John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker (review)

John Townsend was a perfectionist. His elegant and restrained furniture was constructed from the choicest mahogany by methods so refined that reinforcement and precision were lavished even on internal areas not visible in the finished article. A fifth-generation American and third-generation Newporter, Townsend "lived his life below the level of historical scrutiny," with the only documentary record of his existence being his will, probate inventory, some sparse business records, and an occasional reference to his holding public office (51). His signed and often dated pieces, thirty-four extant at last count, have helped to preserve his legacy.

Townsend's accomplishments have now been chronicled in a work as fastidiously crafted as his own. John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker complements the exhibition of his furniture held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. Both are the creation of Morrison H. Heckscher, chair of its American Wing. The work compiles recent scholarship about Townsend, offers new interpretations, and assembles them in a narrative format accessible to both layman and expert.

Heckscher's catalogue illustrates "all known documented examples of John Townsend's furniture" with full-page, precisely lit, color photographs, often with smaller images highlighting design, construction and, where present, signatures and labeling (73). Each catalogue entry is sparsely written. Measurements, provenance, and bibliographic references are provided; but there are no condition reports, unlike in Heckscher's earlier classic, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scholars' appetites will be otherwise sated by the detailed appendices.

Preceding the catalogue are the historical chapters, which are interspersed with images of furniture that introduce the reader to the work of Townsend and his contemporaries. After an initial chapter that pays homage to earlier researchers and summarizes their contributions, Heckscher describes Newport's position within the constellation of colonial American woodworking centers, particularly Boston. Heckscher believes that the "independent course" chartered by Newporters in renouncing the Puritan leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is evidenced in their furniture design. "Boston innovation," according to Heckscher, was "transformed into something altogether richer and more memorable" by Newport joiners (17–18).

While not disputing this achievement in furniture design, it is fair to observe that Newport never fully departed from the baroque influences received from Boston. Indeed, the very persistence of Newport's furniture designs, such as the block-and-shell bureau tables that Townsend produced starting c. 1760, seems decidedly retardaire in the 1790s. Newport neither developed the variety of Boston's blockfront designs nor adopted the rococo influences popular in other American furniture-making centers, such as Philadelphia.

Townsend's signed pieces have the following in common: "[A] fully developed form, a crispness and sharpness of design, a precision of execution, inside and out, and a preference for complex, labor-intensive methods of construction. They are the work of a passionate perfectionist, constitutionally unable to cut corners or economize even in places that cannot be seen" (52). He was a specialist in certain "elaborate and costly" forms. His signing and dating of these pieces establishes their chronology and, according to Heckscher, demonstrate that Townsend "exhibited a self-conscious sense of his own place in the history of cabinetmaking that is unique in the annals of American cabinetmaking" (56).

This interpretation of Townsend's motive in labeling his work is one of the most intriguing claims in Heckscher's book, and one of its most problematic. However "self-conscious" Heckscher may suppose Townsend to have been about his stature in cabinetmaking history, there is nothing "unique" about American joiners and cabinetmakers signing and even dating their work. By way of example, substantial bodies of signed and dated work survive for Townsend's contemporaries John Shaw of Annapolis and Benjamin Frothingham of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Another Charlestown cabinetmaker, Jacob Forster, expedited the process by utilizing labels printed with incomplete dates (e.g., "179_"), allowing him to fill in the last digit as...