FURNITURE

FURNITURE. Far from being of a single style or culture, the first two centuries of furniture made in America reflects the transplanted tastes of many peoples, each beholden to their country of origin, and each restrained by geography and communication.

Colonial Furniture

In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century New England, and farther south along the East Coast, the predominant colonizers were English. The Hudson Valley became Dutch, while Swedes and Germans settled in parts of Pennsylvania. Production was local, mostly utilitarian, and immediate: stools, benches, small tables, and chests with drawers. Furniture construction was simple, medieval, and based on few tools. The resulting shapes were massive, boxy, and mostly without ornament, except for an occasional turning to emphasize leg, rungs, stretchers, and backs. Shallow carving, called "Kerbschnitt," formed geometric bands, leaves, and rosettes, on some flat areas. Later in the seventeenth century, Kerbschnitt became more elaborate. In all the colonies, chairs with straight backs and rush seats were common, and new decorative elements found wide acceptance. Refinements and the latest style came from the mother country and were available in very limited scope to those who could afford it. The Carver chair, a chair honored with the name of the first governor of Plymouth, is an example.

While American colonial furniture was distinctly functional, often serving more than one purpose, simple in design, and heavy looking, it was just as likely to employ Renaissance forms long outmoded in Europe as it was the more up-to-date baroque decorative elements that emphasized carving. As in Europe, the Baroque came in several variations.

As the wealth of the colonies increased, first in the South, so did the demand for quality furniture. A variety of indigenous soft and hardwoods, such as pine, birch, maple, oak, hickory, and later walnut, were easily available to colonial furniture craftsmen. With each boat, new furniture forms arrived, including cane-back, slat-back, and leather-back chairs, as well as upholstered chairs, better known as easy chairs. Counted among the new pieces of useful furniture were tall clocks, high chests with drawers, and storage boxes. Furniture was often named after its area of manufacture, such as the Hartford chests of Connecticut or the Hadley chests of Massachusetts, or it was given a broad, general style-based definition—like Restoration or William and Mary—by later scholars. Construction characteristics included thin drawer linings; dovetail construction; walnut veneers; fruitwoods such as peach, apple and cherry; and chased-brass mounts instead of iron and wooden knobs. Two-tiered cupboards became popular, utilizing carving and turned decoration in the English manner. A new domestic element was the Bible box. With a secure lid, it held a Bible, but also important papers. Where space was available, it often had its own stand. By the mid-eighteenth century, the demand for comfort had grown considerably among newly prospering merchants, resulting in finer homes, with refined interiors and elaborate furnishings. Out went simple, bulky, and functional rural furniture. In came European baroque and rococo styling—elegant urban designs in Queen Anne and Chippendale styles that fit better in the enlarged houses, which now contained a central hall, a dining room, and two parlors, including a formal one with a sofa, chairs, mirror, and several small tables. Each room required specific furniture.

Starting about 1725, the fundamental baroque qualities of the William and Mary style began to merge with the more sophisticated Queen Anne forms. With its lean and taut S-shaped cabriolet legs, pad, trifid, or pointed feet, it dominated the American British colonies for the next three decades. American Queen Anne was simpler than its English counterpart. Where the English relied on carving and gilding for decoration, Americans sought symmetry and proportion, while respecting the natural qualities of the wood. On both sides of the Atlantic, claw-and-ball feet ruled. Knees on high chests and chairs sometimes appear to buckle under the weight of scalloped shells and volutes. Whatever else it boasted, the most important element of Queen Anne was the cyma curve—the one William Hogarth called a serpentine "line of beauty." No part of a piece of furniture was spared the curve—not the solid back, the vase-shaped splats, or the bow-shaped crest. Its use went beyond decoration and into the piece of furniture itself.

In major urban centers, direct links to European craftsmen were established through royal governors, successful merchants, and immigrant craftsmen. The impact of Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director: Being a Large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese, and Modern Taste, first published in England in 1754, did not become felt in the colonies until about 1760. It is by his name that American furniture of the Rococo is known.

While Queen Anne furniture lingered as a rival, Chippendale's pierced chair-back splats as illustrated in his pattern book and copied by skilled local craftsmen, became the rage in the British colonies of the 1760s and 1770s. While the pattern books themselves were scarce, the fundamental forms were widely current, and from them developed an indigenous style. Furniture making was one of the first trades in which American craftsmen could both match and free themselves from dependence on their English counterparts. In every urban center, mahogany, an expensive wood from the Caribbean, quickly supplanted the traditional indigenous Queen Anne favorites, walnut, maple, and cherry. Furniture was now found all over the house. Instead of gentle cyma curves, the C-and S-scrolls dominated. A notable innovation was the upholstered armchair. Widespread ownership of Chinese ceramics resulted in another new furniture form: the corner cupboard.

French-inspired bombé double chests and desk-bookcases became a specialty of Boston. Boston is also credited with introducing block-front furniture, including the widely popular blocked-front desk, an innovation by Goddard and Townsend, two Quaker cabinetmaker families in Newport, Rhode Island. The front of the chest, commode, or bureau-bookcase was divided into three vertical panels, or blocks. The middle block was mildly concave causing the blocks on either side to appear slightly projecting. Accenting this subtlety was a shell motif, carved alternately concave and convex. At this same time, the four-poster canopy bed with hangings of linen, wool, and damask became fashionable.

An elaborate French influence swept Philadelphia, the largest city in British America. Here, in the hands of William Savery, the highboy became the trophy of the Rococo in America. Philadelphia furniture craftsmen also focused on the production of the ubiquitous English Windsor chair. By far the most popular chairs inside and outside the home throughout the colonies, the Windsor— simple, utilitarian, and made of commonly available wood—quickly established itself as an American chair type. In Philadelphia, the Windsor achieved a lean elegance accented by lathe-turned legs and stretchers. Bows for the back were shaped by steam.

In the spirit of the times, American craftsmen ardently advanced technologies and, after independence, became leaders in innovative labor-saving devices used in all aspects of manufacturing. Starting in 1818 in Connecticut, Lambert Hitchcock pioneered a derivative of the Windsor chair with easy to assemble, mass-produced parts, which he shipped to the Midwest and southern locations for assemblage, painting, and stenciling. The finished chairs were distributed by the thousands around the country.

The Nineteenth Century

When publications introduced European neoclassicism to America in the 1780s and 1790s, their scholarly, archaeologically founded classical revival was taken as an appropriate expression of the young Republic, a trend that merged well with the new ideals of government. The publications of Robert Adam were indispensable, though they were known mostly through the designs in George Hepplewhite's Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide, published posthumously by his wife in 1788. The Hepplewhite style is characterized by the use of Marlborough legs (a tapering leg of square section), shield-backed chairs, and a restrained application of classical ornament. Basic classical revival needs were also satisfied by Thomas Sheraton, whose Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, issued in four parts (1791–1794), found immediate resonance.

At much the same time, Duncan Phyfe began to make his reputation in New York, a reputation based on a still much-admired classical style. By 1820, Phyfe employed one hundred workers, each specializing in his own craft, and all working under one roof for one employer. Specialty craftsmen, upholsterers, inlay makers, turners, carvers, and gilders working as allied artists became the staple of the urban furniture industry. Rural cabinetmakers, by contrast, could do it all.

Based on Greek and Roman forms and named after the first empire of Napoleon, the Empire style—as it was defined by the furniture designed by Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, both of Paris—became all the vogue about 1800 in France. The main thrust of Empire furniture arrived in New York in 1803, with the émigré cabinetmaker Charles-Honoré Lannuier. It quickly spread throughout America. Bookcases became Greek temples, couches became Roman beds, consoles became ancient altars, and clocks became pyramids. Archaeological forms were often misunderstood. Adam's Pompeian delicacy became Greco-Egyptian solidity. A major characteristic of American Empire is the increased weight of all the parts. It was wildly popular.

Unconcerned with national styles and trends, uncomplicated forms of the eighteenth century dominated the furniture of the Shakers, a religious sect. Refining their style throughout the nineteenth century, the makers of Shaker furniture became a major influence on modern design from the 1880s on.

Unhampered by a rigid economic and social structure, furniture craftsmen and manufacturers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia followed the population bubble west and set up businesses as required. Along the way, furniture craftsmen adopted and invented labor-saving machines like no other industry had before. The immediate results were acceleration in the division of labor and a significant reduction in cost, as well as constant striving for novelty combined with elegance. New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Chicago quickly developed into primary nodes of furniture production. By 1825, a steam-driven planing and grooving machine was running in Cincinnati, a city that by 1850 claimed 136 furniture-making facilities producing some __BODY__.6 million in product and employing 1,156 hands. With the development of a national railroad distribution system after the Civil War, Chicago became the nation's center of furniture production.

The great international exhibitions in London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, and Chicago sped the global diffusion of ideas in furniture design and contributed significantly to the wars of styles so evident in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, as the need to represent Empire waned, American interior decorating and furniture design fell under the spell of the Gothic Revival style. Applied to any and all surfaces, its repetitive patterns were found to be especially suitable to machine production. Those aspiring to a more aristocratic elegance sought out French-inspired revivals of baroque and rococo styles.

By merging genuine historic design with machine production and innovative handcraftsmanship, in New York, John Henry Belter and the Herter Brothers emerged as inspired, independent forces in America's furniture industry. Both were much admired and copied. By combining marble with gilding and textured silk and satin, using color as pattern, and adding thin legs to thick furniture, mass produced furniture lost all semblance of tradition,

while satisfying America's eclectic markets. New furniture forms, the ottoman, the lazy Susan table, and the wardrobe, joined those with a pedigree. Championing craftsmanship traditions rooted in the honesty of medieval and Renaissance construction, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (1868) by Charles Lock Eastlake, was catapulted into a vogue known as the East-lake style.

Elegance may fade, but it never dies. In the 1880s, the nation fell under the spell of French academics, this time from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose support of authentic reproductions of period furnishings found broad support among America's wealthy. But American intellectuals and designers cheered strong nativism. They embraced the blossoms of the Orient that inspired forms compatible with the English Arts and Crafts style and philosophy.

Along the Arroyo Seco of Pasadena, California, the brothers Charles Sumner Green and Henry Mather Green built and exquisitely furnished a number of Japanese-influenced Craftsman-styled bungalows. The sensuous, languorous quality of California life influenced not only their style, but also that of their contemporaries Irving Gill, in San Diego, and Bernard Maybeck, in San Francisco. It was also in San Francisco that Arthur and Lucia Kleinhans Mathews founded The Furniture Shop in 1906, when the great earthquake provided a wealth of opportunity.

The Twentieth Century

In contrast, the bold lines and forthright detail characteristic of the Stickley brothers, Gustave, Leopold, and John George, are also representative of the early twentieth century. Known collectively as Craftsman or Mission, their furniture designs incorporated smooth rounded edges, elaborately pegged joints, and sometimes-intricate, sinuous inlay. In the early years of the twentieth century, Gustave Stickley sponsored furniture franchises from Los Angeles to Boston. In 1913 he opened large showrooms

in Manhattan. Two years later, he declared bankruptcy. The eccentric end of the movement is represented by Charles Rohlfs, who established his own furniture workshop in Buffalo, New York, in 1898, and soon was making entire rooms of furniture for wealthy clients throughout the United States.

By 1900, the Midwest became a hotbed of furniture design, led by such lights as Harvey Ellis, George Washington Maher, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Grant Elmslie, George Mann Niedecken, and William Gray Purcell. Two world's fairs showed off the achievements: the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. Chicago represented the apotheosis of the "American Renaissance," through Daniel Burnham's insistence on European beaux-arts influences. St. Louis presented to America the new, stylish, utilitarian modern designs of the Arts and Crafts movement. Frank Lloyd Wright is the undisputed leader. His synthesis of Louis Sullivan's organic ornament and impeccable construction, with simplified lines, forthright construction, and insistence on the totally designed environment that subjugated furnishings to architecture took the Arts and Crafts ideology to another level. While Wright never insisted on the handcrafting of furniture, he did maintain a close relationship with manufacturing firms and craftsmen who executed his designs. Foremost among them was Niedecken of Niedecken-Walbridge.

Impressed by the Stickley and Austrian exhibits at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Oscar Onken established The Shop of the Crafters in Cincinnati in 1904. Together with his lead employee, the Hungarian designer Paul Horti, who had worked on the Austrian exhibition at the fair, they created a distinctly European look in their furniture, distinguished by its use of inlays, applied carving, and painted designs.

Although little concerned with the theoretical foundations of the Arts and Crafts movement, Chicago-based mail-order houses like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward introduced Mission-styled furnishings to a remarkably large cross-section of American society. While designers in Germany and France were successfully marketing tubular steel furniture and plate glass–topped tables, and Scandinavians were experimenting with plywood and curvilinear forms, seeking to break up mechanical regularity, some European-born American designers adopted the new rather than creating it. R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Howe and Lescaze, Kem Weber, and others worked in the new idiom, but they did not make significant new contributions of their own. Meanwhile, Roebuck offered American-manufactured tubular steel chairs through its catalogs.

In startling contrast stood the mid-1920s luxurious American variants, based on the distinctly French modern furnishings created by Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and others for the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. While much admired, items were wildly expensive, resulting in a very limited following. Just as rare as French Deco in America were products of the Austrian Werkbund, Austria's semiofficial artists' guild, which became available in America in 1928 when Marianne Willisch began bringing annual exhibitions of modern crafts and furniture to the United States. In 1930, Willisch moved to Chicago. She was soon asked to furnish interiors, and she began to design and supervise the construction of furniture.

In 1933, the Chicago's second world's fair, Century of Progress Exposition, surpassed all previous fairs in the number of model houses on display; there were thirteen at the fair's opening, and twenty in its second season. Exceptionally popular and widely published, the twelve-sided House of Tomorrow and the all-glass Crystal House, both designed by Chicago architects George and Fred Keck, showed Bauhaus-inspired furniture designed by Leland Atwood.

Immediately after World War II, American furniture design again came into its own, based on models developed just prior to the war. In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York inaugurated a competition for "organic Design in Home Furnishings," in which two architects, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, won the first prize for seating and other living room furniture. While sectional seating was not new, the MOMA prizes were revolutionary, for Saarinen and Eames united seats, back, and arm rests in a single shell made of veneer and glue and laminated in a cast iron mold. The shell was mounted on a base. This development greatly reduced the industrial process and would have immense consequences after the war. Charles and Ray Eames produced a series of furniture designs that proved to be classics. So did Eero Saarinen. Harry Bertoia's wire chairs and George Nelson's "coconut" chair and storage walls also became familiar to a broad public. Between them, Knoll and Herman Miller made available what seemed to be distinctly American modern furniture.

While wood and metal dominated American furniture design historically, plastic and fiberglass slowly became a visible furniture material by the early 1950s. Walter Papst in Germany designed the first one-piece plastic table in 1959. The following year, the first one-piece plastic chair was designed and patented by the American R. G. Reineman. By the early 1970s, plastic furniture was in the forefront of American furniture design. The introduction of vinyl and other plastic skins allowed the creation of flexible envelopes filled with beads of polystyrene, plastic foam, as in the "bean bag" chair, or filled with air for deflatable, temporary furniture. The new materials often required rounded forms to best accommodate them. Designers followed suit. In 1972, the architect Frank O. Gehry designed domestic furniture using paper—a laminated corrugated construction he named Easy Edges rocking chair.

At the same time, electronics began invading the home, dictating furniture shapes and room configurations that included not only an almost universally black-skinned television but various black electronic gadgets, each with its own specific LED lights. The introduction of these new furnishing devices were followed closely by computers, mostly beige, and large screen televisions, mostly wood finished.

These developments forced a wholly new aesthetic on American furniture design, one no longer based on construction but on casting, molding, and shaping and the color black, followed by beige, followed by pastels and primary colors. The keen interest in new materials and the exploiting of their potential in mostly rounded forms in the 1970s helped establish an interest in ergonomics and the environment. By the early 1990s, Donald Chadwick and William Stumpf designed the Aeron chair, which brought front-line radical ergonomic, anthropometric, and environmental considerations into the office. Other environmental furniture followed rapidly. While new colors and materials continued to be introduced, an aesthetic interest in retro furniture design of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s bloomed in the 1990s. This aesthetic continued to lead at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

FURNITURE

Colonial Furniture

The Nineteenth Century

The Twentieth Century

BIBLIOGRAPHY