Similar construction techniques were used in joined furniture: indeed, most seventeenth-century joiners were multiskilled craftsmen capable not only of constructing a house frame but also of furnishing it. For instance, the Museum’s 1680 Samuel Hart Room ( 36.127) consists of massive posts and beams connected by mortise-and-tenon joints secured with wood pins. The right-angled, mortise-and-tenon construction of Seventeenth-Century style furniture is also evident in the architecture of the period. Their distinctive florid carving was indebted to Renaissance designs, which became a popular source of surface ornament for medieval forms such as the joined lift-top chest ( 10.125.685). Once in America, Searle and Dennis continued to produce objects in the same manner they had in England. In New England, two of the best-documented are William Searle and Thomas Dennis, who trained in Devonshire, England, and settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, during the 1660s. By contrast, joined chairs relied on more complicated rectangular mortise-and-tenon joints, which required more time to lay out, saw, and fit ( 1995.98).Īlthough hundreds of furniture makers worked in the English- and Dutch-speaking colonies of America in the seventeenth century, only a handful can be identified today. Turned chairs were cheaper than joined ones because of the speed with which their component parts could be turned on a lathe and the simple round mortise-and-tenon joints that held them together ( 51.12.2). The Museum owns impressive examples of both joined and turned Seventeenth-Century style seating furniture. There were two branches of the furniture-making trade during the seventeenth century: joiners, who “joined” together straight wood that had been shaped with axes and saws and smoothed with planes and turners, who shaped wood with chisels and gouges while it spun, or turned, on a lathe.
Since the outlines tend to be rigidly rectilinear, craftsmen imparted visual interest through abundant surface ornamentation in the form of low-relief carving, applied moldings and turnings, and paint ( 66.190.1 10.125.168 10.125.680 50.20.3). It is sturdy and massive, with low, horizontal proportions. Furniture in this style is frequently made of straight oak members joined at right angles. The Seventeenth-Century style reflects the transmission into the New World of late medieval and Renaissance traditions by immigrant craftsmen. Plentiful American timber made it unnecessary to ship bulky furniture across the Atlantic at a great expense: thus, from the beginning, furniture making was an essential trade in the colonies.Īmerican furniture of the early colonial period generally falls into two stylistic categories: the Seventeenth-Century style (1620–90) and the Early Baroque, or William and Mary, style (1690–1730). Most brought little in the way of furniture beyond a chest, small boxes, and other simple storage containers. The earliest European settlers in America arrived with only the most basic provisions to re-create their material existence.
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