Date: Tue 07-Apr-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: LAURAB

Quick Words:

Painted

Full Text:

American Painted Furniture

w/cuts

BY LAURA BEACH

NEW YORK CITY -- Along with people and things, certain books achieve legendary

status in the antiques field. Ralph Carpenter's The Arts and Crafts of

Newport, a slim volume published in 1953, comes to mind. So does Betty Ring's

Let Virtue Be A Guide To Thee. Her study of Rhode Island samplers routinely

trades for as much as $825.

High on the list of sought after titles is American Painted Furniture

1660-1880. If you can find a dog eared copy of the 1972 volume it will cost

you about $150. Written by Dean A. Fales, Jr, with the design assistance of

Robert Bishop and editorial supervision of Cyril I. Nelson -- three big names

in the folk-art field -- American Painted Furniture quickly became the

essential reference on decorated surfaces. It was a stimulus to the market and

an arbiter of style.

It took two scholars with a longtime love of the brush and a keen knowledge of

the marketplace to recognize that as good as American Painted Furniture was,

it could be better. And a lot easier to find. So Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and

Susan Klein, both authors, editors, and former trustees of the Museum of

American Folk Art, set to work culling documents, refining their focus, and

sifting through an ever growing pile of photographs.

The result is American Painted Furniture 1790-1880. Released late last year,

it both expands upon and narrows the earlier work, lopping off 130 years of

Hadley chests and japanned Boston highboys but pushing further into the

Nineteenth Century with examples of both formal and country furniture. "We

wanted to have more representative examples from the 1860s through 1880s, and

more regional Southern and Western material," Schaffner explained.

The two, whose first project together was Folk Hearts: A Celebration Of The

Heart Motif In American Folk Art (Knopf, 1984), worked hand in glove to

produce a seamless effort reflecting individual strength but little personal

bias. Schaffner believed strongly in studying technical manuals and trade

documents as a way of understanding Nineteenth Century production and

distribution schemes.

"There's a need to push American folk art, to explore it through primary

source material. It was during our research for this book that I really

discovered Nineteenth Century furniture finishers' manuals," says Schaffner,

who was simultaneously completing her master's degree at Cooper-Hewitt,

National Design Museum, in Manhattan.

Schaffner plunged far deeper than she had intended, in the course of her study

learning to look at high-style furniture, particularly, in a new way. She

says, "It's difficult to locate those books and, to some extent, it is tough

reading. But we wanted to bring forward something new on surface treatments."

"For example," she elaborates, "when you read in one manual that the surface

is meant to `withstand water and shine like glass,' then you begin to

understand. Another Nineteenth Century manual talks about the imitation of the

colors, grains, and figures of fancy hardwood." Citing John W. Masury's 1872

booklet, The American Grainer's Handbook, she concludes, "When you read

something in a period manual you begin to get inside the mind of the

ornamenters."

She calls a trip to the Boston workshop of conservator Robert D. Mussey, Jr,

"extraordinarily revealing" and identifies as a "great find" a vivid red,

fold-up pattern book of 1800 from the collection of the Redwood Library and

Athenaeum in Newport, R.I. Though English, it illustrates in charming fashion

the multiplicity of decorative schemes that might be applied to a series of

chairs made essentially from the same template.

It was while comparing notes with Peter M. Kenny, the Metropolitan Museum of

Art curator whose landmark show on the French emigre cabinetmaker

Charles-Honore Lannuier opened March 17, that the authors learned of an

engraved trade card for William Buttre's Fancy Chair Manufactory. The circa

1813 document, now in the collection of Winterthur Museum, reveals that labor,

at least in urban settings, was far more specialized than once thought.

"One man does varnishing, another the basecoat, and another, in fancier

clothes, does the ornamental painting," explains Schaffner, who also questions

old assertions that decorative painters were itinerants. "Paint had to be hand

ground and made every day. Readymade didn't come on the market until after the

Civil War. Even then it wasn't considered stable. A lot more was painted in

shops than we might otherwise have thought," she concludes.

For her part, Klein says she most enjoyed uncovering details of little known

schools and artists. "It's a sleeper," she says of furniture by Jacob and

Elias Knagy, a father and son working in Somerset County, Penn., around 1860.

"They made fabulous looking faux-grained painted furniture with gilt

decoration. They used the buttermilk paint and dovetail construction popular

earlier in the century. This was a real find because we have always believed

that painted furniture production declined in the later Nineteenth Century."

American Painted Furniture departs dramatically from its prototype, cleaving

starkly between high-style furniture and its country counterpart. The first

four chapters are devoted to Boston, Salem, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New

York City. The last four cover New England, the Middle Atlantic, the South,

and the West. Concluding appendices survey painting and gilding technique in

more detail; offer a bibliography; and provide a directory of sources,

supplies, and restoration services for painting and gilding.

"We started out by thinking that we would only do objects that were not in

Fales, but our editors felt that a lot of readers might not have seen the

earlier work," says Schaffner. The result is a new volume that mixes familiar

pieces that were "just too good not to include" with startling new

discoveries.

Thanks to printing innovations, the color illustration has a depth and clarity

not possible when Bishop and Fales were at work. With principle photography by

Schecter M. Lee, American Painted Furniture opens with a magnification of the

vinegar-grained surface of a Schoharie County corner cupboard. Its rich

tortoise-colored decoration is evidence of the miracle worked with inexpensive

materials by talented, imaginative painters.

The Schoharie cupboard comes courtesy of New York dealers Robert Kinnaman and

Brian Ramaekers and Kelter-Malce Inc. Other dealers are credited throughout

the book. This nod to the trade is a welcome one, providing validation and

another look at some of the major finds of the last decade. Remember the

Philadelphia secretary bookcase with dazzling eglomise panels that Ed Weissman

found in Argentina and Leigh Keno brought to the Winter Antiques Show a few

years ago? It's here too, courtesy of Mr and Mrs Jonathan W. Warner.

The book's breathtaking furniture selection is enhanced by reproductions of

paintings, watercolors, printed documents, manuscripts, decorators' boxes, and

ornamental tools. "Depictions of interiors help us understand how furniture

was used in the home. It's not to say that we were entirely original, but I

think we came up with some new connections," notes Schaffner.

"Once we started our research it was like opening up Pandora's box," says

Klein, who acknowledges that the ambitious project has prompted as many

questions as it has answered. "I think we have a fairly good understanding of

painted furniture, but there is still more work to do in specific regions,

particularly Baltimore and the South." Adds Schaffner, "The literature of

Nineteenth Century furniture finishers is largely unknown to furniture

historians. I'm dedicating the next six or eight months to making a systematic

study that will help us better understand original intent."

Widely admired, painted surfaces have also been imitated and refreshed for

much of the past century. "We gathered lots of Nineteenth Century

advertisements offering to repaint furniture. Then there was Esther Stevens

Brazer, whose 1940 book Early American Decoration encouraged people to repaint

furniture the way they thought it was intended to look," says Schaffner. "Many

pieces have been striped and repainted our with Twentieth Century paint.

Buyers need to be careful about that," notes Klein.

Rather than replacing the Fales classic, American Painted Furniture 1790-1880

ends up being an essential companion to the first volume and a compelling

statement of our growing appreciation and understanding of painted and gilded

surfaces. Write Schaffner and Klein, "Paint can turn the most ordinary

furniture into decorative sculpture. It is the hand-painted embellishments,

the remnants of the flourish of a natural bristle brush, the depth of handmade

colors produced by hand-ground pigmented paints, and the pattern of wear

resulting from years of use that are celebrated in the furniture shown here."

American Painted Furniture 1790-1880 by Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and Susan Klein

was published by Clarkson Potter, New York. It sells for $65 hardcover.