The desk and bookcase was an essential piece of furniture for a minister because it housed his most important books.
The following is excerpted from “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847),” by Joshua Klein. In this book, Klein (founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine), examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher’s papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait that is at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader – and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early days of the United States.
The Desk & Bookcase The value of a minister’s library was substantial and, therefore, the fact that Fisher invested time in the construction of a desk and bookcase is not surprising. One biographer calculated that Fisher owned approximately 300 books, describing it as “not an inconsiderable store for a poor minister in a small village.” That Fisher valued reading is even seen in the plans for his house in which one of only two items of furniture depicted was a bookcase in the kitchen.
Though Fisher’s desk and bookcase is not explicitly mentioned in the surviving journal entries, attribution can be confidently made based on provenance, numerous construction features and the homemade wooden lock on the door.
The desk is constructed of pine and was painted (although the current paint is modern). The desk has three drawers and downward-extending lopers that provide a slanted writing surface. At the top of the writing surface, there is a small secret compartment with a sliding-dovetail lid for valuables. The bookcase has both full-length shelves as well as small compartments for letters, etc. The panel doors lap with a beveled edge when closed, and a homemade wooden lock secures the minister’s library from tampering. Despite the fact that the lock operated with a key that is now missing, there is an identical lock on the door to his clock face that still functions, operating by turning a knob. Fisher made many wooden latches in his house, all of which are fascinating, but these locks are particularly delightful. They are easy to overlook by assuming that they are the same metal locks Fisher might have purchased from Mr. Witham’s store at the head of the bay, but they are clearly Fisher-made and completely made of wood. Their delicateness and smoothness of operation add a touch of sophistication to an otherwise unassuming piece of furniture.
It is understandable that Fisher’s work has been compared to that of the Shakers but there are differences, especially in ornamentation.
Fisher’s work has been sometimes compared to that of the Shakers because of its simplicity and conscious restraint. While the overall association stands, it is significant to point out that the primary difference between Fisher and the Shakers is their view of ornamentation. While classic Shaker work has little to no moulding, Fisher relished elaborate profiles. The cornice of this desk (as well as that of his wardrobe) sat like a crown over Fisher as he studied. His artistic vision of furniture design, though similar to the Shakers’ in its modesty, was less inhibited. Even as a young child, his mother, Katherine, taught him to value artistic expression. Katherine, whose drawings look so much like her son’s, saw a world in which chastity and artistic beauty were not mutually exclusive. Fisher was not afraid of flourish. His work fits much more squarely in the Federal vernacular classification than that of the Shakers.
The cornice on the desk and bookcase sets it apart from Shaker work.
The floral drawings Fisher’s mother, Katherine, drew in her notebooks are reminiscent of her son’s. Katherine Avery Fisher, untitled hand-bound booklet, 1778; paper, string, ink, pencil, 6-1/8″ x 3-5/8″; collection of Historic Deerfield, HD 56.296. – Courtesy of Historic Deerfield, Photo by Penny Leveritt.
The desk carcase is interesting in that it is constructed like a six-board chest, with the sides extending to the floor with bootjack feet. The dados are a scant 3⁄4″ wide, matching his surviving dado plane. The backboards are unplaned, rough-sawn boards nailed into rabbets in the sides. The drawers (with the exception of the bottom one, which is a replacement) are of conventional dovetail construction – half-blind dovetails at the front, and through-dovetails at the back. The drawers’ bottoms are beveled and fitted into grooves in the sides and front, and are nailed to the drawer backs
Rather than rely on measurements from a ruler, Fisher relied on simple whole-number proportions used in classical architecture.
The overall composition of this piece illustrates the minister’s education. Even this simple desk was designed with classical proportions from his architectural training. Fisher’s fluency in this geometric layout is obvious from his college geometry notebooks in the archives. These notebooks are full of compass exercises to lay out complex patterns. Designing a desk was easy compared to the drawings he usually did. This “artisan’s design language” (as George Walker has called it) [6] must have been intuitive in Fisher’s cosmos of order and mathematical rationality.
The lock is made of wood, with the exception of the metal pins. This is exactly the kind of detail work Fisher seemed to enjoy.
The top panel was beveled on all four sides to fit in the groove, but the bottom panel was thin enough to fit without beveling. This board must have been thin before planing because rough-sawn fibers can still be seen in places.
The panels in the doors are interesting in their irregularity. Their flat sides face out in the Federal style and are beveled only where needed on the inside. The insides of the panels have heavy scalloping from the fore plane, even leaving behind evidence of a nick in the iron of the plane. This tendency to continue to use a nicked iron without regrinding the bevel is consistent throughout his work and concurs with the notion of pre-industrial indifference toward secondary surface condition. For the bottom two panels, he seems to have run short on material because the panels are only barely as thick as the 5⁄16″ groove and, even at that, both retain minor, rough-sawn texture. It appears he was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get those doors finished.
Willard wrote his name all over the house. His father’s bookcase door was no exception.
The insides of the doors have several inscriptions. “Willard” is written in red ink on one door, and “Josiah F” on the other. There are also compass-scribed circles on the inside of both doors whose randomness appears to have no significance beyond doodling. Even more perplexing, however, is the recording of “1 gallon of vinegar” on the inside of the door. This pattern of documenting purchases (and then crossing them off when paid) as well as notable life events is seen in several other pieces throughout the house. Jonathan seemed to have started the habit but Willard definitely took it far beyond his father. Willard’s name, agricultural notes and weather reports appear all over the house and his son, Fred, seems to have continued the tradition.
The Standing Desk
The standing desk was once painted blue and never had a drawer pull. It is said to have been used by Fisher for preparing sermons.
The standing desk is said to have been used by Fisher and is attributed to him. There are remnants of the light blue paint Fisher used extensively in his furniture, but there is no mention in the journals of his building the desk at all. Fisher did describe building a “high writing table” but this would be a surprising description for such a recognizable form as a desk on frame. Furthermore, Fisher was described as “below medium height.” Because the average height of a Civil War soldier was 5’7″, it seems reasonable to surmise Fisher was certainly no taller than 5’5″. If this were his desk, it would have been uncomfortably tall for him without a stool to stand on. Perhaps, though, the “standing stool” Fisher built soon after moving into his house was intended for that purpose.
6. Walker, Geo. R, and Tolpin, Jim, “By Hand & Eye,” Lost Art Press, 2013.
Kale Vogt grew up just south of Covington, in Burlington, Kentucky, in a close-knit family – mom, dad and an older brother, T.J. A self-proclaimed “art kid,” Kale was athletic, playing soccer through high school, and loved to spend time outdoors. Kale’s mom is a special needs bus aide for elementary students, and Kale’s dad served in the military for 25 years, worked in HVAC for a while, and helped inspire Kale’s creativity.
“When I was young, he was really into woodworking,” Kale says. “I grew up surrounded by it but I was so conditioned to it I didn’t take much interest in it, honestly. Now that I’m older, it’s ironic to me that I’ve circled back to that. It’s something I obviously deeply appreciate now.”
This circle includes a loved childhood, a stint in art school, boondocking out West, working in a bakery then landing at Lost Art Press. Here’s Kale’s story.
99 Days Out West
After graduating high school, Kale worked food and retail gigs while trying to figure out how to pursue a career that allowed for creativity. Eventually, Kale took some gen-ed classes at a local community college, then studied studio arts at Northern Kentucky University while living in an apartment, solo for the first time, serving tables to pay for college.
“I got to the point where it began to seem silly to graduate with a major in studio arts,” Kale says. “I thought, ‘I don’t know what I want to do, why I am putting myself through this if I don’t know my focus.’”
Around this time Kale saw photos online of a hike in Zion National Park.
“I was completely blown away,” Kale says. “Having never been west of Chicago, I was like, ‘Wow. There’s a whole world out there.’”
Kale says they became obsessed (a word not used lightly) with the idea of traveling out West and spent the next 10 months planning, researching and saving up money – $8,000 for the entire trip. They took the passenger seat out of their 2010 Honda Fit and put in a cot. And then, in the summer of 2017, Kale started in the Southwest and did a big balloon loop, up through California and the Pacific Northwest, back down to Colorado.
One of Kale’s favorite trips: backpacking through the Sierras.
“It turned out to be, in total, 99 days where I was living alone, on the road, at 22,” Kale says. “I really put my parents through it,” they add, laughing. “There were daily texts to my mom. For the plenty of times I was out of service I would give her a heads up. Overall, hands down, one of the most influential trips I’ve ever taken. I truly don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t take that trip.”
Every day Kale hiked. They hiked Antelope Canyon in Arizona and got a permit to climb Half Dome in Yosemite – a 17-mile day chasing a loved feeling of being so small. They took a sunrise plane ride over the Cascades.
“I was really just living, you know?” Kale says. “Every day was a new hike, and every day was a brand-new experience. It was so memorable for me, all of my senses felt heightened. Everything was new to me.”
Kale boondocked and got a jetboil, living on soup, chili and oatmeal. Once home and having developed a deep passion for public lands, Kale immediately started applying for jobs with the National Park Service.
Four National Parks
Kale applied for more than 30 jobs before getting a call from Kings Canyon National Park in California. They loved the outdoors and had three months experience traveling – that’s it. At the end of the interview the interviewer asked Kale if they had anything to add.
“I basically just bared my soul to the person, begging her,” Kale says. “I was 23 at this point, and I said something along the lines of, ‘I know I may not have on paper a lot of experience but I have a lot of passion. I really think I’d be a great addition…’.”
A week later Kale received an email with a job offer.
Kale’s first year in the National Park Service, Kings Canyon, 2018.
For the next three-and-a-half years, Kale worked at four national parks. As a visitor-use assistant, they started out driving a camp truck from campground to campground in Kings Canyon, reporting visitor usage, ensuring folks were following the rules and performing general safety checks. From there Kale spent the winter at Arches National Park in Southern Utah, watching snow fall on red rocks.
“I love desert; it’s my happy place,” Kale says.
Next up was Glacier National Park.
“Turns out, Montana is very cold,” Kale says, laughing. “And so, from Montana I went back down to Zion, which was a full-circle moment for me. Zion is what inspired me to go out West and it ended up being my last job in the Park service.”
It was 2020, the start of Covid, and everyone wanted to get outside – Zion got hundreds of thousands more visitors that year than the year prior.
“It kind of just did me in,” Kale says. “It was a lot.”
By this point, Kale hadn’t lived longer than five months in any one place for three-and-a-half years and knew that a lifelong career working for the National Parks wasn’t what they wanted. Covid helped Kale realize they needed to get in touch with their roots again.
“Those relationships are hard to keep up when you’re on the road and moving,” Kale says. “So I came back to my family here in Northern Kentucky.”
Home
The first year back turned out to be really tough. Transitioning from an active lifestyle where they had complete control of what came next while living in some of the most beautiful places in the world to a period in their life where they didn’t know what the future held was difficult.
“I was feeling kind of lost,” Kale says. “I tried out this new thing that I was so passionate and sure of at first then it turned out to not be for me. It was scary. I didn’t know where to go from there.”
Kale lived with their parents for three months to get back on their feet and then found an apartment in Covington.
“I wasn’t sure what route I wanted to take,” Kale says. “Coming back I knew I was ready to focus on a creative career. Though I didn’t know what that would look like yet. It had always been my dream growing up and going to college – I wanted to do something creative, but I could never land on a focus.”
Kale worked at REI for a year.
“It’s what was comfortable, but I knew it wasn’t the goal,” Kale says. “I felt I’d done this – I’ve taken this route before to no avail.”
While visiting a local farmer’s market, Kale talked to some folks at North South Baking Co. and asked if they were hiring. They were.
“Honestly, I’m not much of a home baker at all,” Kale says. “I just really appreciate pastries.”
Kale brought drawings that could be translated to stickers or other merch to the interview. This, they thought, could be a path to a more creative career. But with few employees there was little time for extra creative pursuits. Kale did whatever was needed – retail, deliveries and working farmers’ markets. North South Baking Co. had a lot of regulars. Christopher Schwarz was one of them.
Building a Chair & the Start of Something New
“Full transparency, I didn’t know what Lost Art Press was,” Kale says. “I was looking for a restaurant on Google maps for lunch and ‘press’ was in the name. When I Google mapped ‘press,’ Lost Art Press came up.”
Kale pulled up LAP’s website and thought it looked interesting.
“I immediately see Chris and think, Wait a minute. This guy is a regular here. I see him all the time!”
Soon after this discovery, Chris came back into the bakery.
“I told him about how I came across his website and how amazing I think his work is,” Kale says. “I asked him about himself and figured, surely, he’s gone to college for industrial design and he’s like, ‘No, I actually just have hippie parents who were homesteaders and that’s how I learned woodworking.’ By the end of our convo he says, ‘Why don’t you come by sometime? We give out scholarships to local people if you’re interested. We could chat about that if you like.’ Which of course I say, ‘I’d love that.’”
The next day Megan Fitzpatrick came into the bakery and handed Kale her card and a copy of “The Stick Chair Book.”
“I was blown away,” Kale says. “I just talked to Chris and am now discovering this world, it was an exciting time. I was so thankful.”
A few weeks later Kale met with Chris and Megan for about a half hour after work one day, and Chris offered a scholarship to build a chair. It was mid-November and the bakery was busy with pre-holiday orders. With more time the first week of December Kale reached back out – they wanted to build a chair.
“Chris took me up to the lumberyard for our first day,” Kale says. “We picked out the wood, and he taught me how to read the grain, which I found super interesting. I was documenting all of it. I have so many pictures on my phone of this process because I figured, surely, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Kale gluing up their first chair. Photo by Chris Schwarz
Kale began working on the chair at LAP several days a week. After working an eight-hour shift at the bakery, Kale at first found the additional two to three hours of chairmaking exhausting. But then, it became something they not only look forward to, but found energizing.
“It really lit me up,” Kale says. “This was a whole new world I was trying my best to absorb in real-time.”
It took Kale about a month and a half to build their first five-stick chair.
“It’s really unfortunate how unhappy I am with my first chair,” Kale says. “Looking back, it’s difficult knowing what I know now. I literally knew nothing going in. I had no idea what stick chairs were. I was trying to take in the history of stick chairs on top of designing one for the first time. I didn’t have a vision going in. So now, of course, I can only think of all the things I’d do differently. I’m sure that some time from now it’ll be a story to laugh about then be proud of my progress, but I’m just not there yet.”
Kale was about halfway through building the chair when Chris asked if they’d sit down with him and Megan to chat. Kale was nervous.
“He brought me back to his office and he had a book in his hands that he said was a really profound book for him.”
“He shared with me that it’s always been his dream to work with an apprentice and if I was interested, he had this idea about us both journaling from our perspectives during this process. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was so serendipitous. I go from working in a bakery and now there’s a possibility I get to learn from this master?”
By the time Kale finished the chair Chris had brought up the idea of a part-time position, working with him. By this point Kale had been looking for another job – they needed a full-time job. So Chris came up with a plan: They would work full-time at LAP, splitting their hours between working on editorial duties and helping with fulfilling orders.
“I think all of it was unexpected for the both of us,” Kale says. “I think we’re navigating it together.”
Kale’s been journaling, as Chris asked.
“Now that I’m working here, everything once again is a new experience,” Kale says. “I have so many thoughts about it all, so journaling has been helpful for processing.”
They are also studying the work of others.
“I’m learning about different styles and techniques,” Kale says. “It can feel a little overwhelming at times. I don’t yet feel ready to create my own designs. So as of now, to make myself feel less overwhelmed, I’m learning from the masters. I’m learning from Chris’s designs. I’ve been looking at Chris Williams’s work and of course John Brown, all the people I know Chris looks up to and has been inspired by. I’m taking note of the masters, taking what resonates and leaving the rest.”
These days Kale’s also been working on a research project for a workbench video, editing videos for the blog, and woodworking, which is considered part of the job (and really fun, they say, because it doesn’t feel like work). Megan is teaching Kale how to cut dovetails, and they’re finishing up a tool chest. Kale is also working on a second chair.
When not at LAP Kale loves spending time in nature.
“It’s my daydreaming time,” Kale says. Kale’s partner, Jordan, has two dogs and they like to take them out to explore several parks a week. Drawing will always be a hobby and lately, Kale’s been drawing a lot of chairs.
Portrait practice by Kale.
“I am wildly happy,” Kale says. “It’s been hard to articulate because I’m fighting the part of my brain that says this is too good to be true. I’m still in this headspace where I feel the need to prove to Chris that he made the right decision. I have a fair amount of imposter syndrome coming into this field, for good reason. Especially working with Chris and Megan, I mean, what teachers. I couldn’t ask for better role models. I’m allowing myself to be a student again and I’m just so wildly grateful to have been granted this opportunity.”
This chair is made of oak and elm. I call it a Carmarthenshire chair, as it is derived from an old chair from that county. The doubling on the arm-back terminates in a ‘swan neck’. This is seen on several old Welsh chairs.
“Life without Industry is guilt, and Industrywithout Art is brutality”
I came back to live in Wales in 1975. I had been made redundant and I was depressed. After years in a job I loved I had been told to go; my skills were no longer appropriate. I had been building wooden boat hulls for years, but now they needed men who could laminate plastics. Had I been prepared to don a plastic boiler suit, wear a respirator and work with nasty, sticky, smelly chemicals, I could have stayed. But I am an uncompromising woodman, I love it. My employers thought the adze as dead as a dodo, so they gave me a small handful of money and told me to pack my box. As I lived in a seaside resort there was not much work that I could do. I wasn’t cut out for selling ice-creams, no killer instinct! My mortgage would be unpayable without a good job. There were plenty waiting to buy my house, so I sold.
I was seven-years-old when we moved from the safety of a large family in the valleys of Wales. Auntie was school-teaching in Kent, Dad came out of the pit and became a bricklayer. So, after a lifetime away, I returned to the ‘Land of my Fathers’. What sort of a living could I make in Wales? There was plenty of building work, but I have a horror of the ‘wet-trades’. I can only work in wood. One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makersas such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.
Two particularly good examples of Welsh stick chairs. The comb on the right hand chair isinteresting,for although it has no transverse curvature, the maker has tried to individualisethis lusty chair with a shaped profile.
I now had the idea that maybe I could make a living out of building chairs. I loved making the first ones; it was new and exciting. But if I was going to be successful I had to try to get into the shoes of the old Welshmen who made these lovely chairs, and try to work as much like them as I could. It isn’t possible to get very near it, life today is so different. I was convinced then, and even more so now, that the chairs were made as occasional items, and that none of them were made by chair-makers. Even with my small overheads, we do live in a total money economy – everything must pay. The lack of electricity has been a plus factor in my work. I have a strong back and don’t care for bills.
I am impressed with the simplicity of old Welsh chairs. I have long been of the opinion that the work of ‘fine’ joiners, work with highly complicated joints, all hidden in the finished piece, leads to clean lines and continuous surfaces which make the finished work uninteresting. I am often tempted to ask these clever fellows “and what’s your next trick?” The Arts and Crafts movement was responsible for a refreshing change. Ernest Gimson went to work with an English country chair-maker, Philip Clisset, to learn how to make simple chairs. Sidney Barnsley, working entirely alone, produced beautiful furniture with exposed dovetails; all the working showing. Of course, all this was over the head of the old Welsh craftsman. A great attraction of Welsh cottage furniture is its simplicity. So with the chair-makers, their work is the equivalent of naive painting. You hear people say “a child could paint that.” Try it!
So I had first to unlearn, and then learn. I was lucky in the order that things happened to me. First, I built some chairs – then I got the books and found out how it should be done. By then I was conceited enough to think that I was closer to the men that built the chairs, 200 years ago, than the sophisticated authors. I have no intention of telling anyone how to build a stick chair, but I will tell you how I do it.
Before I go on to tell you about my methods of work, it would be well if I tell you a little more history of the Windsor chair. First a definition: What is a Windsor chair? Fundamental to a Windsor chair is a solid wooden seat; everything grows from this. From this seat the legs project down, and the sticks or laths project up. That’s it. Arms, combs, fan-backs, balloon-backs, stretchers on the legs, different sorts of turning, a thousand variations – once a chair has a solid wooden seat with legs and sticks socketed into it, then it’s a Windsor. The English Windsor started like the Welsh chair as a peasants’ chair in the countryside. At the beginning of the 19th century, tycoons of the Industrial Revolution decided that what was good enough for Adam Smith’s pins was good enough for the Windsor chair. They set up sweatshops in the Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire. The surrounding beechwoods of the Chiltern Hills provided the material for legs, sticks and bent parts, whilst elm for seats was plentiful everywhere. Bodgers with their pole lathes worked piece-work in the woods, turning legs and stretchers, which they sold to the factories on Saturday evenings. In the workshops, bottomers, benchmen and framers did the rest. Wages were poor and conditions appalling, and even in the last century strikes were not unknown. The owners of the factories were not chair-makers but money-makers. Design had a low priority, but the chairs had one major advantage – they were cheap!
Chairs were made at Wycombe – year in, year out – by the thousands. Piled high on horse-drawn wagons they were shipped to London. A month or so before making the journey most of the parts had been growing in the local woods.
Dealers bought these chairs and they were sold on to the less well off. They were bought for public houses, church halls and other places of entertainment. They found their way into the houses of the rich – but only for the people below stairs. Her Ladyship wouldn’t be seen dead sitting in one. British class distinction at work, the chairs were cheap, so they were expendable. Like the herring, when kippered and rare, it was for the rich. When every fishing port had its smokehouse and they were cheap, then the poor could have them. When baked beans first came to England they could only be had at Fortnum and Masons!
There was no development on these cheap chairs. Identical designs on some types lasted for 150 years. These cheap chairs were exported all over the Empire (sometimes in knockdown form), and became known as the English Windsor. It beggars belief that there are today people making replicas of these chairs for sale in stripped pine shops. Fine cabinet-makers confined themselves to making joined chairs in the Sheraton and Chippendale styles. Some small Windsor chair-makers designed Windsor chairs with elaborate backs, highly carved splats, but used cabriole legs. These in many cases were very fine work, but a chair with cabriole legs is not, strictly speaking, a Windsor.
The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.
Personally, this book makes me want to draw and create every time I pick it up. It is a reliable source of inspiration to me, a reminder that creative time is not wasted time. And David’s writing is just fun to get wrapped up in.
I was fortunate; I was not destined for the production line. I was lucky enough to go to the wonderful art school at the University of Oxford that was set up by John Ruskin, the great theorist at the centre of the Arts & Craft Movement. Ruskin believed that art should be taught at places of great learning, that art students would benefit from being at the centre, right in the hum of the academic process, and that in turn those universities would be enriched by their presence.
Ruskin set up three art colleges: The Ruskin School at Oxford, The Fitz William at Cambridge and The Slade College at London University. Although The Slade has since prospered and gone on to become one of the greatest post-graduate art schools, I don’t believe that all three were universally welcomed by “the Dons.” The Fitz William is no more, and my own experience at Oxford suggested that The Ruskin School was not entirely loved by the University. We were always damned by the idea that as art students we could not be given a proper degree because we were “not academic enough.” The intelligence that we displayed daily was of the wrong kind for the Dons (the professors).
William Morris and his buddy Edward Burne-Jones were at Oxford at Exeter College. They shared lodging in the same street as me, but many years earlier and probably in much greater comfort. My time at Oxford was the late 1960s, concurrent with the brand-new contraceptive pills, very, very short skirts, the very beginnings of feminism and all the fun that entailed.
The Ruskin School was then situated in a wing of The Ashmolean Museum. We had three large studios, one of which was devoted entirely to life drawing and painting. Before you were allowed to draw from the nude you needed to serve a full term’s apprenticeship in drawing plaster casts of Greek statuary, mostly from the Parthenon. This was mind-numbingly dull, but it gave you great discipline in the simple task of looking very, very hard.
We were in a gallery in Walton Street about 200 yards from the Ashmolean. An ancient but much loved and respected tutor named Geoffrey Rhodes would slowly, very slowly, make his way from the school to the cast gallery. He was a small man who took tiny, painful steps. I was the only student diligent enough to be drawing at three in the afternoon. It was silent in the gallery. The outside door opened; I could hear Mr. Rhodes’ approaching footsteps. Tap, tap, tap. It took ages.
“Ah, there you are David,” he said. Slowly, he looked at my drawings, then put his whiskery head next to mine to see what I was looking at. To see exactly what I was looking at. “Ah well, not much I can help you with there, carry on.” He then turned and tapped his way back to tea and cakes in the staff room. Drawing is like that; there are times when words just don’t do it. Mr. Rhodes knew that, which is why he was universally loved and respected.
This was at the time of “The Hornsea Art School Revolt.” The school’s studios in London were being filled with dry ice, smoke and writhing naked bodies. “Happenings,” laced with LSD and weed, were “what we did now.” If you painted, it had to be a kind of Mid- Atlantic Expressionism: big vacuous canvases, lots of sloshing about and full-on freedom of expression.
I didn’t work this out until much later, but all these developments were about de-skilling young creative minds. The Conceptual Art that won the “Salon” and that has become the Official Art of my generation needs no skill – just ideas. For it, skill is a restriction and inhibition to creative expression. Which is, of course, nonsense.
What I came to learn at art school was how to draw, how to look, how to think visually. This was slowly, gradually being devalued and removed from the curriculum. All the skills were being chucked out of the art school window to the point that now, a generation later, we have few capable teachers left to teach the basic drawing skills.
I had come to learn to draw; I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have the skill to draw and draw well, which meant practice. Ten thousand hours, they say, to achieve any skill or competence. Like a pianist, I knew that it was necessary to practice.
I had come to learn to draw, I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have the skill to draw and draw well.
The Ashmolean Museum is a wonderful place for a young, visual mind to explore. In it, there’s everything from Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai armour, from Minoan figurines to Classical Greek statues. The classical Greek dudes were a big deal for me. They were in a long gallery between the drawing studio and the front door. A small ragged group of us would gather at the front for a cigarette every time the model took a break. We sat on the stone walls outside the main doors, got piles (hemorrhoids) and had monumental snowball fights. We really were a scruffy nuisance to have in a museum, but it was the best place to be. I absorbed the Ashmolean though the pores of my skin. In three wonderful, full years I knew what the artefacts of world culture felt and looked like. My eyes had wrapped around and embraced everything, whilst probably I knew very little. What I did know, however, included a small collection of Raphael and Michelangelo drawings of which I devoured every line and every nuance. It was BBBBBBBbrill. Did I tell you I had a stammer?
Stammering was an affliction I carried with me throughout childhood and school into my middle years. It was an invisible affliction. I didn’t look like I was crippled in any way, but to a large degree, it stopped me from speaking. My mouth would jam up with words beginning with “B” or “M.” I could see them coming up ahead in the sentence. It was like lockjaw – I was left humming, buzzing and dribbling, trying to push out a word that had jammed in my mouth. The more effort I put into getting the word out, the tighter the lockjaw.
To say this affected my life would be an understatement. Think what your life would be like if you couldn’t talk. That’s unfair. I could talk – it’s that I chose to not talk very much. It was irritating when it came to girls and no doubt restricted my sex life when I could have had much more fun. But isn’t that always the case? We all could have had much more fun when looking back. Much later, I was able to get past this obstacle, but that is another story for later.
I wonder if Burne-Jones and Morris got piles from sitting on the same stone walls outside the Ashmolean? They certainly inhabited the same space. For Morris, brotherhood and comradeship was a big deal. He gathered about him members of a group of young painters who were to become the rather pompously titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They later went on to paint up a storm. Then, they painted with startling lack of success, the walls of the Oxford Union.
Morris was always wrapping fellow artists and writers about him like a warm cloak. Blessed with a background that meant a few shillings were not a problem, he could focus on ideas and ideals. Here, Ruskin came to influence both Morris and his group. “The Stones of Venice” was a powerful and popular thesis published in three volumes between 1851 and 1853. The books examine Venetian architecture in detail. In “The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter in book two, Ruskin gives his view on how society should be organised:
“We want one man to be always thinking, and another man to be always working, and we call one man a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising his brother: and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”
Wow. Tell that to Henry Ford.
I have worked night shifts at Black & Decker. I worked a machine that bored a part of the casing for an electric drill. These were the industrial “top of the range” drills. Learning to do this well took about two shifts. After that, what could I do to keep my mind occupied? I had a total number of casings to do in a shift; too few and I had the charge hand on my neck. Do more than this, however, and the union guy was going to give me earache. So you play: How fast can I go for an hour? Then how slow? How few could I make in the next hour? I needed the money but after a while, when I had paid my bills, I joined the 863.
Morris picked up Ruskin’s social ideas and ran with them. Known initially for his poetry, Morris again assembled a group of trusty creatives to create William Morris and Company. The goal was to create, improve, make, have made and sell stylish artefacts for the burgeoning middle-class home.
The Muse came to Morris and found him working. (The muse has always got to find you working!) His inspiration was the English countryside, not just the generality but the very core of how nature fits together. I believe this is why the movement has so much resonance for us now. Not what Morris did – his shapes and forms, the wallpaper and fabrics – but why he did it, and the way he was looking at nature. Morris gave us a Victorian response. Why can we not look at nature and give a 21st-century response?
Morris rented Kelmscott House near Oxford – a beautiful, warm, stone house with a mature garden full of perfumed summer. During his time there he developed something that touches the essence of nature herself. His drawings were cleverly arranged into repeated images that could become wallpapers or woven tapestries.
It was typical of Morris to spend a part of the week “in the doing” – weaving, drawing, printing. The making was important to him, and he was not afraid to bring back old techniques. His textiles needed skills, looms and processes that could be found abroad and recovered from obsolescence.
The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society poster below shows in part the ideas that were evolving – the artist and the maker shaking hands as equals, with mutual respect.
“Let you have nothing in your home that is not both beautiful and useful.” That was the strap line of Morris and Co.
Oscar Wilde answered that with: “The definition of Art is that it is useless.”
First-class, Oscar. His argument (which has little historical validity) in the following years won the day. The creative force of the 20th century has very largely created an art that defines itself as useless.
Leaving this battle (yet to be lost), the Arts & Crafts movement encouraged a new generation of makers, often young men and women with sufficient resources, to set up small workshops outside the cities that were close to nature. These were jewelry makers, potters, weavers, silversmiths. The new railways would take their product back for Morris and others to sell, and they could live the rural idyll.
It was the furniture makers who particularly affected me. They were part of a small group that settled near Cheltenham. Each year, I take a group of Rowden students to see their work at the Wilson Museum in Cheltenham. I do this to show them the freshness of the workmanship and to remind myself of the essence from which Rowden has come.
Rowden students examine a table base by Ernest Gimson at The Wilson Art Gallery in Cheltenham.
For me, their move to the countryside was most important. It was the closeness to nature, having it around you every day when walking the dog, seeing the changes in the hedgerow as season followed season. Remembered changes from last year become marked in your work. You get closer to the raw bones of nature, and your work benefits. You bring home bits of hedge and draw, not knowing why, but feeling that it is part of the process – and you trust your feelings.
Two brothers, Sidney and Ernest Barnsley, and a good friend, Ernest Gimson, all young, all recently trained as architects, took to this idea of living and making out in the sticks. They came to the quiet Cotswold village of Sapperton (not far from Cheltenham) and set up small workshops. Sidney Barnsley worked alone, always. Ernest Barnsley spent a little time with Gimson, but soon gathered a commission for work at Rodmarton Manor and became engrossed in that. Gimson is my hero. He worked not alone but with the help of both local and imported craftsmen. Probably learning as he went, Gimson, with his assistants, created a place that turned out extraordinary furniture.
The table shown above is made in solid English walnut with black Macassar ebony and pale green holly detailing. The boards of the tabletop are secured with a decorative dovetailed key. The hide glue would probably have secured the joint, but these were joints to express, to show off the workmanship.
Each year I delight in showing the freshness of the workmanship displayed in the wide chamfers worked in the hard black ebony. Tool marks are evident; they could only come clean off the spokeshave or drawknife. This is stunning work.
The goal of this small group was to make pieces with integrity, very largely by hand. There is almost no veneer from the early Gimson workshop; what you saw was what you got, all the way through. Gimson worked with local craftsmen, notably Henry Clissett and Edward Gardiner, who were skilled chairmakers. Clissett was notable for aiming to make chair a day and rush the seat in an evening. Gimson aimed to take these traditional chairs and improve the product, using his design skills in conjunction with the craft skills of Clissett and Gardiner.
The Edward Gardiner chair, also at The Wilson.
Here is an example that blows me away (above). This is a chair reworked by Gimson but made by Gardiner. Look at the chair back. Look at the arrangement of the back splats. Five of them all different, each getting larger as our eye climbs up that back. This chair is aspirational – it seeks to pull the eye up, a positive upward movement. Look at the chair legs. They can’t outward toward the top, welcoming the body into the chair. See how the back splats are arranged on the chair. Look hard. The centres are each wider, one from the next. The ends are each wider, one from the next. The splats are fixed with a negative space that is wider, one from the next. But look at the centre. The top of each splat is the same distance from the splat above. It’s as if all is upward energy, every element is up – but this is like a string in the centre of the chair back that pulls down. You don’t see it until you hunt – but it’s there.
This is what a good chair design does; it teases the eye to find the hidden logic. It is just there. You could not change one element without binning the whole lot. Gimson must have driven Gardiner mad (until the orders came in and the money followed).
It was not so much the work that grabbed me by the throat, it was the activity. These men and women were contrarian counter-culture beings, and I liked that. They set themselves up in the wilds of rural England when transport and communications were ridiculously hard. The move to the country was a serious decision and one I support, working at Rowden in the heart of rural Devon, with a lake to chuck the dog in and fields to walk.
The library at the Bedales School, which involved the talents of several great designers and woodworkers.
Although Gimson is my role model, it was the other guy, Sidney Barnsley, the guy who worked alone, who had another most serious effect. He had a son, Edward Barnsley, who, confusingly, also became a furniture maker. Edward Barnsley came to work at and later own a workshop at Petersfield in Hampshire. The man who founded the Petersfield workshop was Geoffrey Lupton, a former apprentice of Gimson’s who was largely responsible for the library at the nearby Bedales School (above). The building was designed by Gimson, the tables in it are by Sidney Barnsley and the chairs are by Gimson. The building was started by Lupton but was completed by the workshop under the direction of Edward Barnsley.
I nearly wrote “finished by Edward Barnsley,” when really it was the team that he led – a group of clever intelligent makers, probably capable of telling the lad, “No boss, it’s got to be this way.” Our culture doesn’t allow us to name everyone; it’s bad enough to acknowledge they are even present – but they damn well are there. And it’s this presence, a team working together, with different skills pulling together, that makes something extraordinary.
The Edward Barnsley Workshop continues to the present day. In 1950 they took on apprentice Alan Peters, who went on to open his own workshops at Cullompton in Devon. It was this man who gave me a model to follow. I admired him so much. With a lovely Devon long house, the barns converted to workshops, the stacks of English hardwood drying in the sheds, and his two skilled assistant makers, he made beautiful, saleable modern furniture. He was the man I wanted to become. But that’s another story.
The home Fisher built signifies his success on the frontier.
The following is excerpted from Joshua A. Klein’s “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” Fisher was the first settled minister of the frontier town of Blue Hill, Maine. Harvard-educated and handy with an axe, Fisher spent his adult life building furniture for his community. Fortunately for us, Fisher recorded every aspect of his life as a woodworker and minister on the frontier.
In this book, Klein, the founder of Mortise & Tenon Magazine, examines what might be the most complete record of the life of an early 19th-century American craftsman. Using Fisher’s papers, his tools and the surviving furniture, Klein paints a picture of a man of remarkable mechanical genius, seemingly boundless energy and the deepest devotion. It is a portrait that is at times both familiar and completely alien to a modern reader – and one that will likely change your view of furniture making in the early days of the United States.
[Jonathan] Fisher didn’t die an active cabinetmaker. About the time he recorded paying off his debt, his shop activity waned. By March 1820, when he wrote “I am free from debt to earthly creditors,” he hadn’t made a chair or a stand for almost a decade. He had reached the ambition of every frontiersman – in the most literal sense, he had built from the ground up a comfortable life for his family and himself in a thriving coastal community. As Richard Bushman has pointed out, “Beyond the physical side of comfort – warmth, good food, restful chairs, and accessible conveniences – comfort implied a moral condition achieved through retirement from the bustle of high life and retreat into wholesome domesticity.” (1)
Being able to take moments of leisure has long been seen as a sign of success. There are few objects that signify this more powerfully than a comfortable chair.
With all the labor he expended to get to this place in life, Fisher appreciated being able to reap the rewards. Not every family was so fortunate, though. On one visit to a struggling family whose father had been recently imprisoned, Fisher sympathized with them when he wrote, “Mrs. David Carter had with her 4 little children, three of them sick with whooping cough. Not a chair in the miserable cottage to sit in and her husband recently gone to prison for shooting some of his neighbor’s cattle and she professed to believe him innocent … Oh when will the benign sway of pure Christianity banish in some good measure from this earth this mess of human misery!” For Fisher, the lack of a chair in the Carter home symbolized the family’s economic, social and spiritual poverty.
For Fisher, though, comfort was not simply about retreat from the “bustle of life” Bushman refers to – it had much more to do with contentment. On a visit he made to the exceptionally fine house of a Mr. Codman, “Mr. Fisher was greatly surprised by its beauty and luxury and exclaimed: Brother Codman, can you have all this and heaven too?” (2) Fisher wrote in his journal on one occasion: “So craving is the disposition of man, that his wants in general increase with his riches. And besides this, his anxiety increases for what he possesses, which is a farther source of unhappiness. If riches conduce not to unhappiness, what then is wanting to make me happy? I tread on as good an earth, as the richest, I survey as fair a landscape. And breathe as pure an air, as they; yes, and may contemplate the same glorious heavens; nothing is wanting to make me happy, as happy as man can be in the world, but a good heart, a heart that delights in virtue.” (3)
To have a house furnished tastefully in a frontier town was no small feat. Rather than achieve this through purchasing articles from established artisans, Fisher built his domestic environment with his hands.
It’s not that Fisher lost interest in creative work. Instead, he fixed his focus on the production of his book, Scripture Animals (4), a compendium of all the animals mentioned in the Bible, complete with his own woodcuts. This project took dedication and more than 10 years of effort to complete. Not only is the volume a fascinating insight into Fisher’s mind, it is an incredible example of the attention to detail of which the man was capable. The homemade engraving tools, though crude and primitive in appearance, were delightfully manipulated to form the finest details of hair, feathers and eyes on the boxwood blanks.
Even though these tools appear crude, they were used to engrave exquisite woodcuts for the books he wrote. – Jonathan Fisher Memorial.
It was only a couple years after the 1834 publishing that Fisher fell into the period of his life known to all as “the long sickness.” The inside of the small cupboard door (Cat#6, p 142) twice records the event by this name, and in his letters to family, the regularity of which the event was discussed suggests it was something akin to a near-death experience. This sickness was disruptive enough that he decided to retire in 1837 at the age of 69. The church agreed to give Fisher $2 per week for one year after his retirement. After this support ran out, Fisher wrote in a letter dated November 1837, “I am now thrown upon the kind hand of God, and the avails of my own industry. I think it probable that for the present I shall work on the farm and at mechanics, and preach now and then a Sabbath and a lecture in Bluehill and vicinity … As respects temporal concerns, I may remark that I have at present a competency. I owe but little, and I have about $200 due to me ….”
The relentless work of his hands afforded Fisher a comfortable life.
The “avails of his own industry” appear to have been sufficient for satisfying his financial needs – he credited manual labor with the restoration of his physical condition: “I am able to perform nearly all the work on my farm, cheerfully and with little weariness. My labor conduces to my health … The ax, the saw, the plane, the shovel, and the hoe may many times add life and vigor to our composition as well as add years to the number of our days.” He was, by 1838, in “almost perfect health.”
“Blue Hill, Maine” by Fitz Henry Lane, circa 1853-1857.
Throughout his furniture-making career, it seems Fisher benefitted from a monopoly in his rural market. Undoubtedly, some Blue Hill residents preferred to order furniture from “the westward” and have it shipped to Blue Hill bay because local options were limited. The only local furniture maker documented to have worked in the first quarter of the 19th century in Blue Hill was Fisher. In R.F. Candage’s Sketches of Blue Hill, he made a mention of the “old Curtis furniture factory” on the stream at the head of the bay. This is, apparently, a reference to Robert T. Osgood (a cabinetmaker) and Ezra Curtis (a wheelwright) who shared a shop there from 1835 to 1842, although no other period resource mentions the “factory.” (5) If Osgood and Curtis were making furniture at the head of the bay, it is probable that Fisher would not have been able to favorably compete with their efficiency in division of labor and waterpower. David Jaffe (6) has shown how the New England “move from craft to industry” began for chairmaking with countless small workshops operating “chair manufactories” on mill streams much like the one in Blue Hill.
Fisher viewed his workshop as a place of meditation and rest. He was not desperate to escape the trade like some of his contemporaries.
Like most artisans, Fisher was driven by complex motivations that must be appreciated if we are to understand the role furniture making played in his life. His devotion to God was the core of all he wrote, did and made. For Fisher, the mere ability to work produced emotional gratitude: “Brisk S. mild and cloudy. Spent most of the day burning brush by the side of new field. While my hands were occupied in needful labor, I was led to exclaim in heart, hands, what a blessing they are when employed aright. The fingers are adapted to such a variety of useful occupations that they give man a great superiority over all other creatures.” This moment of reflection perfectly captures the relationship between Fisher’s manual, spiritual and intellectual activities. His manual labor provided the opportunity to ponder the glories of heaven and marvel at the beauty of the created order. The relationship among the head, heart and hands of Fisher were clearly intertwined and complex.
The permanence of Fisher’s work is a testimony to a life well-lived. The man made a lasting mark on his community.
What was furniture making to Fisher? It was, in one sense, an avenue to indulge the artistic and creative impulse woven through the fiber of his being. In his shop, Fisher was free to design and build functional objects of beauty that still reflect his complex mind to this day. His furniture is distinctive for its perplexing fusion of micro-focus attention to detail and humble pragmatism.
The clock in his hallway illustrates Fisher’s sophistication in its mechanical complexity and his humility in its understated built-in “case.”
Furniture making was also a way for him to make ends meet. With nine children at home, the demands on his pocketbook were real. His modest salary as a preacher was not enough to ensure everyone was fed and educated while continuing to develop his farm. Making furniture was one of the many services Fisher offered to his community. The surveying, book publishing, sign painting, pipe boring and even hat braiding were all important contributors to the flourishing of the Fisher family. The Puritan work ethic to “work with your own hands” forbid wasting time in idleness, and Fisher seems to have taken this seriously. His hands were ever employed aright.
1. Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, Knopf, 1992, p 268. 2. Candage, Rufus George Frederick, Memoir of Jonathan Fisher, of Blue Hill, Maine (1889), Kessinger Publishing, 2009, p 224. 3. Smith, Raoul N. The Life of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847) Volume 1 (From His Birth Through the Year 1798), self-published, 2006, p 42-43. 4. Fisher, Jonathan, Scripture Animals: A Natural History of the Living Creatures Named in the Bible, Pyne Press, 1972. 5. Hinckley, William, “The Weekly Packet,” Oct. 5, 1978. 6. Jaffe, David, A Nation of New Goods: The Material Culture of Early America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, p 189.
