Furniture Design Ideas

Figures 104 and 105. Card Tables. Wealth, skilled competitors, population growth, and knowledge of fashion were parts of a mixture of ingredients in Philadelphia that produced imaginative variety in furniture design. A straight frame with non­conforming top supported by tapered Marlborough legs provides a contrasting form in Figure 105. Top corners are rounded, like those […]

  Figure 73. Settee. This settee’s claw-and-ball feet relate to other Philadelphia seating furniture. Carved shells in high relief on a shaped skirt are also familiar. Carving on the front rail at the juncture of legs and seat was shown on a side chair (Fig. 62). Settees were not a common form of seating furniture […]

Figure 38. Bed. The only stylish feature of this high-post bedstead is fluted decoration on the footposts. Though Philadelphians were generally more style conscious than New Yorkers, there was a market for Queen Anne forms and decoration in Philadelphia throughout the Chippendale period. Poplar was the common wood for bedsteads. In 1777, George Haughton, a […]

Candlesiands. Shallow knee carving—here in the form of fleur-de-lis, V-shaped lambrequin, and acanthus leaf—combined with a turned urn and Doric or Tuscan columnar shaft relate Figure 26 to other New York screens, stands, and tables. A heavy disc separating an urn or baluster shape from the base of the shaft is frequently seen on New […]

closely related to Figure 34, but in neither example is the carving in the high relief that is associated with tilt-top tables made in Philadelphia (Figs. 115­18). According to Joseph Downs, this table was found in Albany. In the advertisement of the sale of household furniture noted above, "A Sett of fine Tea Table China" […]

Plate 1. Bed. In colonial America, the term bedstead meant the frame, headboard, and posts. Bed furniture referred to matched hangings, as in this set of English indigo resist-dyed cotton. The bed has typical New York cabriole legs with leaf-carved knees and square claw-and-ball feet. Other New York examples have stop fluting (Figs. 7,17). The […]

Handsome but rigidly controlled and shallow carving is a distinctive New York feature (Fig. 5a). The rear feet of Figure 5 (Fig. 5c) and the four-square claw-and-ball feet of Figure 6 are also familiar New York features. But the front feet of Figure 5 and the so-called stump rear legs of Figure 6 are more […]

Middle Atlantic and Southern Colonies In 1835, before the handcraft system of production in Amer­ica had been replaced by modern industrial techniques, Alexis de Tocqueville characterized the utilitarian spirit in which Americans cultivated the arts: "They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful."1 Almost seventy years ear­lier, the colonial […]