OAK CHAIRS. DATE ABOUT 1680.
Showing the inclination of the craftsmen to assimilate designs then being fashioned in walnut.
(By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin.)
Transition between Jacobean and William and Mary Forms.—The rapid growth of the finer specimens of furniture made in walnut brought a new note into the farmhouse variety. The elegance and grace of the newer styles were at once evident. In the same manner as the grandiose splendour of Elizabethan woodcarving was succeeded by a less massive style in oak, degenerating into a rude simplicity in farmhouse examples, so in turn Jacobean lost favour. Walnut lent itself to more intricate turning, and lightness and greater delicacy claimed the popular favour of fashionable folk. The cane seat and the cane back at once indicate this new taste. The use of cushions became general and the sunk seat for the squab cushion is a feature in the later years of the seventeenth century.
Oak still remained the favourite wood of the country craftsman, in spite of its more refractory qualities. But when the walnut styles became so firmly established that clients demanded furniture in this fashion, elm and beech and yew were found pliable enough to conform to the more slender touches and the finer turning considered desirable.
Walnut was in its turn supplanted by mahogany, and it will be shown later how farmhouse furniture followed the dictates of fashion in days when the outburst of splendid design by Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton, together with a crowd of lesser known men, spread far and wide new principles in the art of furniture-making and brought country furniture another stage in its evolution.
Farmhouse furniture slowly assimilated the technique and design of the walnut age. The love for the native oak was so pronounced that country makers did not desert this wood and essayed to produce effects by its employment that were exceedingly difficult and oftentimes unsuccessful. The three chairs illustrated p. [205] show this transition style, about the year 1680, struggling with technical difficulties and affording a fine series of points in the evolution of design.
Farmhouse Styles contemporary with the Cane-back Chair.—Farmhouse furniture rarely, if ever, had cane-work in the back or in the seat. But the craftsman, while appreciating the delicacy of the cane back in adding lightness to the chair, circumvented his inability to work in cane by substituting thin vertical splats to give the necessary effect of transparency. The three chairs illustrated show each in varying degree the quaint compromise made between the technique of oak and the technique of walnut, and the attempt to reproduce the walnut designs.
The arm-chair exhibits strong relationship with the older Jacobean chair in its turned legs and uprights, but these have assumed a more slender proportion. The front stretcher is in the newer manner. The sunk seat is intended to receive a cushion. There should be no difficulty for the amateur correctly to assign a date to such a piece. The process of reasoning would be somewhat as follows:—The lower half of the chair is Jacobean, but the front stretcher suggests the Charles II. period, borne out by the open back, which removes it from the Cromwellian period, and the details of the top rail with its curved top indicate that the country maker had seen the tall straight-back chairs of the William and Mary period with the cane-work panel.