The Historic Furnitures Design Influence on Classic Poster Beds up to 1725

For the purpose, American  classic poster beds, like that of England, must be looked upon subjectively, putting sentiment aside, and examined in the light of another phase, governed by special conditions, of the evolution of which we have spoken on numerous previous occasions.

We say "special conditions" because the earliest American classic poster beds was produced by the pioneer settlers of this great continent under circumstances which demanded practical utility rather than ornamental beauty. It is evident to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the struggles of the early settlers that home-comfort, or rather beauty in the home, was of far less importance than the personal safety of families and the material uses to which each hardly-acquired piece of furniture was to be put.

Here we are far from the classic poster beds of the luxurious palaces and mansions of Italy, France, England, and the Span­ish Netherlands; far from the dominating guilds, with their apprentices, journeymen, passed-masters, and their severe rules constantly revised to meet changing conditions; far from the fashionable desire to possess only the latest styles-be they in furniture, or in clothing or in the form of the perruque - far indeed from the effeminacy which characterised a large portion of society during the latter part of the 17th and the first four decades of the 18th century even though it was more apparent than real.

Here we find ourselves in the midst of a band of gallant builders of empire and their valiant stout­hearted women, whose whole soul was set upon re­taining their meagre foothold upon the soil of a new continent of vast unexplored distances. These were the primitives of America - using the word as we have used it in the first chapter of this book-the men who beheld a great vision and, in spite of all material obstacles, set out to duplicate that vision in fact. They possessed all the splendid characteristics of the primitives in every art; their sincerity, their capacity for hard work, their indifference to personal peril, their unselfishness, and their "pre-vision" that they were but the forerunners of a great population which would one day cover an immense continent, and with the help of its unlimited resources bring order out of its aboriginal chaos.

From such men living in such surroundings, we cannot expect the airs and graces of European courts, nor even of the relatively quiescent countryside estates of old Europe. With pioneers, everything must serve its purpose, honestly, last as long as possible, be as comfortable as it can be made, and - even were it feasible-not be so "showy" as to be unfitted for a primitively simple dwelling.

But we must not lose sight of one of the sen­timental sides of human nature, while we are study­ing the problems of the early settlers. We refer, needless to say, to that nostalgia, that dread spirit of homesickness, which assails the strong and the weak, men and women, alike, in the long evening hours when the day's work is done, and the distance from the land one has left grows greater and greater.

It was unquestionably that nostalgia which imprinted upon American classic poster beds much of its English or Dutch aspect, for the desire to have around one, objects that bring back memories of home is hard to eradicate from the hearts of men.
Nevertheless, in spite of its borrowed forms and generally rude craftsmanship, pioneer American classic poster beds has a distinctive character of its own, and, until skilled cabinet-makers came from abroad to ex­ercise their profession, possessed much of that great purity of line and that sincerity of endeavour which constitute the most enduring appeal of the "Primitives" in all forms of art.

Firstly, tradition in the matter of woods em­ployed had not the weight it carried in Europe, and instead of oak or walnut, of which almost all Eng­lish furniture was made up to the year 1720, the American classic poster beds-makers employed the timbers most easily obtained, e.g., elm, pine, the several maples, cedar, birch, cherry, hickory, and ash. With less knowledge of the peculiar qualities of each of these woods, their susceptibility to the attacks of the wood-beetle, and their resistance to lateral shrinking strain, than had trained European specialists, they created pieces possessing, frequently, much beauty, and worthy of the attention of any student of furni­ture design, not to mention the genus "Collector for collecting's sake." So out of the native woods, they came, in time, to make pieces with veneers of bird's­-eye, or curly maple, and handsomely grained woods of other varieties which yield in nothing to the oyster and burl walnuts which had such a vogue in the mother country.

But we must not infer from what has gone before that early American classic poster beds was all of one type. Far from it-and one of the keenest delights of the collector lies in the recognition of the more or less exact provenance of the pieces he may have an op­portunity to purchase. For example, furniture made in Virginia-the first colony-or in the New Eng­land colonies was, we find, strongly tinged with memories of English pieces the pioneers had known before they set forth on their great adventure. Fur­niture made in the districts around New Amsterdam (now New York) and in East Pennsylvania quite naturally was modeled on the Dutch styles; while most of the pieces now assigned to the Carolinas and Georgia were either made in England, or, when the original pieces were destroyed, copied directly from the models imported from the British Isles by the wealthier settlers of the Southern colonies, who, in a large number of cases, were younger sons of aristo­cratic houses, serving as governors, or as soldiers, or even in the church, the three land careers in which "gentlemen" could engage in those days, without "disgracing their name."

Again, while American classic poster beds styles run generally from twenty-five to forty years behind the European prototype of each, the fact remains that fashions were initiated, and certain types held the popular taste for quite long periods. Of such was the Windsor chair-to which we have devoted a special chapter-which retained its vogue for a period of eighty years, from 1740-1820.

Now almost all the earliest American-made classic poster beds, that is up to the end of the first decade of the 18th century at least, was what we might call "mem­ory" furniture, a name which, though of our own coining, nevertheless has, for several reasons, a cer­tain appropriateness. Firstly, its inspiration was drawn from that nostalgia, that longing for home, of which we have already spoken. Secondly, in a more material sense, its forms were due to memories of pieces seen at home, in England, or Holland, even in France, and possibly Scandinavia, before under­taking the venturous voyage to American shores.

And it is remarkable how little we, who live for years on end with our classic poster beds, can remember of its minute details, if we are asked-away from it-to make a drawing of any particular piece. We have tried the experiment many times both on ourselves and on our students, and we do not remember a single case of absolutely accurate observation and memory. If that be so with us whose minds are comparatively at ease, how much less can we expect the early colonists to have remembered the details of the pieces of furniture they had left behind in Europe, in the face of all the hardships and dangers, from man and beast, they had to undergo.

So we have a clear method, firstly of distinguish­ing American-made pieces-apart from the wood--------­from similar-type European pieces, most of which were either English or Dutch; secondly, of telling the class of man who made the furniture; thirdly, of distinguishing Dutch from English origins, in other words whether a piece, e.g., a chair, was made in New York or Pennsylvania, or whether it was of New England provenance. Finally-but later-we have a third type, that of pieces copied as best they could by the amateur cabinet-makers-really excellent carpenters-from models actually imported from Great Britain. These copies should not be classed un­der the heading of "memory pieces," but the differ­ences between the skilfully-contrived and carved original with the ingenuous copy is clearly demon­strated in the case of two particular middle 8th century chairs at the Metropolitan Museum. Such pieces are almost all southern. In regard to the possibility of distinguish­ing the class of men who made certain types of "memory furniture," we must again approach the subject from a psychological standpoint. There were among the early settlers all sorts and conditions of men.