Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

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Maine Antique Digest, December 2016 23-C
- FEATURE -
23-C
Art and Industry: The
Furniture Trades in 18th- and
19th-Century Rhode Island
by Lita Solis-Cohen
“American furniture has been studied
for a hundred years, and Rhode
Island furniture has been an obsessive
part of the story,” said Philip D. Zimmerman on
September 15 to an audience of 300 in the Robert
L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall at the opening of
the 2016 Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Memorial
Lecture and Symposium and the exhibition Art
and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island
Furniture, 1650-1830 at the Yale University Art
Gallery. This landmark exhibition, masterminded
by Patricia E. Kane, the Friends of American Arts
Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale
University Art Gallery, and accompanied by a
seven-pound illustrated catalog ($85), continues
through January 8, 2017.
Zimmerman, a classmate of Oswaldo
Rodriguez Roque (1949-1989) at Yale (class of
1972), was the keynote speaker. After completing
his master’s degree at Yale in 1975, Roque had
a career in the American paintings department at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the first
director of the Chipstone Foundation collection in
Milwaukee.
Zimmerman’s talk on Thursday afternoon was
followed by a daylong free symposium on Friday
that further illuminated the depth and breadth of
this first major survey of Rhode Island furniture
in half a century.
Fourth-floor galleries at the Yale University
Art Gallery are filled with 130 pieces of Rhode
Island furniture borrowed from collectors,
museums, and historical societies and fromYale’s
own collection. The show celebrates more than
a decade of research and the building of Yale’s
Rhode Island Furniture Archive (RIFA), which
documents furniture and the woodworking
trades in Rhode Island from the time of the first
European colonization in 1636 through the early
19th century.
For more than 15 years, curator Kane has led a
team of scholars who read all the early published
sources and searched state judicial archives,
land, probate, and town records, account books,
shipping records, diaries, indentures, court
records, and advertisements in order to document
the furniture trades in Newport and Providence
and in the surrounding towns that heretofore had
received little scholarly attention. They examined
every piece of Rhode Island furniture that came
to their attention and described its construction,
inscriptions, makers’ marks, and provenance.
They recorded 6000 pieces of furniture, of which
about 4000 are online along with the names of
2000 craftsmen who worked in wood, including
cabinetmakers, shipwrights, and wheelwrights.
The online archive is continuously updated and is
searchable by anyone who wants to use it (www.
). It is a model for 21st-century
scholarship in American studies and decorative
arts and has inspired similar projects at other
museums and universities.
For the exhibition, Kane chose furniture
masterpieces from the two main mercantile
centers—Newport and Providence—along with
the finest examples from the smaller towns where
skilled cabinetmakers filled the needs of local
customers.
Alongside well-known works by members of
the Townsend and Goddard clan are works by
hitherto unknown makers, such as Daniel Spencer
of Providence. Spencer trained with his uncle
John Goddard and used some of Goddard’s shop practices, such as
lettering on the inner faces of the drawer backs starting at the top with
“A.” He added his own mark, a cursive “I” that looks something like
an “S” in the interior front corners of the drawers.
These markings are found on the 9' tall desk-and-bookcase with
six carved shells made by Spencer for the Providence merchant John
Brown. In 1760 Brown had bought from John Goddard a pair of
roundabout chairs, one of which is in the exhibition, but by the 1770s
he was patronizing the local Providence craftsman Spencer, whose
personal style is evident when this desk-and-bookcase is compared to
the John Goddard desk-and-bookcase in the same gallery.
Both have concave and convex blocking and three shells carved
on both the upper and lower sections. According to the catalog,
these monumental desk-and-bookcases are two of nine Rhode Island
examples of this form. The one made by Spencer is in the Garvan
collection at Yale; the John Goddard desk-and-bookcase is on loan from
the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Its pencil inscription,
“Made By John Goddard 1761 & Repaired By Thomas Goddard,” who
was his son, makes it the touchstone piece for the characteristics of
John Goddard’s block-and-shell decoration.
These two pieces express the full flowering of the Rhode Island
style. They are offspring of the patriarch of this form, the Appleton
desk-and-bookcase signed by Christopher Townsend, 1745-50, with
silver hardware marked by the Kingston silversmith Samuel Casey.
It has a place of honor at the front of the exhibition next to a desk-
and-bookcase by his older brother Job Townsend—the two were the
founders of the Townsend-Goddard clan of cabinetmakers. Discovered
in France, it had been fitted with its missing bun feet and sold at
Sotheby’s in New York City in January 1999, heralded as the earliest
of all these majestic Rhode Island case pieces. Kane believes it was
made for Mary Fayerweather, who married Newport merchant Nathan
Carpenter in 1743 and set up housekeeping in Newport. After Nathan
Carpenter died at sea in 1771, Mary moved to her brother’s house in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when she died in 1791 she left the
desk to her brother Thomas Fayerweather. His daughter Sarah, Mrs.
John Appleton, left it to her stepson, who took it to France where it
A separate gallery is filled
with the earliest known Rhode
Island furniture—none of it
made in Newport.
This mahogany multifunctional table, with four
protruding corners for candles, a two-board top,
straight turned legs, crisply turned pad feet on
disks, and chestnut corner blocks, is similar to the
table in Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of about 1773 of
Francis and Saunders Malbone, ages 14 and nine,
sons of merchant Francis Malbone and his wife,
Margaret Saunders. These tables are found in a
wide geographic area in walnut, cherry, mahogany,
and birch, but the majority of them are maple. This
mahogany table was owned by the Howland family
in Newport and is now in a private collection.
This desk-and-bookcase, attributed to John
Goddard, is one of nine Rhode Island examples of
the form. It is inscribed “Made By John Goddard
/ 1761 & Repaired By / Thomas Goddard 1813”
in pencil on the middle prospect drawer. Thomas
Goddard was John’s youngest son. It makes this
piece the touchstone for John Goddard’s block-and-
shell decoration. Photo courtesy Museum of Art,
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Photo
by Eric Gould.
These five bureau tables are all signed by cabinetmakers trained in
Newport. The carving and construction are all slightly different. Bureau
tables were a luxury form, used for dressing and grooming, and the first
known American one was used for writing.