Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Furniture of the Pilgrim Century: 1620-1720, Including Colonial Utensils and Hardware
HE interest in native wood early furniture is of recent growth. Many persons who formerly collected Sheraton types have gone farther back through the Hepplewhite period, through the Chippendale, to the Dutch period, and of late not a few persons collected only Americana, by which term, applied to furniture, is meant not merely furniture made in America, but made also of native woods.
The Spirit of patriotism stirred by the great war, has stimulated interest in the work our fathers left. The study of American furniture has only recently reached the point of recognizing how desirable is the handiwork formed of local materials, as modified from foreign styles by the exigencies of the colonists. The late Empire furniture has acquired, without reason, in New York at least, the epithet Colonial. We should do what is possi ble to relieve our early fathers of the responsibility for such productions. Nothing is colonial that follows 1776, and so far as concerns those who de sire to be correct the Colonial name should not be applied to any furniture later than Chippendale.
But what did the second generation of settlers, and to some extent the first generation, have as furniture? This fascinating question has begun to call to us until thousands ask it. This book is the effort to answer the ques tion, and hence nothing is shown here that was not or could not have been made in America before the time of the cabriole leg, except the gateleg table, a style which continued half way through the eighteenth century; and pine cupboards, which for the sake of completeness, are shown to the close of their period.
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