Enfilade

Press release (15 September 2014) from PEM:

In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, 15 November 2014 — 29 March 2015

Chest of Drawers, 1758–66, attributed to Nathaniel Gould. Marblehead Historical Society and Museum. Photographed in the Jeremiah Lee Mansion (ca. 1766–68), 170 Washington Street, Marblehead. © 2014 Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Dennis Helmar Photography.

At the dawn of the American Revolution in a city bustling with trade, politics and commerce, a craftsman of unusual ability was working tirelessly to create fine furniture for his wealthy patrons. Nathaniel Gould (1734–1781) established one of the region’s most sought-after workshops, producing thousands of technically sophisticated and aesthetically refined works for clients at home and for export. With an astute business sense, Gould thrived in one of the most tumultuous political and economic eras in American history. Despite all of this, until recently, Gould’s life and legacy was largely unknown. Masterworks sat in anonymity in the halls of major museum collections, unsigned by their maker and identified only vaguely by their geographic origin. In 2006, everything changed.

In the vaults of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among the records of Gould’s estate lawyer, researchers discovered documents that cast fresh light on—and forever enhance our understanding of—American furniture history. Three of Gould’s bound ledgers kept between 1758 and 1783 document in detail the production of almost 3,000 pieces of furniture in his Salem workshop. Painstaking analysis has revealed the identity, preferences, and transactions of more than 500 of Gould’s patrons as well as the names of his journeymen and probable apprentices. This veritable data dump of information has led museums, antique collectors, and the general public to examine their collections with fresh eyes and piqued interest. Works whose significance was obfuscated by the passage of time and lack of provenance are now being reconsidered and reappraised.

Attributed to the shop of Nathaniel Gould, Side Chair, 1770. Mahogany, maple, birch, and pine, 39 x 21 x 21 inches (NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Gift of Mrs. Paul Moore, 39.88.2)

In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould—on view at PEM from November 15, 2014, through March 1, 2015—is the first exhibition to definitively unpack this discovery and describe the signature characteristics of Gould’s work. In Plain Sight also invites exploration into the life, times and social mores of early America through the lens of one of the country’s earliest and most successful woodworkers. Stately desks, bombé chests, and scalloped-top tea tables made of the finest imported mahogany are presented alongside paintings, archival materials, decorative arts, and an interactive workbench and desk provide insight into the makers and consumers of 18th-century American design and culture. The exhibition is accompanied by an exquisite publication of photographs and detailed essays from PEM curators and principal researchers Kemble Widmer, Joyce King, and Betsy Widmer.

“Possessing extraordinary woodworking skills and a refined sense of design, Gould created works that rank among the finest produced in 18th-century New England,” says Dean Lahikainen, PEM’s Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art. “This jewel-like exhibition celebrates the best of Gould’s furniture in a format that invites contextual exploration and rewards close looking.”

Gould’s work is distinguished by its careful attention to graining, distinctive carved ball-and-claw feet, extended knee returns, and superbly carved pinwheels and scallop seashells. Clients could choose from a range of design forms, including desks and chests of drawers, tables, chairs, beds, and miscellaneous pieces, such as cradles, coffins, and fire screens. Gould built his career on his ability to translate London’s latest designs—sometimes gleaned from British pattern books, including Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Director—into a more conservative style that pleased the tastes of the region’s wealthy elite.

The Gould ledgers reveal a high percentage of domestic furniture produced to fill wedding orders, mostly from members of the merchant class. Within a highly competitive social environment, newlywed couples aspired (as they do today) to own status symbols that communicated the family’s wealth and social position.

At the time, Salem was the hub of coastal trade and, as the ever-wise businessman, Gould saw opportunity. His ledgers reveal 616 pieces of furniture that were sold in the Caribbean and of this inventory, 62 percent were desks, half of which were made of cedar—an aromatic wood prized for its ability to deter insects in the semitropical regions. Gould’s participation in the export business also allowed him to become Salem’s principal importer of cedar and mahogany logs and allowed him to reserve the best pieces for his own magnificent workshop.

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From Giles:

Kemble Widmer and Joyce King with essays by Dean Lahikainen, Glenn Adamson, Daniel Finamore, and Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould (London: Giles, 2014), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804335, £45 / $70.

In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould is the stunning result of happy accident and indefatigable, dedicated research. In the field of early American furniture made in Massachusetts, Nathaniel Gould has loomed as something of a mystery—believed to have been prolific, handsomely skilled, and exceptionally enterprising, yet considered elusive because of a scarcity of known works, lack of documentation, and difficulties of attribution. Accident—the unexpected discovery of Gould’s day books and account book in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society—and analysis—painstaking and inductive—have produced an invaluable, multifaceted case study.

This book establishes Gould unquestionably as Salem’s leading cabinetmaker before and during the period of the American Revolution. He made substantial and often expensive furniture, including case pieces of bombé form embellished with carving. The number of works that can be attributed to Gould remains small, but the foundation for increasingly assured connoisseurship lies within these pages and Gould’s archival records. The scale of his workshop, his impressively large, diverse clientele, and his successes in Salem’s furniture export trade attest to his achievements as an entrepreneur.

This book illuminates not only a particular individual, but the Salem/Boston/New England spheres in which Gould operated during a tumultuous time in American history. The scrupulously recorded notations in his ledgers are precious clues to emerging concepts of style and taste, cultural mores, business practices, socio-economic circumstances, and familial histories with local, regional, and national relevance. In Plain Sight presents a choice array of forms confidently assigned to Gould’s shop and makes accessible the ledgers themselves, meticulously analyzed and interpreted to facilitate present and ongoing scholarship regarding Nathaniel Gould, Salem, early New England furniture, and colonial America.

Kemble Widmer has applied his training and career as an industrial engineer to his examination of early furniture in Boston and Essex County, Massachusetts. Over twenty-five years, by rigorously documenting and comparing like forms, he has determined places of origin and even individual craftsmen. His research on Nathaniel Gould has disclosed an unparalleled amount of information about cabinetmaking, customers, and colonial life. Joyce King, an eleventh generation inhabitant of Salem, Massachusetts, is an expert in genealogical research. She has collaborated closely with her co-author on numerous issues of provenance that have enabled attributions of furniture to Nathaniel Gould. Glenn Adamson, formerly Head of Research, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is The Nanette L. Laitman Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. He is the founding co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and the author of Inventing Modern Craft. Daniel Finamore is The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Dean Lahikainen is The Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. His publications include Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style and In the American Spirit: Folk Art from the Collections of the Peabody Essex Museum. Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, formerly director of Sotheby’s American Arts course and a Senior Vice President at Christie’s, New York, and director of Classes in Connoisseurship, is an authority on American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative arts and social history. Her publications include At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870.

André-Charles Boulle, Louis XIV’s commode; made of resinous wood, ebony veneer, tortoiseshell and bronze inlay, gilt bronze, griotte marble; Paris, 1708, H. 88 x 131 x 65 cm (Versailles, National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon; Inv. VMB 14279.1) 

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From the Château de Versailles:

Eighteenth Century, Birth of Design, Furniture Masterpieces, 1650–1789
18e, aux sources du design, chefs-d’œuvre du mobilier 1650 à 1790
Château de Versailles, 28 October 2014 — 22 February 2015

From 28 October 2014 to 22 February 2015, the Palace of Versailles is hosting the exhibition 18th Century, Birth of Design, Furniture Masterpieces from 1650 to 1790 in the Africa and Crimea Rooms. The exhibition offers a glimpse of the ingenuity of a bygone era viewed from a present-day perspective and showcases the innovative and avant-garde nature of the shapes, techniques, decorations, and materials used in 18th-century furniture. The exhibition includes around 100 major works from collections at the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palace of Fontainbleau, and the Getty Museum, alongside works from private collections which will be on show to the public for the first time. Cabinets, desks, writing tables, commodes, and console tables, but also sofas, armchairs, folding chairs, and seating chairs will testify to the revolution that the 18th century brought about in the history of furniture, a reflection of the evolving tastes of a society enamoured by modernity and wanting to live in comfort and luxury.

Jacques Gondoin and François II Foliot, Chair from the Pavillon du Rocher at the Petit Trianon; carved, gilded beech; 1781, 89 x 56 x 56 cm (Versailles, National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon, Inv. V 5358)

Concept of Design

In 1712, Shaftesbury introduced the term and concept of design to art theory. It contains the dual meaning of ‘plan’ and ‘intention’ and unifies the processes of conceiving and shaping a work. For the first time, furniture was planned with forethought, created with specific intention and shaped for both functionality and comfort. 18th-century furniture was produced according to design sources, both in its overall conception and its quest for harmony between form and function.

The Transformation of Furniture

The quest for the ideal shape and form hit its peak in the 18th century, when the shape of furniture began to change. Inventiveness and creativity abounded and new outlines began to take shape, from console tables to commodes to secretary and armoire desks. Rigid outlines began to soften, then morphed into rounded curves, subsequently giving way to curved legs—sometimes four, six or even eight of them. Furniture became multi-purpose and featured mechanisms that allowed it to transform into something else.

Boldness of Materials and Colours

The same quest characterised the use of materials: furniture was covered with exotic woods, lacquers, varnishes, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, bronze, brass, lead, porcelain, straw, steel and stone marquetry. Cloth, bulrush and copper began to be used in chairs. Long before the garish colours afforded by plastic in the 20th and 21st centuries, the 18th century saw the birth of furniture in red, daffodil yellow, turquoise blue, apple green, partially gilded or silvered, etc. At the same time, other colour palettes were limited to the black and gold of lacquer and bronze, and patterns were reduced to natural ones made out of quality materials such as mahogany.

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The catalogue is available in both French and English:

18th Century, Birth of Design, Furniture Masterpieces, 1650–1790 (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2014), 280 pages, ISBN 978-2878441949 (English) / 978-2878441901 (French), 42€.

The sole purpose of this book, published to tie in with the magnificent exhibition at the Palace of Versailles, is to lay bare the incredible inventiveness of the century of Enlightenment, a century in which, for the first time, furniture became an art. Architects, artists and dealers as well as ordinary craftsmen set about organising furniture and elaborating it as never before.

The eighteenth century was to turn three everyday acts—sitting, sitting at table, storing things—into an art. Furniture changed its skin and shape. For the first time, it explored new materials, sought out new forms. It broke free of architecture, but went on playing with some of its styles. It became movable and occasional, and the notion of comfort came into being. Furniture found its identity in everyday actions to which it was closely linked. The connection between the individual and furniture became obvious. From its disposition to its ingenuity, and through the matchless quality of its incomparable workmanship, furniture in the eighteenth century came to be an integral part of daily life and fashion, quick to respond to changing moods and styles. Having thus secured both a new status and recognition, it became for ever a distinct element in the intellectual process of creation.

Daniel Alcoufe, conservateur général honoraire
Gérard Mabille, conservateur général honoraire
Yves Carlier, conservateur en chef au Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon
Patrik Hourcade, photographe et designer
Patrick Lemasson, conservateur en chef au Musée du Petit Palais