American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730: An Interpretive Caralogue

Forman, Benno M., et al

New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Hardcover. Navy cloth boards with gold gilt lettering on spine, white and bw illustrated dust jacket with red lettering, xxv, 397 pp., bw illustrations. VG-/Good+ (cloth scuffed & rubbed. corners may be rubbed to boards. dust jacket scuffed & smudged; edges rubbed). Item #6010
ISBN: 9780393025163

"The earliest American-made furniture has long fascinated curators and collectors and more recently has attracted the attention of historians. The late Benno M. Forman spent nearly twenty years at Winterhur studying seventeeth- and early eighteenth-century American furniture and its European antecedents in an effort to expand our understanding of life in the early colonies. Using objects - most particularly the woods used to make them, the constuction techniques employed by the craftsmen, and the everyday domestic uses of the various types of seating furniture - as evidence to supplement the written records, he was able to document the changes and continuities in craft traditions and living conditions faced by the early colonists during the first century of settlement in America. Winterhur Museum's collection of seating furniture made between 1630 and 1730, the largest such collection in the United States, forms the core of his study and is supplemented by more than a hundred other examples now in public and private collections throughout Europe and America which offer important insights about the transmission of styles, constuction details, and taste. This long-awaited volume will be essential reading for specialists in American furniture and students of early American history." - dust jacket description.