Yale University Art Gallery Photo.
High chest of drawers, John Townsend, Newport, RI, 1759
A young newlywed couple, good subjects of the crown in colonial Rhode Island, are very fashionable, and they’re sufficiently well-to-do to support their good taste.
They want for their first home together a decidedly French-looking table, with its serpentinely curved legs and expensive marble top, of a kind that might have been found in a far-away chamber at Louis XIV’s Versailles.
Does it matter that when the couple decide to purchase the Gallic pier tables of their dreams that the British are fighting the French in The French and Indian War?
Apparently not.
Phillippe Halbert.
That’s one of the stories that emerge in “Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650 – 1830,” which runs through Jan. 8 next year in the fourth floor special exhibition galleries of the Yale University Art Gallery.
The tables, chairs, and bureaus were talking Wednesday afternoon through their interpreter, Phillippe Halbert, a grad student in art history, who led a tour focusing on the French connections in Rhode Island furniture.
Rhode Island became the home of skillful colonial cabinet makers — many of them children or apprentices of talented Huguenot, that is, Protestant craftsmen who became refugees in North America due to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; within a short time they had paying customers from the Caribbean to Canada.
The international business, which spoke an eclectic style of continental influences, flourished in the mid-18th century, especially in Newport and then Providence.
Allan Appel Photo
Slant-front desk attributed to Abraham Tourtellot, Gloucester, Rhode Island, 1743.
One of the earliest pieces in the fascinating show is a slant front desk fashioned in Gloucester, R.I. in 1743 by Abraham Tourtellot, the son of a French Protestant who immigrated to the colony after 1685, when the Edict of Nantes re-established France as an officially Catholic country.
“Not recognizably French?” Halbert asked rhetorically.
Unusual, for the colonies, on a chest by Christopher Townsend,silver hardware echoes the all-silver furniture of Louis XIV.
That’s likely because these craftsmen, while they brought a full knowledge of French styles with them, did not deploy all they knew, at least not right away. The French curves and other features contrasted with straighter lines in traditional Chippendale furniture, and the French craftspeople chose a modulated, eclectic approach that would appeal to their new customers.
The story this particular piece tells is that while Tourtellot was adept and knowledgeable about French styles, he did, in the beginning of his career, “not want to do anything too over-the-top,” said Halbert,
Slab table evoking French high style, 1755,attributed to John Goddard, owned by Robert and Anne Wickham Crooke, Newport, R.I.
Nothing that might shock or get ahead of a primarily Anglo-colonial market in the colonies — except, of course, for furniture fashionistas like Robert and Ann Wickham Crooke, of Newport, the couple who went more French in their tastes likely sooner than their neighbors. Their table was built by John Goddard in Newport, one of the most famous names in Rhode Island cabinet-making.
The chronologically organized exhibition is particularly revelatory when the curators have been able to excavate the personal histories of these pieces. The chief organizer, Curator of Decorative Arts Patricia Kane, has spent a decade assembling the samples and tracking down the provenance and chain of ownership where possible.
Some pieces, like the Tourtellot desk, are signed, but many others don’t tell their stories until documents emerge, for example, in court records. Like personal ancestry searches, they go back often only so far.
Only about half a dozen of the 130 objects in the show — carved chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks — hail from Yale’s own collections. Many come from far-flung private collections and homes.
A solid but plain slant desk, like this one, would have been shipped, perhaps in protective crates, to places like Nova Scotia, where Kane was able to trace its ownership back but only as far back as 1850.
“It’s a ‘fusion’ story,” said Halbert. “Think of this big heavy piece floating around the world and finding a home in New Orleans or French Canada.”
The large and detailed catalogue for the show tells us that there are only 50 or so pieces extant from Rhode Island cabinet makers because the production there was small, if highly skilled and prized, compared for example with neighboring Massachusetts.
Kane examines the desk, or bureau table, from Nova Scotia.
Of those only a few pieces in the show were commissioned or ended up residing in Connecticut, and those hail from New London and other towns in the eastern portion of the state. There, well-to-do families looked not to places like Hartford or New Haven but rather to Newport and then later to Providence to buy their furniture.
By the mid-18th century, merchants were growing wealthy, well-to-do families wanted to be connected to what Halbert called a “pan-European” story, and “you’re not living in a wilderness. You’re living in Rhode Island. This is Britain. You need furniture,” Halbert said.
Although all these bureau tables — where in a pulled-up chair a gentleman or lady would sit, likely with a mirror in front of them, adjusting a wig or doing make-up — well, they might only appear to be identical in a line-up in an elegant colonial furniture showroom if you pass by them quickly.
Look again, suggested Kane.
While all the desks have the block-and-shell carved front drawer, which became a kind of signature of Rhode Island furniture, the last one is more ornate. It is also dated from around 1784, and signed by Daniel Goddard of Newport.
This desk, however, hails from Nova Scotia, Kane said. And there hangs another story, of the American Revolution.
Kane found records that show Daniel Goddard, son of John, and his brothers Job and Henry, received land grants in Canada. That was the fortune of many loyalists who fled to Canada at the end of the American Revolution, she said.
Was Goddard a loyalist? Many of the loyalists were well-to-do people, and likely the kind who would have been the Goddards’ customers, Kane speculated. Or did he only follow his customers to Canada?
In the 1780s Shelburne in Nova Scotia had 17,000 people, which made it the fourth largest city on the Atlantic Coast of North America, Kane said. That would also mean, of course, that it was a good town for talented cabinet makers.
Another mystery: In addition to fancier styles, the Nova Scotia desk contains chestnut, a type of wood not found in Nova Scotia. Did Goddard bring some local Newport wood with him when he fled? If he fled? That would have been a possibility, Kane said, because it doesn’t take all that much wood to build these small desks.
What’s clear to Kane from the additional details, like more elaborate lattice work around the shells and gadrooning — that is, fluted decoration near the feet — is that “these craftsmen move, they bring what they learned in Newport, but they meld that to the new location.”
As their predecessors did when they came from France to Newport decades before.
More questions, of course, abound than answers. But when the queries are posed by these silent witnesses of shining mahogany, white pine, and silver hardware, that have seen so much, and any one of which you would die to have in your home, well, ask on.
The next tour on the exhibition’s public programming calendar is “Details of the Works of Newport’s Cabinetmakers,” by Jeffrey Greene, on Wednesday, Oct 26 at 12:30 p.m.
Fabulous article. Possibly the best I have ever read in the Independent. Classy, informative, and relevant. Now add that you can be green by buying antiques. American and French 18th c furniture is a bargain these days from reputable dealers. Support antiques buy green.