Mark Firley of The Furniture Record sent me some photos of a couple of high-back settles he’s encountered in his travels. One of them has a curved seat and back, like the example I showed yesterday.
But even more interesting are the photos Mark took of the joinery of the settle: Dovetails on an angle, through-tenons for the seat and a nice detail of the fantastic joint at the back where the backboards meet.
It’s almost enough visual information for me to build the settle. But sadly, I’ll have to travel to England to complete my research on this and other pieces.
Though I haven’t been writing much about it, work has continued on my next book, “The Furniture of Necessity.” It’s still too far away to predict its publication date, but things are falling into place to make a type of book that hasn’t been seen in a long time.
Here are some recent waypoints.
1. An Engraver. I have found a copperplate engraver who will make the plates for “The Furniture of Necessity.” She works in a very traditional manner. This book will be a partnership between her and me, so expect some eye-opening illustrations.
2. Thanks to Suzanne “Saucy Indexer” Ellison, the research for the book has been forging ahead. She has been collecting the limited literature on these forms, which I have been reading for many months now on long flights and in hotel rooms. Without Suzanne’s help, I’d be a year behind on this book.
3. Projects. I’ve been sorting through some of the projects I want to discuss and build for “The Furniture of Necessity.” Today I was looking at some of the English pieces I selected from a 1982 exhibit at the Stable Court Galleries at Temple Newsam. Suzanne dug up the hard-to-find exhibit catalog for me.
Here are a few of the forms that are finalists for the book.
Welsh Stick-back Chair (shown above)
I call this chair the “Cwm Tudu” chair because that was the area where the chair was found in Cardiganshire. (And because I have no idea if I’m pronouncing “Cwm Tudu” correctly, it’s fun to botch.) This chair has an elm seat. The arm bow is a naturally curved branch. And guests won’t be able to tip backward in it.
Countrey Stoole
Illustrated in Randle Holme’s “Academy of Armory,” this particular example was allegedly owned by Anne Cotton, the West Auckland murderess. These stools were used for everything from milking a cow to resting your feet.
Farmhouse Settle
The high-backed settles of England are one of my favorite forms. I particularly like the ones with a curved seat and back, such as this early 19th-century example. Ealier examples tended to have backboards of random widths.
Lodging Box
These very common boxes were used by every youth leaving home to go into domestic service. Most had a till for storing small objects. The boxes were commonly dovetailed and used for a variety of purposes in a household.
Drinking Table
A common three-legged table, usually painted white or left in the white. The three legs made it stable on uneven floors. This example is dated 1821, though this form is quite older.
For me, naming things is akin to violence. So you can imagine how fond I am of the habit of people “naming” their pieces of furniture.
But no matter. Today I finished up a six-board chest made of Eastern white pine for the “Furniture of Necessity” book. For this piece, I took Peter Follansbee’s advice and scratched a geometric design in the front panel.
The pattern is based on the number “six.” The inner circle is a 6” radius and the internal arcs are one-sixth of that circle’s circumference, like that of a hollow or round plane for making mouldings. Yet there are no applied mouldings on this chest. And there are only five nails up each end of the chest.
Wow.
And so I name this piece: “Moulded & Unmoulded No. 1.” (It’s always best to attach a number to the piece. Beret, please.)
After two full days of sawing, planing, hammering and gluing parts together, the 14 students in this Six-board Chest class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking laid down their tools. They swept up their shavings. They quietly loaded their chests into their cars.
Some classes end with exultation. Other with exhaustion. This one ended (I hope) with a little of both.
The pace of the class was particularly brutal. I was determined to cram in 400 years of history on the form of the “boarded chest” into the class time. And I wanted us to start with long boards that we had to knock down to size (by hand) and glue up into panels using jointer planes and spring joints.
Oh, and one more thing: There was no predetermined design for the chest we were going to build.
That was a good thing and a bad thing. Bad: Everyone had to think through his design and how it related to his material. This made every step forward a bit of a slog with 14 different answers to 14 questions.
Good: No two chests were the same. Not even close.
In fact, the chest that I built was not even the chest I set out to build when the class commenced on Saturday morning. Instead, I followed the needs of the material and ended up with a chest I am quite happy with. I’ll finish it up when I return home and post photos here on the blog. It’s stripped down, simple and appealing – to me at least.
As the students left – all a bit too weary – I could see that I had pushed things a little too far this time. It probably should have been a three-day class. And we should have used pre-cut stock. And worked to a predetermined design.
And… maybe not. I love to be dead tired when I have earned it.
Leave it to Jeff Burks to turn up a bunch of images of early trestle tables that I haven’t seen before.
As you’ll see from the gallery below, these trestle tables are of the old variety – two independent horses that are topped by a large board, suitable for carving up your meal (or your unliked saint).
Most of the horses have three legs, though there are some that have interesting feet that are flat on the floor. Also interesting is how many trestles have decorative panels between the legs.
One warning before you start browsing these images: A few are a bit on the graphic side. If you ever wondered about why these tables were covered by tablecloths when people ate at them, this set of images should help you answer that question.
As always, thanks to Jeff Burks for the original source material here. His research and publishing here speeds our efforts at Lost Art Press.
