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| Unidentified maker, occasional table of red cedar with mahogany and rosewood veneers, [Sydney, NSW, about 1845] |
If we regard design as a tripartite process of production,
mediation and consumption and view it pre-eminently as one of the
manifestations of industrialisation, then we have to allow that for much of the
nineteenth century the production of furniture fell into what might be described
as a design history problematic: it was global yet persistently local; it was modern in its conception and production, yet pre-modern in the methodology of its making. The raw materials used by furniture makers were
sourced globally: from exotic timbers such as Brazilian and Indian rosewood and
mahogany – used largely for veneers, to more humble woods, such as Baltic
pine and deal, which were employed structurally. Over the course of the nineteenth century, furniture production was neither industrialised nor
entirely craft-based; and while many of the processes it made use of were increasingly
mechanised, those making it were still, largely, organised on the
pre-industrial model of master, journeyman and apprentice, although this also changed as the century wore on.
In terms of its mediation though, nineteenth century
furniture production, at least that directed for consumption by the middle and upper classes,
was entirely modern, relying predominantly for its types and forms on pattern
books, catalogues and other printed references. The use of such mediated sources
was no new thing and had characterised elements of European furniture production – particularly those directed at luxury markets – since the
rapid expansion of printed visual media in the mid-eighteenth century. The
difference was that printed material was no longer exclusive to producers but
was used, increasingly, to shape market preferences. As society commercialised,
middle-class consumers – no matter their location – were increasingly exposed
to notions of fashionability. Equally, the availability of printed sources
meant that fashionable furniture could be produced outside the metropolitan
centres, provided it adhered to the centre’s standards of quality of design and
production.
One of the best instances of this derogation of production
was the market for furniture that emerged in Australia during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thanks to the circumstances under which
the continent was colonised by the British, we know quite a bit about the
people who moved there, what they did and what they surrounded themselves with:
convict colonies were the ideal surveillance society and, free or not, rich or
poor, their inhabitants were well observed and the results documented. The
trouble for design historians, amongst others, has been the difficulty of
matching this archived data with the objects, the things of the period. In some
instances, it’s relatively easy; in others it’s quite impossible as the vital
connection between thing and documentary context or thing and the observed
person has been lost.
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| John Verge architect, western façade of Camden Park House, Menangle, NSW, about 1835 |
The contents of Camden Park House, the speculating termagant John Macarthur’s ‘Grecian’ style patrician villa at
Menangle, south of Sydney (John Verge, 1835) are uniquely, for a private Australian house of that date,
largely intact and well-documented. The Macarthur papers, now held at the
Mitchell Library in Sydney, retain many of the invoices and receipts for the
objects used to furnish the house from the mid 1830s. Over the past sixty or so
years, furniture and architectural historians have sought to match the invoices
with what remains in and what is known to have been in the house – there have
been a number of family settlements over the years that have led to some
dispersals. The research has led to some items of furniture, once proudly identified
as ‘made of Australian cedar by convicts on the estate’, being recognised as made of exotic timbers and
acquired from fashionable London retailers. It’s easy to make mistakes when it
comes to cataloguing furniture, particularly if you don’t have access to
sources or are unfamiliar with the timbers used. In the case of Camden Park
House such errors of classification really shouldn’t have happened given that it
accommodates an extraordinary collection of wood samples, apparently duplicates
of those collected by William Macarthur and exhibited by him at the 1855 Paris Exposition universelle.
The study of nineteenth century Australian furniture production
has been helped by publications such as Kevin Fahy, Christine Simpson and
Andrew Simpson’s Nineteenth century
Australian furniture (Sydney: David Ell, 1985) and by the development of
that invaluable resource, the Caroline Simpson Library and Research Centre, a vital component of Sydney Living Museums, formerly the Historic Houses
Trust of NSW. With their emphasis on economic, social, political and geographic
contexts, these empirical resources have contributed to a significant change in
the way Australian material culture history is researched and written. It’s an
approach emphasising the critical position that design is more than just a production
process.
While there have been furniture histories written in and
about New Zealand they tend to be decontextualized in the sense that they focus
predominantly on objects rather than ideas; narrating the thing rather than its
context. Probably the earliest New Zealand furniture history, Stanley
Northcote-Bade’s, Colonial furniture in
New Zealand (Wellington: AH & AW Reed, 1971) was remarkable in its
attempt to both identify a genealogy of furniture types and place them within a
specific, colonial, context. William Cottrell’s more recent Furniture of the New Zealand colonial era:
an illustrated history 1830-1900 (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2006) deploys Fahy
and Simpson’s methodology along with the facilities made available by
modern digital technology to document and analyse a much broader range of types
and possible makers.
The problematic of nineteenth century colonial furniture is
evident in a piece that turned up at a recent Art+Object auction in Auckland. It was catalogued as ‘lot 715. William IV period mahogany and rosewood work
table, single frieze drawer raised on an octagonal tapering column on a
quatrefoil base on four scroll legs. W. 510 x H. 730mm’. Rather than being a
work or sewing table, it might be better described as an occasional table as,
conventionally, work tables have a cloth bag - or the fittings for one -
suspended under the top. In addition, while the table is clad with a thickly
cut mahogany (Swietenia sp.) veneer with a cross-banded Indian rosewood (Dalbergia
sp.) trim to the top, the bulk of its carcase is made of red cedar (Toona ciliata). With the exception of the drawer, which is dovetailed, the component parts of
the table are glued and screwed together and the resting surfaces of the
scrolled pads or feet protected with pressed metal ‘buttons’. There are no
labels, stamped marks or inscriptions.
Both the thick veneer and the cedar carcase suggest that the
table was most probably of colonial manufacture. Cottrell notes that New
Zealand furniture makers used Australian red cedar, possibly as early as the
1830s and into the 1840s (pp. 312-313) but certainly not in the quantities found in this piece. A more likely place of manufacture would be Australia and more
specifically either New South Wales or Tasmania. In the 1840s and 50s, Sydney
cabinetmakers such as Andrew Lenehan and Joseph Sly were certainly making
tables with quadriform bases, scrolled pads and octagonal sectioned pedestals
with Lenehan also setting the pedestals within a turned shallow concave collar
(Fahy and Simpson, plate 455). Lenehan is also known to have used rosewood
veneers on cedar carcases in the mid 1840s (Fahy and Simpson, plate 496). The turned finials under each corner are made of a different timber from the the other external parts, have a different finish and would appear to be later additions; similar finials are found on Australian furniture dating from the 1870s and 80s. They may have been added to the table to enhance its appearance in the second-hand furniture market.
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| Title page of John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of cottage, farm and villa architecture and furniture (London: Longman, 1846) University of Pittsburgh Library System |
The design of the table, described by the auctioneer as ‘William
IV’ - that is it is based on a design produced between 1830 and 1837 - could
have been sourced from the maker’s own drawings, an imported example or, more
likely, on an illustrated publication. John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of cottage, farm and villa architecture and furniture (London: Longman, 1833) illustrates an écarté
table (fig 1956) with a similar base configuration and an overall similar form
to the piece under discussion.
As Fahy and Simpson assert, Loudon’s Encyclopaedia was ‘Probably the most
popular and significant publication of the period in terms of its effect and
influence on Australian furniture forms’ (Fahy and Simpson, p. 215). Although
regarding Loudon’s prescriptions as reflecting a ‘decline in taste’, they
observe that the book was ‘Enthusiastically received in Australia’ and that
copies were in wide circulation by the 1840s and were available in popular venues such as the library of the Sydney Mechanics Institute soon after 1842. The availability of
this pattern, combined with the use of veneers, suggests that the table was
probably made about 1845.
Empirical histories are vital tools in decoding the
information embedded in objects but they tend not to be all that illuminating
when it comes to contextualising or understanding the dynamics of commodity
production, mediation and consumption. To achieve this, another approach that
is needed, one that provides a critical understanding of context,
artefacts, space and connections, across timeframes and cultures. In her
2007 paper ‘Furniture design and colonialism: negotiating relationships between
Britain and Australia 1880-1901’ (in G Lees-Maffei and R House, eds The design history reader (Oxford: Berg,
2010), pp. 478-484), Tracey Avery comments on the connection between the desire on the part of both makers and consumers for
a British appearance to furniture designs and ‘the tenuous place of Australian
timber in the hierarchy of domestic suitability.’ While Avery's focus is on a later period than
that in which the occasional table was made, her view is equally pertinent. Her conclusion is that ‘the
achievement of the appropriate furnished ‘British’ domestic interior in
Australia involved certain reassignments of meaning around style, labor (sic), and materials.’
Designed elsewhere, but veneered to express both gentility
and sameness to the culture that provided its design, the occasional table
expresses the moment in a colonial culture where the local market’s capacity
for production surpasses the social, economic and aesthetic urge to sustain haptic links with the
colonising culture.
Camden Park House continues to be a residence for the descendants of John Macarthur. It is open to the public once a year, during the second last full weekend of September. For further information see: camdenparkhouse.com.au
