less well-to-do. Cabinetmakers’ account books demonstrate
that the prices of furniture were based on separate elements, and a patron
could choose a la carte. Ornament or carving could be added, better material
chosen for an additional cost. Urban furniture-makers might employ several
specialists on a contract basis to provide these optional elements.
At the same time, market competition led to a continual striving to find
more efficient and better ways to make things—to make them rapidly
with consistent results. “Reduction of risk” is one principle
in the creation of the decorative arts; chance for error was heightened
in freehand carving or painting, for instance. One way to reduce risk
was repeated motion, making more and more of the same thing led to a rhythm
of work that sped production and ensured proper results. A seventeenth-century
chairmaker often used sticks or strings with markings where holes should
be cut as guides to prevent mistakes. Such a pattern would have been useful
on the chair made by Ephraim Tinkham II or his associate (fig. 13);
it contains holes cut in the wrong places to receive the chair’s
stretchers. Patterns for cutting and carving sped production as well as
prevented mistakes. The carver of a Boston chair from the Chipstone collection
used a template of leafy C-scrolls and asymmetrical acanthus secured with
two nails. Those shallow nail holes remain on the chair, rare physical
evidence of a common production practice of using patterns to produce
carving (fig. 14).
Ceramics had their own efficiencies. The plasticity of clay was especially
suited to producing multiple copies. Molding and stamping allowed more
elaborate shaping with less labor and higher success rates (figs. 15
and 16; cats.
53
and 60).
Decoration evolved from reliance on individual painters to printed designs
that ultimately enabled more complex surface scenes. Catalogue 57
is a print of George Washington transferred from paper to ceramic. The
net result was a successful art object, shaped in large part by the consumer’s
pocketbook and the larger market conditions.
The trend toward proto-industrial craft techniques helped transform the
objects made and used in early America. The overall business conditions
in the colonies evolved to create places of commercial importance that
local artisans both helped produce and could utilize. A good example is
seen in the commercial development of Boston into the center of furniture-making
in the American colonies by the end of the seventeenth century. With fewer
agricultural products on which to base its economy, it emerged as a place
for manufacturing and shipping. This, in turn, helped create a wealthy
mercantile community well connected to clients in the larger Atlantic
world. These two economic factors ultimately combined: Boston became the
first city of the colonies in fashion and style; its vast production and
export soon made it the source of furniture for other colonies. Style
became a commodity of measurable worth. Merchant-upholsterers were especially
successful, and this group provided the capital for production of chairs
on a massive scale.6
Leather-bottomed chairs, for example, were so commonly made in Boston
that the term “Boston chair” soon became a synonym for “leather
chairs.” Leather chairs, like cane-bottom couches, were part of the
new catalogue of forms of more comfortable seating furniture.7
The Boston example (cat. 24)
in the Chipstone collection was probably made between 1700 and 1710.
Boston furniture also exemplifies the finest craft traditions and the
ways that new styles were imported and disseminated. Boston merchant William
Phillips owned a set of English chairs that provided models for Boston
woodworkers to produce a large group of chairs that were not exact copies.
In the Chipstone example (fig. 17),
the carver modified the design to fit his own work practices, cutting
out his design of floral volutes on the back of the chair rather than
applying it from another piece of wood. Other examples modeled from the
Phillips chairs modified the design in particular common Boston variations.8
In the early eighteenth century Boston cabinetmaking was at the height
of fashion and skill. Boston merchant Charles Apthorp (1698-1758) and
his wife Grizzell (Eastwick) (1709-1796) owned a set of eight chairs,
one of which is in the Chipstone collection (cat. 25).
Probably purchased from the chairmaker and upholsterer Samuel Grant, the
carving is attributed to John Welch (1711-1789), the most important and
prolific carver in prerevolutionary Boston. The shell and acanthus leaves
on the crest rails are repeated in several painting frames that Welch
made for Boston artist John Singleton Copley. These details distinguish
these chairs from more standard Boston forms.9
If Apthorp’s chairs are expensive elaborations on standard forms,
other chairs were less expensive varieties for export. Catalogue 26
is an example of the kind of Boston chairs, often with simpler carving
and of less expensive wood, that were shipped throughout the colonies.
This story of Boston furniture is one of many about furniture-making.
It is from that kind of detail, nonetheless, that larger themes emerge.
Colonial furniture-makers were both artists and businessmen, providing
a range of services and prices and efficiently using the pool of local
labor. They filled ships with exports to other places. As we learn about
furniture through close examination, we can group craftsmen according
to style and technique and resurrect the makers of the furniture.
Social Use
Decorative arts objects were made with an eye to beauty and a hand on
the pocketbook. Although all art has a function, furniture, ceramics,
and the like were used to perform such tasks as protecting clothing from
dirt and insects or pouring hot beverages without burning hands. Prints,
although often only decorative, sometimes conveyed cultural and geographic
information. Even the mundane chamber pots, although decorated, were constructed
in a form and size that aided carrying and prevented spilling. A chair
that quickly broke was no seat of power. A plate with a glaze that was
easily chipped and cut with a knife was no enduring source of aesthetic
pleasure. The rare seventeenth-century chamber pot in the Chipstone collection
is available only because it cracked during firing and was discarded by
the potter in a waste pit (fig. 18).
Some ideas of usefulness came from improved product performance from other
cultures. One problem for Western artisans arose with the introduction
and popularity of Asian lacquer work, known in the Western world as japanning.
Western consumers quickly appreciated lacquer because of its lustrous
durable surface and its exotic beauty, but Western craftsmen could not
copy true lacquer. They devised their own process by building up layers
of colored finish to simulate lacquer and decorating the surface with
gesso figures and ornaments, metallic paints, and gold leaf. Mirrors with
japanned frames were particularly popular because both mirrored glass
and frame were superior refractors of light, a property that was increasingly
valued in the eighteenth century. Mirrors were imported in large quantities
from England by the end of the seventeenth century. The japanned mirror
from Chipstone (fig. 19)
is exceedingly rare because it was not imported but made in Boston between
1700 and 1730.
Lacquered surfaces demonstrate that standards of craft performance evolved
alongside ideal properties of utility. Usefulness was, in itself, a social
construction that changed markedly in these two centuries. Some new furniture
forms were invented. A fire screen (cat. 30)
to shield the face from the heat of the fire was undoubtedly a welcome
development to those seeking warmth without discomfort, but had never
before been seen. Other standard furniture forms evolved. Tables were
used as generic work surfaces, but recreations such as playing cards or
drinking tea demanded more specific kinds of tables. New furniture forms
defined by specific female uses, such as the worktable for sewing and
writing shown in figure 20,
both reflected and added to an increasing sense of a woman’s value
as mother and domestic manager in the early nineteenth century. Conversely,
the Townsend document cabinet (fig. 21)
represents a new form that evolved from larger cabinets for the purpose
of storing financial records. Like desks, it was part of the masculine
realm of increasing business needs in a commercial world. Chairs were
more often upholstered for comfort, and for the most wealthy a new form
was available and popular by the third quarter of the eighteenth century.
The upholstered armchair, such as the Boston example seen in catalogue
90,
developed with supportive arms and winged back to provide comfort for
those most in need--the elderly, infirm, women before and after childbirth.
Finally, following changes in cuisine and manners, ceramics similarly
underwent a remarkable specialization of form, from multiuse bowls to
specific bowls for dining or tea-drinking.
Artisans needed to solve problems and improve techniques to respond to
evolving consumer needs. Craft practices evolved in conjunction with two
centuries of developments in social relations, economic patterns, and
cultural ideals, all expressed in changing products. What was considered
necessary, useful, and desirable tells remarkable stories about the American
people who bought and used these objects in their daily lives.
LIVING WITH THE WORLD OF GOODS
If we could enter a seventeenth-century home, we would be entering a world
starkly different from our own. Unlike modern domestic arrangements with
individual rooms for specific functions, privacy for household members,
and a plethora of consumer goods, seventeenth-century lifestyles can be
roughly summarized as people living in close proximity and sharing things.
This spirit of communal living can first be seen in the paucity of objects
owned in any given household. For example, household inventories of the
early and mid-seventeenth century show that even the wealthy might own
but a single chair reserved for the male head of household. Other family
members sat on benches or stools, perhaps even on steps or in doorways,
eating from a bowl with a wooden or pewter spoon. The single chair was
often called a “great chair.” Of the two mid-seventeenth-century
chairs in this exhibition, the Tinkham chair (cat. 4)
represents a common style, and the Elderkin (fig. 22)
chair an unusual variant, but both are massive constructions with arms
for comfort, strong visual symbols of patriarchal authority. Ceramics
of the period also show how individual needs were sublimated to a larger
unit. Large chargers or platelike dishes (such as the one made by Ralph
Toft, cat. 52)
and tygs or communal drinking pots (fig. 23)
were common products of the era, with fewer individual plates, cups, or
knives and forks.
Even in upper-class homes, these furnishings were often placed in one
or two rooms where people slept, cooked, ate, worked, and conversed. The
fewer objects in a household often had numerous uses. The Mason-Messinger
table (fig. 24)
was a popular kind of table: multipurpose flat surfaces that could be
folded and moved where needed. Small trunks or boxes were often all that
was needed for storage of the few expensive linens and clothing not in
use, although the most well-to-do added cupboards for storage and display.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the increasing wish for individual
privacy and personal identity found visual and material expression. New
rooms were added to houses that occasionally sported names and dates in
their brickwork. Sets of chairs began to replace single ones; sets of
plates for individual consumption of food replaced bowls.
Within a half-century, these incipient steps had become a full-fledged
gallop. More furniture, more dishes, and more prints filled American homes.
High chests of drawers that protected valuable clothing and linens from
dirt and insect damage replaced the common box chests of the seventeenth
century. The evolution of form and decoration of these storage pieces
demonstrates several important aspects of these changes. The six-board
chest from New England (1675-1725) was of simple nailed-board construction,
decorated with grain painting (fig. 25).
The chest from Marblehead, Massachusetts (1650-1680), was more expensive
and elaborate, featuring joined construction, channel moldings, and simple
glyph appliques (cat. 74).
Both, however, fulfill simple storage needs. In contrast, the Christopher
Townsend chest made between 1740 and 1750 (fig. 26)
does more than protect and organize: it symbolizes a new way of making
things and thinking about the world. Its smooth, luminous wood grain reflects
a new emphasis on lighting. The top of the chest had special shelves for
displaying china figurines, purchased as part of the increasing cosmopolitan
interest in the world. Its form was anthropomorphic—it was a human
body with high legs, a waist, and decorated head. The Philadelphia chest-on-chest
made between 1765 and 1775 (cat. 1,
fig. 12) is
a further evolution. More storage needs helped force out the wasted space
of high legs. But the Chipstone chest-on-chest was intensely and completely
architectural. It was a building, and like the new town houses around
it, expressed a thorough knowledge of classical design and extraordinary
skill in carving on the pediment. It was a sign of power, no less than
the new public buildings of Philadelphia.
The evolution of these furniture forms expresses much about the eighteenth
century. It was not that Americans merely wanted more things, but that
they wanted particular new things. Expressing wealth through material
possessions was hardly new, but the new consumer goods like teacups expressed
important cultural shifts in how social standing was measured and identity
was formed. The wish to appear refined--not common, not rude, not loud,
not ignorant--is the ideal of moving from nature to culture, from base
motives to high ones, from a local world to a cosmopolitan one. In material
terms, it meant moving from rough to smooth, coarse to finished, brown
to white. Elements of construction (i.e., the coarse and natural) should
be hidden, whether through the plastering of walls or the blind joinery
and smooth veneering in furniture, because refinement was also artificiality.
In social interaction, such changes in attitude led to a heightened exaggeration
of politeness, to a more theatrical presentation of self, and to the formation
of a material environment to be shared with one’s peers in elaborate
sociability. Americans of means made the transition from eating to dining,
from touching food with their hands to eating with a fork, from cooking
stews to making dishes with sauces. They also moved from public rituals
of drinking alcohol (with little ability to exclude less worthy companions)
to domestic rituals of tea drinking (which valued precise performance
of tiny politeness).10
The worldly ethos of the eighteenth century also valued trade and objects
from other cultures and found full expression in the phenomenal fascination
with products from East Asia. Not only were they decorated with exotic
motifs, but goods from those vaguely known places called the Orient demonstrated
standards of refinement and skills far in advance of those in Europe.
Like lacquer work, porcelain posed a problem for Western artisans. It
was a hard, white-bodied, and translucent material that surpassed in quality
all other ceramics produced by Westerners until the eighteenth century.
The Chipstone Chinese porcelain teapot shows that superiority: it is white,
thin, delicately painted, and elegant (cat. 38).
In sum, it was the visual opposite of standard European ceramics that
were thickly potted in the colors of clay. More than sixty million pieces
of porcelain reached the West from China before 1800. The shock of this
new, superior material and its decoration led to a mad “quest for
porcelain” by consumers and a century of innovation to try to solve
its production mysteries by the pottery industries.
The popularity of foreign goods demonstrated an interest in a world beyond
personal experience, a curiosity about other places and peoples. The maps
of North and South America by the Dutch engraver Johannes Janson, printed
in 1640 (cat. 33),
contained decorative elements of native flora and fauna. Portraits of
native Americans were extremely popular in England and America as expressions
of other cultures, such as John Faber’s mezzotint Tomo Chachi
Mico or King of Yamacraw and Tooanahowi His Nephew (fig. 27),
which commemorated the 1734 visit to London of four representatives of
the Iroquois people. Of course, these cultural “others” were
modified in varying degrees for European audiences. Nonetheless, the stylized
Chinese men and women shown on popular porcelain export wares (cat. 40)
were taken to be faithful representations: Robert Southey wrote in 1807
that "the plates and tea-saucers have made us better acquainted with
the Chinese than we are any other people."11
This rich visual culture of the eighteenth century expanded beyond images
of other cultures. Inexpensive printed media and decorated china were
extremely popular means of bringing knowledge, color, and beauty to American
homes. Their images offered geographical information (maps and townscapes),
news (new ships or battle scenes), moral instruction (paths to ruin),
and natural instruction (flora and fauna). Each of these themes is illustrated
in this exhibition (cats. 43,
44,
45,
46,
47,
48,
49,
50
and 51).
Another part of the education of refined people was the acquisition of
skills for new leisurely pursuits. Growing in number and spreading geographically
after the middle of the eighteenth century, special schools were established
for training young women in such accomplished pursuits as music, dancing,
and needlework. Fancy needlework was considered a basic accomplishment
of a well-to-do young woman, and numerous examples demonstrate the heights
of their skills. As in furniture, regional groupings are obvious with
needlework, because each teacher taught certain uniform patterns with
personalized details added by individual girls. Figure 28
is a Jabez-Bowen family coat of arms. Made on black silk with silk and
gold and silver metals and metallic threads probably between 1780 and
1790, it strongly resembles those made at Boston schools from the 1760s
until the end of the eighteenth century. Many wealthy New England families
sent their daughters to be educated at noted schools in Boston. The coats
of arms in the hatchment (diamond) shape were generally abandoned around
1800.12
While the Boston coats of arms were the most richly worked examples of
schoolgirl skills, other items were made and embroidered more for daily
use. An excellent example is the detachable pocket seen in figure 29.
While men’s clothing had sewn-in pockets, women’s garments did
not. Pockets were sewn to hang around the waist on ribbons, partially
in view behind slits in skirts, a convenient and private place to keep
daily necessities.13
These principles of refinement—artificiality, exaggeration, exclusion,
exoticism, education, and politeness—can be evaluated by a historical
anecdote. When Benjamin Franklin considered a present for his sister Jane
Mecom, he at first considered a tea table as a fitting furnishing for
a member of his family, then turned to a spinning wheel. To Franklin,
a tea table symbolized a life where time was wasted in idle chatter; a
spinning wheel signified an efficient housewife.14
His aphorism in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1758 put
this concern bluntly: “Many Estates are spent in Getting/Since Women
for Tea forsook Spinning and Knitting/and Men for Punch forsook Hewing
and Splitting.”15
Franklin was not alone in thinking that tea tables were increasingly required
in wealthy homes. After the 1769 marriage of Michael and Miriam Gratz,
prominent members of Philadelphia’s Jewish community, the couple
commissioned a large suite of furniture, including a dressing table, a
set of side chairs, and an easy chair, probably to match a high chest
purchased some ten years earlier by Michael soon after his arrival from
Silesia via London. To provide the appropriate setting for their new household,
they also purchased the tea table shown in catalogue 29.
The drinking of tea from porcelain at a tea table may be the essence of
refined behavior. Tea was a strikingly distinct commodity from another
culture: it was imported and consumed hot and bitter, unlike any known
foodstuffs. It came with a host of social accouterments and was served
on furniture that grouped social peers in tight proximity for educated
conversation and a set of elaborate social behaviors that must be learned
and performed with one’s social peers. It was an elaborate form of
theater in which all were watching to make sure lines were correctly spoken,
props were correctly handled, and the stage was correctly set. Knowing
how to make and pour tea, handle a cup, converse, even when to go home
were all the small signs of being one of us and not like them.
That sense of audience, of self-fashioning, of vanity is one part of the
increasing consumerism of the eighteenth century "For what purpose
is all the toil and bustle of this world?" asked the British economist
Adam Smith in 1757. "From whence, then, arises that emulation which
runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages
which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering
our condition? It was to be observed," he concluded "to be attended
to, to be taken notice of . . . It is the vanity, not the ease, or the
pleasure which interests us."16
The American John Adams too saw the way that human relations were formed
by the material world. He explained carefully that when a man sees another
that he considers his equal with a "better coat or hat, a better
house or horse, than himself, and sees his neighbors are struck with it,
talk of it, and respect him for it . . . he cannot bear it; he must and
will be upon a level with him." It was not the hat that caused the
desire but the attention that it drew and the respect it endowed upon
its wearer. Adams saw this tendency in the microcosm of every neighborhood
and in all social classes. Social competition was released where the rich
had continually to pull away from those scrambling below. 17
In a time of seemingly boundless social mobility, people who wanted to
rise had carefully to craft a befitting identity of that new status. Most
commonly shared was the idea that someone’s appearance was an index
to social worth. Self-fashioning, vanity, appearances--all were part of
the performance. Mirrors became a standard bedroom furnishing (cat. 84);
and careful grooming needed accessories like rouge pots and basins for
shaving (cats. 85,
86).
Fine furnishings mattered because they physically embodied wealth, taste,
and style. The competitive urge to display the absolute latest in fashion
must have caused fashions to change more rapidly. What surprises us is
the speed with which change ensued and the near fanatical wish to be the
most in fashion. George Washington had ordered a set of porcelain tableware
in 1762, and another in 1763. Yet, even all that porcelain was not enough;
in July of 1769 he asked for an assortment of over 250 pieces of Queen’s
ware “ye most fashion[ionable]e kind.”18
By the end of the eighteenth century, changes in the styles of consumer
goods were so rapid (and so many people of varied levels of wealth were
participating) that we can find the origins of our modern consumer society.
Yet only recently has this extraordinary change come to the attention
of scholars. Early museum curators noticed the larger number of items
to collect and study from the eighteenth century. But the large increase
of possessions over two centuries was not truly acknowledged until computer
analysis enabled the counting and comparing of household possessions that
were documented in household inventories. Many historians have dubbed
this phenomenon “the consumer revolution” or the “rise
of consumerism” and challenged older economic ideas about the significance
of the rise of factory systems of industrialization in the nineteenth
century—indeed the more modern world. The debate began with a question:
which came first, increasing consumer demand or changed production systems?
The controversy continued and addressed complex issues of timing, scale,
and motivations for change. We can now say, however, that the notion of
economic revolutions has been replaced with a more nuanced sense of evolving
human circumstances, motivations, opportunities, and intellectual ideals.19
Nonetheless, untangling those factors is difficult. Greater affordability
occurred when more efficient modes of production and more frequent and
effective means of transportation met with a rise in disposable income
for more of the population. Increased population density meant more consumer
demand that could support more retail outlets. Finally, with the idea
of desirability, the Pandora’s box is opened. People in the past
quite simply came to want more and different things. The decorative arts
are the kind of commodities that sparked human desire and fueled economic
change. In their uses and very materiality lies part of the explanation
for the rise of consumer society.
This obsessive spiral did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. While religious
complaints against excessive luxury were longstanding, by the middle of
the eighteenth century a specific political critique emerged: The debasing
effect of too many luxury goods was sapping the American spirit. By the
1760s, political tensions led to American nonimportation agreements, the
wish to bring economic force against English manufacturers and merchants,
but, at the same time, to halt the spiraling moral decline of consumer
excess.
In that heightened political climate, the colonists looked at England
as a corrupt empire of luxury and feared the spread of that corruption
to their own land. One Virginian blamed that overweening pride and luxury
for compelling them to “seek after and desire many Articles which
we do not really stand in Need of, and which we cannot afford.”20
The American colonies had become Britain’s “goose which lays
the golden eggs” by becoming “foolishly fond of their superfluous
modes of manufactures.”21
Benjamin Franklin warned the British House of Commons, that those consumer
goods were “mere articles of fashion, purchased and consumed, because
the fashion in a respected country.” When England was no longer respected,
English fashions could be easily rejected and the shackles thrown off.22
In an anonymous letter in a London newspaper, Franklin wrote of the common
resolve that bound the American people: “Let us agree to consume
no more of their expensive gewgaws, let us live frugally; and let us industriously
manufacture what we can for ourselves.”23
Thus, by the eve of the American Revolution, the wish to be like England,
through copying the latest popular English styles of furniture and importing
massive quantities of consumer goods like ceramics, prints, and other
household goods, had been transformed. The personal had become political.
Refined, fashionable and worldly English culture had become corrupt and
immoral. Americans could only hope to return to a virtuous simplicity
by breaking political bonds. A band of rogues dressed as Indians throwing
tea into the Boston harbor, now known as the Boston tea party, was a deeply
complex piece of theater. It nonetheless symbolized how the world of goods—teacups
and tea tables—were more than decorative furnishings. At the same
time, artisans were no longer mere makers of things but angry mobs and
political figures. Paul Revere was a silversmith and engraver of prints;
his 1770 print The Bloody Massacre, depicting the Boston Massacre,
was enormously popular in the colonies (fig. 30).
But his fame for us rests not in the things he made, but the things he
did, to make this a new nation. That breaking apart is the final story
of the dramatic tension to be like England and not like England. A new
nation was formed.
CONCLUSION: STORIES TOLD, US AND THEM
Our sense of our national past and identity is based on many concepts,
ideals, and myths. Beginning in the generation after the American Revolution
and peaking in the colonial revivals of the early twentieth century, Americans
have been fascinated with how our nation came to be and a story--not always
completely true--emerged to explain who we are. How we think about that
past is also colored by the colonial revival houses that line city streets
and modern furniture marketed in styles vaguely labeled as “Early
American.” These tables and chairs and chests are interpretations
of the goods of seventeenth-century Puritans, later simple “country”
or rural peoples, or eighteenth-century patrician founding fathers. Each
carries myths and truths, and each is shown in its true form in this exhibition.
The collecting interest of Stanley and Polly Stone is a thus part of that
twentieth-century fascination with the past but is simultaneously a way
to reappraise it. Two final pieces of furniture in this exhibition help
assess how we know and think about the past. The Mason-Messinger table
was made about 1650 in New England (fig. 31).
Three hundred and fifty years of use and sunlight have left us a drab
brown form decorated with deep carving, fitting furnishings for our modern
ideas of the dour and drab Puritan experience. However, decorative arts
scholars have shown the richness of life and color in their world. The
use of contrasting local and imported West Indies woods, with paint embellishing
carved and decorated surfaces, produced a colorful table that was a fitting
symbol of a British empire that conquered the world with commercial and
military might. It encodes a sense of pride and optimism and is a sign
that the new colonies were up-to-date and flourishing.
The New York tea table from the Chipstone collection (fig. 32)
tells the next century’s story. The wars of the British empire at
the middle of the eighteenth century brought fortunes to New York merchants
and entrepreneurs from privateering and provisioning British forces. New
York’s population soared and attracted many artisans from abroad.
One of these British ÈmigrÈs was John Brinner, a “Cabinet and Chair-Maker
from London” who advertised in the New-York Mercury on May
31, 1762:
At the Sign of the Chair, . . . every Article in the Cabinet, Chair-making,
Carving, and Gilding Business is executed on the most reasonable Terms,
with the utmost neatness and Punctuality. He carves all sorts of Architectural,
Gothic, and Chinese, Chimney Pieces, Glass and Picture Frames, Slab Frames,
Gerondoles, Chandeliers, and all kinds of Mouldings and Frontispieces,
&c. &c. Desk and Bookcases, Library Book-Cases, Writing and Reading
Tables, Commode and Bureau Dressing Tables, Study Tables, China Shelves
and Cases, Commode and Plain Chest of Drawers, Gothic and Chinese Chairs;
all Sorts of plain or ornamental Chairs, Sofa Beds, Sofa Settees, Couch
and easy Chair Frames, all Kinds of Field Bedsteads &tc. &tc.
[end block indent]
The listing of his products demonstrates the explosion of specialized
goods: for literacy and business (desks and bookcases, tables for writing,
reading, and study), for storage (commode and bureau dressing tables),
for display (china shelves and cases), for entertaining large parties
(“all sorts of plain or ornamental chairs”), for appropriate
settings (chimney pieces, frames, mirrors, and chandeliers), and for comfort
(easy chairs, sofas, settees). It also tells of competing styles of the
mid-eighteenth century (architectural, Gothic, and Chinese). Brinner also
noted that he had “brought over from London six Artificers, well
skill’d in the above branches.”
The multiplication of skills by artisans and the creation of large businesses
like Brinner’s matched that multiplication of choices for the consumer.
While the maker of this tea table is unknown, close study of its form
links it to other tables, although a different tradesman carved each.
The shop also produced a chimney piece for the Van Cortlandt manor house
in the Bronx, now considered the height of the American rococo style.
At least three of the five carvers in New York during the third quarter
of the eighteenth century were British-trained.24
Hence, this tea table tells us about the eighteenth century in many ways.
It is, in itself, a table for distinctive use. Unlike the seventeenth-century
Mason-Messinger table that served several functions, it was purely an
object of refined towns, houses, and peoples. It was made in a business
that relied on multiple specialists to carry out phases of production,
such as the hiring of the skills of independent carvers. It shows the
continual influx of highly trained and up-to-date craftspeople from abroad
that brought the latest methods and styles of making things; the American
colonies were no backwater but could support specialists like those in
the major English towns. It demonstrates the arrival of specialized immigrant
artisans, the influence of pattern books and imported furniture, and local
and international economic and political situations.
One final eighteenth-century object completes the story. As much as we
discern change, we can find continuity. The harvest jug made about 1748
in Staffordshire, England (figure 33)
played a key role at times of ritual celebration for rural communities
pooling their labor to bring in agricultural crops. The friends and neighbors
who joined together would have been treated to shared drink, served from
these large jugs, often decorated with jocular phrases and traditional
emblems. The potter decorated this vessel through sgraffito, scratching
through a layer of slip to reveal contrasting colors beneath. Decorations
include the royal arms with unicorn and lion supporters, the initials
“GR” (George II), and the rhyme (laid out to fit the jug’s
form):
Now I am come for to Supply
your workmen when in harvest dry
when they do Labour hard and Sweat
good drink is better fare than meat
also in Winter when tis cold
I likewise then good drink can hold
both Seasons do the Same require
and most men do good drink desire
John Hockin
1748
The jug demonstrates the remarkable tenacity of objects of celebration
and ritual. Large sgraffito slipware jugs first appeared in the seventeenth
century, with the earliest dated form in 1699. The earliest of jugs decorated
with royal arms was made in 1735, and production of the form continued
until the end of the eighteenth century. The vessel type persisted, without
decoration, into the nineteenth century. Long after communal entertaining
had declined in popularity, and long after the pottery type ceased to
be stylish, these jugs continued to be made, used, and enjoyed.25
At the end of the twentieth century, we are moving away from many of the
polite sociabilities that so deeply concerned our eighteenth-century forebears.
Less and less do we gather in dining rooms for formal meals, polite manners,
and educated conversations. More and more do we eat with our hands at
fast-food venues; we often eat on the go, at unset times and places. Nonetheless,
at times of established traditions, we retain vestiges of the social practices
and relations that were new to the eighteenth century. Thanksgiving meals,
for example, are our own gatherings of friends and family in communal
celebration, a time of sharing food and drink (as expressed through the
harvest jug), with our own forms of manners, at the dining table with
the best dishes and the good knives and forks. The honorific foods we
serve at this most American of shared rituals spring from our colonial
past, reminding us of our country’s beginnings. By retaining these
traditions, even as their altered forms reflect our contemporary lives
and values, we reenact and commemorate many of their original forms of
significance. Through them, we are, in the end, the same as and different
from our colonial past.
Notes
1. Benjamin Franklin, “Information to those who Would Remove to America,”
(Passy, February, 1784), 976, 978 in Benjamin Franklin: Writings,
ed. J. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), hereafter cited
as Franklin: Writings.
2. Franklin, ibid., 976-77.
3. Benno M. Forman, “The Chest of Drawers in America 1635-1760: The
Origins of the Joined Chest,” Winterthur Portfolio 20, no.
1 (Spring 1985): 31-49; Robert F. Trent, “New England Joinery and
Turning before 1700,” in New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century,
ed. Jonathan Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1982), 3:522-24.
4. Trent, “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” 3:515-19.
5. Philip Zea and Suzanne L. Flynt, Hadley Chests (Deerfield, Mass.:
Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1992); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
“Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the
Decorative Arts,” American Furniture (1995): 52-55.
6. Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund, and Alan Miller, “The Very Pink
of the Mode: Boston Georgian Chairs, Their Export, and Their Influence,”
American Furniture (1996): 267-86.
7. Neil Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Disappearance and Material
Life in Colonial New York,” American Furniture (1995): 193-96.
8. Luke Beckerdite, “Carving Practices in Eighteenth-Century Boston,”
in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno M. Forman,
ed. Brock Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities,
1987), 123-35.
9. Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode,” 271-85.
10 Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses,
Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992).
11. Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London
1807; reprint, London: The Cresset Press, 1961), 191-92.
12. Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial
Needlework, 1650-1850 (New York: Knopf, 1993), 1:60-75; Betty Ring,
Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode
Island Women, 1730-1830 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society,
1983), 91-92.
13. Yolanda Van de Krol, “Tye’d About My Middle, Next to My
Smock: The Cultural Context of Women’s Pockets,” (M.A. thesis,
University of Delaware, 1994).
14. Franklin to Jane Mecom, January 6, 1726-27 in The Letters of Benjamin
Franklin and Jane Mecom, ed. Carl van Doren (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1950), 35.
15. Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1758 in Franklin: Writings,
1298.
16. Emphasis mine. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London,
1759; reprint, New York: Garland, 1971), 70-71.
17. John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United
States, 6 vols. (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851), 6: 94.
18. Susan Gray Detweiler, George Washington’s Chinaware (New
York: Abrams, 1982), 54.
19. The literature on consumerism in the eighteenth century is growing
rapidly and cannot adequately be summarized here. A good place to start
is Cary Carson, Ron Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming
Desires: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1996); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and
J. H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982). For a summary of the literature on consumerism from the view of
the consumer goods, see Ann Smart Martin, "Makers, Buyers, and Users:
Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework," Winterthur Portfolio
28, no. 2 and 3, (Summer/Autumn 1993): 141-58.
20. “Tillias to Mr. Guy Smith of Bedford County,” Purdie and
Dixon, Virginia Gazette, November 23, 1773.
21. Franklin, “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,”
London Chronicle, January 7, 1768 in Franklin: Writings,
614.
22. Franklin, “The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, before
an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp-Act, &c,”
February 13, 1766, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed.
Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969-), 8:
143.
23. Franklin, “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,”
London Chronicle, January 7, 1768 in Franklin: Writings,
615.
24. Luke Beckerdite, “Immigrant Carvers and the Development of the
Rococo Style in New York, 1750-70," American Furniture: (1996):
246-53.
25. Leslie B. Grigsby, English Slip-Decorated Earthenware at Williamsburg
(Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1993), 31-37; Leslie
B. Grigsby, Catalog of the English Pottery Collection at Chipstone, forthcoming.
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