I’m delighted that JoJo Wood and her partner, Sean, will visit Covington, Ky., on their upcoming trip across the Atlantic. JoJo is teaching two courses at Plymouth Craft in Massachusetts, then they’re traveling to Kentucky for a two-day spoon-carving class on August 8-9. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, July 5, at 10 a.m. Eastern.
Starting from a piece of fresh green wood and using just three hand tools (small axe or hatchet, straight “slojd” knife, hook/“spoon” knife), you’ll learn simple carving techniques to create beautiful spoons you can use in your home. Take home some beautiful objects and plenty of new skills to begin or continue carving at home. The class is suitable for those with any or no carving experience – including complete beginners ($350 plus a small stock fee).
Read more in the class description on our Covington Mechanicals classes site, and set a reminder to return Tuesday at 10 a.m. to register.
The following is excerpted from “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley,” by Donald C. Williams, with photographs by Narayan Nayar. This book is the first in-depth examination of one of the most beautiful woodworking tool chests ever constructed and presents the first-ever biography of Studley (1838-1925), a piano and organ builder in Quincy, Mass. After a brief stay at the Smithsonian, the cabinet was sold to a private collector and hasn’t been seen by the public for well over a decade. Studley’s workbench has never been on public view.In this excerpt, Nayar’s approach to capturing the monumental Studley Cabinet is reverent and moving.
In the winter of 2010, Don Williams and I calculated that principal photography and primary study of the Studley ensemble could be accomplished in a single three-day trip. Photographically, we’d have one day to shoot the tool cabinet and bench, another day to shoot the tools and a day to spare for contingencies. Don had already visited the ensemble, taken survey pictures and had worked out with the owner some general rules about how we could work with the cabinet. By studying Don’s photos and making some assumptions about the room in which we would be working, I formulated a plan for a three-day shoot and packed my gear accordingly.
It took only five minutes standing in front of the tool cabinet and bench for those plans to disintegrate. Within hours, we were discussing follow-up trips and wondering how to talk the owner into letting us take the cabinet off the wall.
Principal photography ended five trips later and spanned roughly four years.
The overwhelming majority of images in “Virtuoso” are forensic. After all, the primary goal of the project was to document the cabinet, its contents and accompanying workbench both photographically and historically. To accomplish this, we worked methodically through every artifact, capturing every detail at great resolution from multiple angles. Images from this important documentary aspect of the project intentionally forgo any creative interpretation or photographic flair. They are shot with flat, diffuse lighting on simple backgrounds to reveal Studley’s ensemble with an almost clinical objectivity.
I refer to these photographs as “necessary” images – i.e. photographs taken to address the dearth of public information about the cabinet, its contents and maker. The process to capture these images was production-like, but in no way did that diminish our enthusiasm. Many, if not all, of the objects in the cabinet are not only perfectly executed, but also bear some witness to Studley himself – be it in the way the blades evince his sharpening technique, to the patina and wear patterns formed by his hands as he used his tools. Discovering these details as we worked through the collection delighted us and reminded us how important it was to shine light on these details for others.
Like thousands of people, I became acquainted with H.O. Studley many years ago through one of the famous Taunton posters. These posters feature the cabinet in its “natural” state – upright and open-kimono, enticing and not unlike a girlie magazine centerfold. Photographed in this pose and presented in two dimensions, the cabinet registers as an exquisite piece of graphic design, mesmerizing with its masterfully arranged contents, visual elements that crescendo and decrescendo, staccato accents of decorative inlays and the multi-layered tapestry of materials, color and texture. We gaze upon the poster as we would a painted masterwork, wondering what kind of mind would conceive such a thing and what kind of hands could bring it into this world.
Though the exterior of the cabinet benefits from the same care and precision of design and manufacture as its interior, it’s clear from a newspaper photo of Studley in front of the cabinet that the wide-open object is, in fact, its face. The Taunton posters have allowed the cabinet’s face to also represent the face of Henry O. Studley and, for many, of the very concept of master craftsmanship. So it somehow seems awkward to deem the ubiquitous, straight-on view of the cabinet a “necessary” image, as if the term relegates the most recognizable and revered glance of Studley’s masterpiece to mere documentation. But it’s only one view of an artifact that supplies infinite distinct and equally alluring views, and whereas extant appearances of the tool cabinet have more-or-less reduced our understanding of it to a single, postcard-like glance, “Virtuoso” has provided us the requisite space for exhaustive coverage and analysis. If the straight-on view of the cabinet is the necessary image, we felt an obligation to enrich everyone’s understanding of all that this single image contains: the cabinet’s layout, its suitability for use, its mechanical properties, its inner and sometimes hidden grandeur. The Studley tool cabinet is a woodworking fractal; as you zoom in on one detail, you not only see that detail in greater resolution, you discover a universe of new details.
We are proud to submit this collection of necessary images to the historical record. Until the day that holograms become widely available, this collection of documentary images should satisfy the factual needs of historians, artisans and connoisseurs of well-made objects. But the ensemble’s visual facts in and of themselves, however well-documented, were not enough for me. I placed a great deal of personal importance on ensuring at least some of the photographs in “Virtuoso” imparted more than a factual account of the Studley ensemble. Whereas the “necessary” images strive to capture the cabinet and its contents as physical forms, I wanted to find ways to visually convey its more metaphysical attributes. The cabinet alone has become for so many people so much more than a collection of tools in an elegant box – it has become legend. For me, it is no less than a testament to what our species is capable of. Studley’s tool cabinet represents the hope that with enough perseverance, the things we create or pursue can achieve some small fraction of its magnificence.
Having spent considerable time with the cabinet during the past few years, I can say without hesitation that the legendary status the cabinet has gained through that single image on the Taunton posters is well-deserved. I can also say that in this case, the legend is orders of magnitude less compelling than the real thing.
The First Five Minutes
Throughout the course of this project, I witnessed a dozen or so people encounter the H.O. Studley ensemble for the first time. I’ve noticed only two reactions to experiencing the cabinet in person. The first involves the liberal use of choice expletives. The second (and more common) reaction: several minutes of utter silence (though to be fair, this silence is often followed by the liberal use of choice expletives).
In person, the cabinet is far more than a three-dimensional poster. It is a monument.
I have been an armchair student of architecture and architectural history for a long time, and for several years in college I was fascinated with the Hagia Sophia. Captivated by its shifting but always-prominent role in several civilizations, I spent many hours reading its history, looking at images of its interior and exterior, and studying its incredibly ambitious engineering. I spent enough time with texts on the Hagia Sophia that I came to refer to it as “Sophie.”
Years later I traveled to Istanbul in a pilgrimage of sorts to Sophie. However academically familiar I may have been with her – however many photographs and architectural drawings I had pored over – walking through its nave and standing under its dome made my palms sweat and my head swirl. As is the case with many of the world’s great religious structures, the scale of the Hagia Sophia filled me with equal parts awe and insignificance. I spent a whole afternoon in the museum, wandering its main floor and upper balcony, looking up at the architectural details and murals, realizing that the building I thought I knew existed only in books. The Hagia Sophia was not Sophie, and only by visiting it in person could I feel the weight of its history, grasp the scale of its majesty and find inspiration even in its imperfections.
When encountering the Studley cabinet in person, I believe all first-timers experience an even more amplified version of what I felt in Istanbul. The Studley cabinet features architectural themes found in and on many of the world’s greatest monuments, and in the first five minutes you stand before the cabinet, your eyes can’t help but lead you through ornamental doors and make you gaze through myriad windows. You are compelled to follow fences that divide the interior into courtyards delineated by the lines and shadows of numerous arches, buttresses and columns. In those first five minutes you take a tour of a wood, metal, pearl and ivory palace so captivating and opulent that you forget that the cabinet is, in fact, smaller than you. Witnessing in person the masterpiece that one talented Mason created with his own two hands is as much an encounter with the sublime as standing in the shadows of structures many times its size, with masonry assembled by hundreds, if not thousands, of hands. It is no wonder that many people forget to speak when confronted with such concentrated grandeur. How does one capture this with a camera?
The truth is, one cannot. Not entirely, anyway. So the images in “Virtuoso” that carry the most personal significance for me are the ones that encapsulate some small fraction of the awe that overcomes anyone standing in front of the cabinet for those first five minutes. During the course of four years, I searched for ways to photographically convey the cabinet not as a postcard or a painting, but as an architectural space. Just as my Sophie could only ever exist on paper, for many of us, Studley has been to date a single image of a cabinet frozen in one quintessential pose. As you move through “Virtuoso,” you will, of course, see more of the H.O. Studley ensemble than has been historically possible for all but a select few. But if I’ve done my job, some of these images will bring you on the journey that I’ve been fortunate enough to take on your behalf during the last four years, and as you turn these pages, you’ll find yourself rendered mute, then apologizing to any sensitive souls within earshot.
Pro tip: Do not leave oil-covered scrapers (or any scrapers) sitting in the sun in 90° heat. Ouch.
If you’ve been waiting on a Crucible Dovetail Template, click the link to head on over to the store – as of 8 p.m., we have four score in stock.
And exciting (and long-awaited) news on the scraper front: They’re almost ready. Chris and I burned our hands today loading them into the back of his pickup truck…because we were so stupid as to leave the oil-bathed beauties sitting in the hot sun in the back of Catbus for a few hours, after they delivered from C.T.S. Waterjet. Oops. Tomorrow morning, I’m driving the scrapers down to Nicholasville, where Craig Jackson and the crew at Machine Time will machine and polish the edges, and engrave them with the Crucible logo. (Note: You can find out more about Craig in Sunday’s post.) So we hope to hve those back in stock soon!
Plus I got an update today from the foundry, where a run of holdfasts was poured the first week of June. The grinding is almost done, and those should be shipping next week.
Finally, we got notification this morning that our (long-awaited) hardcover edition of Joseph Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” was in line at the printing plant’s shrink-wrap machine – here’s hoping it got on the truck later in the day, as it was supposed to. It should be in the warehouse next week.
My first tattoo will be up my right arm and will say: No more posters, dummkopf.
Wall posters, no matter how nice, are not a good product for us. With the exception of the “With Hammer in Hand” letterpress poster, which we cannot reprint, posters lose money or (at best) break even. We have two posters in the store right now. They are taking up valuable space in the warehouse and are not selling.
So before I recycle them, here is your chance to buy them at the lowest price we can go without losing even more money.
Our “Family Tree of Chairs” letterpress poster is now $12. It is available in either black or green ink. We broke even with the first printing of the poster. And then when we did a second run, we ended up with way too many because of a mistake at the printer.
This is a gorgeous, gorgeous poster and graces the wall of my office. The drawing is from artist Lee John Phillips, based on my research. Please don’t make me recycle these. They are so pretty.
The second poster is our “Edwin Skull Chair Poster, Circa 1865,” which is now $5. This poster is a reproduction of a fantastic broadside by the Edwin Skull company that shows 141 chairs in remarkable detail. It’s a beautiful example of 19th-century advertising and chairmaking technology. A portion of the proceeds goes to the Wycombe Museum, which has the original in its collection.
I already paid the museum the proceeds we promised on the entire run based on the original retail price. So we have taken care of our financial obligation.
The first of these two stools, (#59.537) is the stool that Alexander first studied in detail, leading the way into the lost craft of joinery. A table now at the Historical Society of Old Newbury (Massachusetts) is directly related to this stool in its construction and decoration. The table is believed to have been made by Stephen Jaques of Newbury, late in the 17th century. Thus the stool is attributed to him as well. It is clearly made of riven stock; the interior surfaces show evidence of riving and hewing, and in places retain their wedge-shaped cross-section. The pins securing the mortise-and-tenon joints are proud on the exterior and not trimmed on the inside at the apron height. These pins show their faceted shape on the inside. Layout lines struck with a marking gauge, fore-plane marks, hewing strokes and more are among the many traces of tool use Alexander found in abundance on this stool. This object literally paved the way for this book. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
For more than two decades, this unlikely pair – an attorney in Baltimore and a joiner at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts – pieced together how this early furniture was constructed using a handful of written sources, the tool marks on surviving examples and endless experimentation in their workshops.
The result of their labor was “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th-century Joinery.” This book starts in the woodlot, wedging open a piece of green oak, and it ends in the shop with mixing your own paint using pigment and linseed oil. It’s an almost-breathtaking journey because it covers aspects of the craft that most modern woodworkers would never consider. And yet Alexander and Follansbee cover every detail of construction with such clarity that even beginning woodworkers will have the confidence to build a joint stool, an iconic piece of furniture from the 17th century.
In 17th-century New England, joiners made chairs, tables, chests, stools, cupboards, wall paneling and various other products all based on a few basic principles. Their oak was split, or “riven,” from a freshly felled log, and worked up at the bench with a few simple hand tools. Although the configuration of the pieces varied, the essence was always the same: a frame joined at its corners with drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints fastened with wooden pins. Sometimes these frames had panels fitted into their inner edges, as in a chest; other times they were open, as in the stool that is the subject of this book.
Our work in studying joined furniture has its roots in the post-and-rung chairs made by John (now Jennie) Alexander, whose 1978 book Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood was pivotal in the revival of the traditional techniques regarding working wood riven or split from a log. This background became a key element in our study of 17th-century-style New England joinery.
The second Winterthur stool (#59.538) reinforces the things we learned from the first. In one sense, it is a better example than the Jaques stool, this one having even more of its original height. The aprons have two rows of moulding: a “crease” moulding, and one along the lower edge as well. The turnings are less detailed than those of the Jaques stool, but of a similar form. The two stools are both discussed and illustrated in Benno Forman’s American Seating Furniture 1630-1730 (Norton) pp. 180, 181. Photo Courtesy of Winterthur Garden, Museum & Library
Alexander’s experience from chairmaking was the necessary foundation that helped her recognize that the preparation of joinery stock was based upon the same green woodworking techniques as the chairs. In 1980, Charles Hummel of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library showed Alexander the interior of a joined oak chest in the collection. It was immediately clear that the rear stiles had been riven, not sawn, and that the stiles were bookmatched sections split from each other. This commenced a journey into the lost craft of joinery. With the patient kindness of Hummel, Benno M. Forman, Robert St. George, Robert Trent and many others, Alexander was able to closely study examples of 17th-century New England joined furniture.
Also in 1980, I saw an advertisement for a week-long class in chairmaking being held at Drew Langsner’s craft school Country Workshops taught by Alexander. I didn’t drive at the time, had practically never been out of New England and I wasn’t much of a woodworker. Plus, I was terminally shy. Regardless, I wrote to the address, signed up for the class and made plans to get to western North Carolina.
This little joined stool is a partial survivor from the 17th century. The turnings, the moulding profiles on the aprons and stretchers, and the chisel-chopped dentil decoration all indicate a strong relationship between this stool and numerous other furniture pieces from the entire 17th century in Plymouth Colony. The frame, although refinished long ago, is intact and original. The seat/top board is an early replacement, having been pictured in Wallace Nutting’s books in the 1920s in essentially the same condition. The stool originally had turned feet below the stretchers, so adding perhaps 3″ or 4″ more to its height. There is very little “rake” or splay to the side frames of this stool. Some of the rails on this stool are riven so slim that the tenons are “scant” in places. This means that the tenons are not necessarily full thickness throughout. This stool is the first place we noted the inner chamfer on the stiles. It occurs throughout almost all other Plymouth Colony joined chairs and tables as well. Photo Courtesy of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston
After stumbling along on my own for a few years, I returned to Country Workshops in the mid-1980s, and was for the next five years or more a regular attendee at classes – timber framing, white oak basketry, spoon carving, and coopering, as well as post-and-rung chairs with Alexander and American-style Windsor chairs. Sometime about 1986, Alexander showed a class at Country Workshops a slide presentation about 17th-century oak furniture made in New England.
Thus I was caught, and Alexander and I began an informal study together, yet we were 500 miles apart. Alexander lived and worked in Baltimore, Md., and I lived at the time in Hingham, Mass. Our “work” together consisted of lengthy correspondence and weekly phone calls. We would each spend some time studying original artifacts at Winterthur’s museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We’d take numerous slides and notes, compile these and send them off to each other in the mail. We would each work in our shops, experimenting with our ideas based on what we had seen on the surviving furniture. It was a cumbersome undertaking by today’s standards, but one benefit was that the need to write it down forced a sense of clarity upon our thinking. Each year we spent a week or two together, both in the workshop and at times studying artifacts.
This joined stool is worn, but intact; it has been repaired and re-pinned at some point. The one-board seat is cracked along its length and has been reinforced. Originally, it was pinned only into the stiles. Like the MFA stool, the joiner planed a chamfer on the inner corner of the stiles. The crease moulding used here is one of our favorites – a wide convex moulding flanked by two pointed fillets. We used it on several of our reproductions. It also is found on a large group of joined chests from Braintree, Mass., that we wrote about in American Furniture in 1996. In that article, we even linked the stool to the chests, based on the moulding, the stock preparation and joinery. These days, we’d be more cautious about making such an attribution. See Frances Gruber Safford’s American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art) for a detailed discussion of this stool. Photo Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Our artifact study was supplemented by the study of the tool history, as well as the documentary study of the period. To learn about the tool kit of the 17th century, we started with Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: Or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying. This book was published in serial form between 1678 and 1683 in London, and the chapters on joinery and turning were a critical first step in our study of tool history. (For more on the sources we used for tool research, see “The Historical Evidence for Tool Selection and Use” on page 25.)
Additionally, we studied probate inventories in great detail for craftsmen’s tools. Learning of the period tool kit and understanding the traditional use of bench tools such as planes, saws, chisels and carving tools helped us to see that to assemble a tool kit that functioned like a 17th-century kit was not that difficult. The forms and functions of hand tools have not changed much over time.
Throughout our studies, our friendship with Robert Trent, the leading American scholar on 17th-century furniture, was a great benefit. Trent led us through the process of researching the artifacts, their histories and the formation of an attribution for a group of furniture. This amounted to a private internship, though quite informal. The first results of this collaboration with Trent were published as “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: The Savell Shop Tradition” in the 1996 edition of the journal American Furniture. (1)
This joined stool [above] and form [below]share a decorative element that is simple and effective. Instead of turned decoration between the joinery on the stiles, the maker shaved stopped chamfers. In the case of the form – an elongated joined stool, stretched out to bench-length – the “stops” form a pattern often now called a “lamb’s tongue.” Similar treatments are commonly found on the interior parts of 17th-century New England framed houses. Note also the breakthrough on the upper corner of one front stile. Here the mortise for the end apron was chopped just a little too deep in one spot, leaving a hole in the face of the stile. It has still held up for the past 350 years or so. Photos Courtesy of Sotheby’s
In the end, what we learned was a discipline in two related crafts: that of the joiner/turner in the shop, and that of the furniture historian, using artifacts, archives and documents to better understand these 17th-century trades.
Early on, we decided to focus on the joint stool as an introductory project that encompasses most of the basics of joinery. The stool requires only short lengths of timber, and except for the seat board, narrow dimensioned stock. This makes it easy enough to acquire the necessary timber, without a great expenditure of time and effort. The principle elements of joinery – riving and working the stock directly from the log, and cutting and fitting the drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints – are well represented in this project. After a few stools, the progression to more involved joinery featuring paneled work is not a huge leap.
This stool was bought at auction in 2011, with no known history. It certainly appears to be a New England joined stool, although it is hard to link it to known works at this time. All its rails are riven and wedge-shaped; some are hewn, others are just as they came from the log. The pine seat is no doubt a replacement, but like several of the museum pieces here, the stool retains much of its turned feet. The shape of these feet differs from the top of the stiles’ turnings; usually the feet repeat what happens above. The stretchers are planed with the same crease moulding as the aprons, but the aprons have the additional run of an edge moulding also. The stool has been stripped of its finish, but traces of red paint remain throughout. Private collection
(1) Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: the Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, ed., Luke Beckerdite, (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996) pp. 81-104.
