“Furniture which is strictly useful, should be of good quality; strength and durability being generally the chief points to be regarded… it is therefore little affected by fashion, whereas the style of drawing room furniture is almost as changeable as fashion in female dress.”
— Mrs. William Parkes “Domestic Duties” (London, 1825)
Firstly; Amen, and so say all of us!
Secondly; (off topic) do you use automatic settings for your photographs, or are you a tweaker? If so, what’s your general set up? Your capture of raking light and shadow are always so stirring.
Peter,
I shoot in manual mode, both exposure and focus. My lighting is a swing-arm desk light – plus sometimes a compact fluorescent. I shoot in RAW and color correct when I import (not necessary here because it’s in black and white).
I might then adjust the levels a bit to balance the exposure, but that’s it. No masks, layers, filters or fancy stuff.
I consider my secret weapon to be a solid tripod (a used Bogen/Manfrotto). I can take long exposures that way.
Thanks for asking about the photography!
Chris
Always impressed with the photography here. Your refined eye shines through from words to photos to layout (note un-schwarz’d Feb PWM cover layout, sigh…) to beer and even to woodworking (doesn’t always extend to your humor…)
I often wonder how many of your regulars have a shared interest in photography beyond woodworking. Even more, if the ethos is evidenced in unorthodox kit choices (L-N vs. Portercable , Limited primes vs. Canikon zooms.)
Using manual focus and exposure is exactly what one would expect from an anarchist, although I am a little surprised that you don’t use auto-focus, given your claims of poor eyesight and the fact that your camera/lens combination performs so well in the focusing area.
As suggested by Jeremy, there probably is a strong correlation between woodworking and photography, as both involve creativity and interpretation of the world we see.
Perhaps there is a relationship between lens choice and method of work — I think hand tools and prime lenses would be a match.
The value of the tripod is no secret, but I wonder why a true anarchist wouldn’t make his own, out of wood.
Hmm. I guess I should get a drawing room.
I’m not so sure she was referring to furniture- – maybe she was giving advice to our daughters who would do well to kindly regard the man who is useful, of good quality, strong and durable. Or on the other hand, should he be affected by fashion, to turn and run.
Fashion has always been trendy with one group or another but if you give the quote more than a minute’s thought and consider it’s 19th century origin, and then look around you today, you really have to wonder what brought about this almost universal lemming mentality today and the obsessive pursuit of “fashion”. And don’t even get me started about daughters and their choices. It’s too early for that headache.
I tell my nieces that they should evaluate men like vehicles. Sporty, flashy ones are fun for a while, but they often crash and burn. They should look for a pick-up truck of a man. He may be not much to look at, but damned handy to have around. (Ok – sure that’s a little self-serving)
Or as Red Green used to say “If women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.”
I have a room that I draw in, does that count?
I agree with the useage of the word “almost” in the quote.
Mrs. Parkes is absolutely right.
I’d go further. Furniture which has no discernable function and is built solely to be ‘fashionable’, or which fails to perform it’s supposed function satisfactorily, should be burned. Or, at the very least, recycled into something genuinely useful.
IT’s the plane people. It is gorgeous.
Hmm….it does not explain the current fad of workbench fashions.
Jeff,
I get your drift. But the lightweight, poorly designed so-called “Euro” bench is/was the fad.
A simply constructed, solid worktable (legs tenoned through the top) with uncomplicated workholding emerged in Pompeii and was the standard through the early 19th century.
That is not fashion.
Chris,
By the late 1600’s the “Euro” bench was well established in Northern Europe so I find it difficult to consider it a fad and hardly something to be labeled as “poorly designed”. On the contrary, I believe that there is still room to make the case that it is functionally superior to the Roubo or Nicholson. The lighter-weight commercial and Fridian versions are very late on the scene.
once a week I sit on and marvel at the simplicity and strength of the George Nelson platform bench and I’m working on making my own strictly with hand tools…I was thrilled to see it show up in the Terrence Malick film Tree of Life.
“The clean, rectilinear lines reflect designer George Nelson’s architectural background and his insistence on what he called “honest” design – making an honest visual statement about an object’s purpose.”
“Furniture which is strictly useful, should be…”
But that’s certainly not what we strive for (“strictly useful”), is it? Why then bother with grain matching? Or using quartersawn for rails/stiles? (Or custom engraving the sidewalls of a hand plane; nice job contrasting the photo and the quote.) I have an Ethan Allen piece in my house that is plenty strong and durable, but poorly grain matched and covered with plastic finish. It’s shaker style so not affected by any (recent) fashion; would Mrs. Parkes approve? Should we?
The rest of the quoted sentence states that strength and durability are the chief elements of good quality. I reject this. Those are necessary elements of good quality, but do not by themselves allow one to achieve it.
Also, consider this: is there (today) a difference between furniture fashion and a furniture style? Was there a difference in the past?
I don’t know! I don’t have a really good answer to any of these questions and I feel like I really need some. I think these are brilliant questions. thank you for opening the subject up like this…for me at least.
I agree with Joshslopsema – these are good questions.
My interpretation of Mrs Parkes’ quote is that she’s making a distinction between ‘strictly useful’ (as in utilitarian) furniture such as kitchen tables, scullery cupboards and the like, and ‘show’ furniture – the sort of fine furniture that you’d expect to see in drawing rooms and dining rooms. If I’ve got that right (no guarantee of that, of course!), then she’s saying that the likes of kitchen tables and scullery cupboards should be strong, durable and generally unaffected by fashion.
I think we tend to rather ignore that with the modern fitted kitchen. Not sure how things are in the US, but here in the UK it seems to be generally accepted that a fitted kitchen will be ripped out and replaced about once a decade, and they are built accordingly. Nothing much is made to last. Even the poshest fitted kitchens are seldom more than fancier-than-usual doors and drawer-fronts on the same particleboard boxes used in the budget-range kitchens. One driver for that is that the kitchen, instead of being a hidden-away workroom, is now a prime show space in a house, even more than the drawing rooms of old (a trend amplified by the fashion for open-plan living).
An old chap I used to work with told me that when he married in the 1930s, the first thing you did on getting engaged was to scrape together £100 for a local joiner to make a suite of bedroom furniture, some basic parlour furniture, and a kitchen dresser,table and chairs. That was expected to last the marriage out. You might upgrade the front parlour furniture later in life if you did well, otherwise it was just repairs or replacements for breakages. Given that premise, the furniture was made to last half a century, even if wasn’t up to much stylistically. After WW2, that changed, and we all fell in love with the rapidly-changing disposable furniture that resulted from the introduction of the likes of Formica and chipboard. (There was also the fact that proper wood was very scarce during and after the war here in the UK, which meant that most people didn’t have much choice anyway.) Consequently, most people now expect furniture to be almost disposable – we haven’t relearned the old habit of buying once for a lifetime’s service. I think we need to.
Of course the furniture industry plays along with this delightedly. Repeat business is great for them. So even less incentive for people to learn what good, sound cabinetmaking in real wood could give them. Pressure on budgets doesn’t help either – too many things to buy, wear out and replace – mobile phones, computers, i-everything (bet they haven’t got an App for dovetailing), plasma televisions, designer trainers, you name it. Not much cash left over for furniture, so industry provides something to fit the depleted budget – with consequent shortcuts on quality.
You made much the same point in ‘The Anarchist’s Toolchest’ with your dining table experiences, Chris. (What a superb book, by the way. Only discovered it a couple of months ago. I’ve read many ‘tool’ books, and very good many of them are too, but this is the only one I’ve ever come across that sets out clearly what tools you actually NEED to make furniture, and why, and how to select and set them up properly. Twenty-four carat gold distilled wisdom.)
It’s time the balance was redressed. The world needs more decent kitchen tables and solid, well-made kitchen cupboards, and fewer disposable chipboard boxes. Us amateurs need to show the way if we can – make your friends want good, solid, honest furniture, too. Start to create the consumer demand. Change the world, and give the craftsman a least the sniff of a chance. Overopimistic? Maybe, but at least we can have fun trying…
Sorry that’s turned into a bit of an essay!
Nice. It’s a great essay! I think Mark took a kind of novelty quote and put some flesh and blood on the statement as a reality and kind of forced it to earn it’s keep. If it indeed means something to craftsmen today then what exactly. I think there is a cultural and historical context, but if it can cross that context to say something today then that is pretty exciting. To get some insight from the UK is very exciting to me and it sounds like the industries in question seem to follow similar trends. I have a lot of interest in architectural and interior designers because they are often in a position to dictate what gets built, how and by whom. But for a craftsman to take such a role in his/her own living space is to me like…raising your own child instead of leaving it to TV or public school… I think there is more to this that I’m not seeing yet. But this is a really interesting thread.
“Where economy is not important, an elegant taste may gratify itself in the display of exquisite workmanship, particularly carving, as far as respects the more solid furniture of a dining-room; and no ornaments are so much in place in a dining-room as pictures, busts, and similar specimens of art… but no piece of furniture is so capable of evincing an elegant and cultivated taste as the sideboard, which should appear massive without being clumsy; and in point of carving should be ornamented with appropriate devices, such as wreaths of vine or of olive, vases, amphorae, and the heads of bacchantes and satyrs…”
— Mrs. William Parkes “Domestic Duties” (pg. 192, London, 1825)
What, no inlay? Given her description and the timeframe in which this was written, it sounds to me that Mrs Parkes is now chasing the fashion of Empire furniture.
I got a copy of ALL CONSUMING IMAGES (the politics of style in contemporary culture) to address some of my questions on style…But for Mrs. William Parkes…she can stay in 1825 and I won’t be consulting her unless I need help placing the many busts I have lying around the house. (I actually have one. It’s Elvis. and there is no way I trust Mrs. William Parkes with my bust of Elvis)
The picture is great the quote hits a note as for benches well each to there own. But I want the plane. HAHA