“Japanning” was a western imitation of the lacquer that reached Europe from Asia in the 1550s. In America, Boston was the main center of japanwork and supported at least a dozen specialized japanners who decorated furniture from several of the cabinetmakers working in the city. American japanned furniture began to appear on the market around 1712 and remained popular through 1750. This high chest was made by the Boston cabinetmaker Charles Warham (1701-1779), an immigrant from London. The japanner marked the backs of four drawers “War—” and “Warham” with the paint that he used for the undercoat, presumably to ensure that this chest did not get mixed up with others in his shop.

Japanning
In seventeenth-century Europe, small boxes, chests and tea tables decorated with Asian lacquer were so popular, and so expensive, that European craftsmen tried to imitate the process. They had no experience, and no access to the resin of the Asian lac tree, so they experimented with paint, metallic powder, gold leaf, and clear varnishes to recreate the look of lacquer. The process they came up with was called “japanning.” Japanning was disseminated throughout Europe and America by John Stalker and George Parker’s book, Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), a compendium of techniques and designs.
A dense hardwood with fine grain, such as soft maple, is the best base for japanning. To get a sound surface, the japanner first wetted the wood to raise the grain and then sanded it smooth. Next he laid out his design of oriental figures, animals, foliage, pagodas and other structures. Then he built up areas of raised relief with layers of gesso, a mixture of whiting (chalk), animal glue and a plasticizing agent such as gum arabic. When this had dried, he sanded it all down, and painted it with an undercoat of vermilion paint followed by a coat of black paint.
The next stage was to paint the designs with metallic dust, such as bronze powder, suspended in water or sizing (glue), adding gold leaf to the larger design elements and picking out the fine details with black paint. And then, to finish the piece, he brushed on eight or more coats of varnish. The finishing touch was a coat of beeswax melted in turpentine and buffed to a high sheen.
Japanning is an ephemeral form of ornament. The wood expands and contracts with changes in humidity causing the rigid japanned surface to crack and the gesso to flake. The layers of varnish degrade and darken over time, dulling the effect. On this chest, only the japanning on the drawer fronts of the upper case and on the two side drawers in the lower case is original.
The central drawer of the lower case, legs, stretchers and feet are replacements.

A member of a well-to-do family in Essex County, Massachusetts commissioned this high chest from an Ipswich cabinetmaker probably between 1730 and 1740. In New England, wealthy families chose high chests, often with matching dressing tables, for their best bed chambers and to give to daughters or nieces as their “wedding portions” upon marriage.
Tall, seemingly effortlessly held aloft on cabriole legs, and crowned with an enclosed broken-scroll pediment, this high chest represented a radical departure from the joined oaken furniture of the previous generation. It conveyed a powerful visual statement appropriate to the new, Palladian-style houses that wealthy colonists were building in the early eighteenth century whose rooms had plastered walls, high ceilings and large windows. The brighter interior light enabled householders to see and enjoy the figure of natural wood in furniture. Consequently, the carved and painted furniture of the seventeenth century fell out of favor, to be replaced by veneered and varnished surfaces.

Construction and decoration
The top and bottom boards of the upper case are dovetailed to the sides and the front; sides and backs of the lower case are attached to the legs with mortise and tenon joints secured with pins. Full dustboards separate the top row of three side-by-side drawers from the drawers below.
The random pattern of closely-spaced grooves cut into the underside of the top board in the upper compartment tells us that the lumber was cut in a sawmill. Teethmarks from a toothing plane are visible on the inside of the case and on the backboards where the cabinetmaker used the plane to smooth the boards he had received from the mill. A pattern of non-parallel saw kerfs on the backboards of the case indicates that two workmen used a frame saw to cut the faces of the backboards.
This chest is decorated with bookmatched figured veneer and herringbone crossbanded inlay on its drawer fronts, two gilt-decorated, shell-carved drawers with reverse-blocking on the skirt below the lower drawer, compound cornice moldings and “flame” finials—finials with bottoms meant to evoke urns and corkscrew tops meant to suggest flames arising from the urns.

Cabriole legs
Like lacquer, cabriole legs originated in Asia. They reached Europe in the mid-seventeenth century and America a couple of generations later. They were structurally stronger than turned legs such as those on the japanned high chest, and so eliminated the need for stretchers. Historic Deerfield subjected a reproduction of this chest’s cabriole leg to a controlled compression test. At 1,400 pounds, there were sounds of creaking, but the ankle did not fail until an astonishing 3,700 pounds of pressure was applied to it. Cabriole legs will only break when subjected to lateral pressure as when pushed or dragged over a rough surface, such as an uneven wooden floor.
To make a cabriole leg, the cabinetmaker first traced the shape of the leg onto the square workpiece using a wooden pattern. He then turned the bottom of the pad foot on a lathe. Next, following the guidelines set with the pattern, he quickly removed waste wood and cut the leg’s cabriole shape using a saw. To save time, some cabinetmakers resorted to a hatchet for this step. With rasps and a draw-knife, he further shaped and smoothed the leg until it was ready for assembly.

The case of the high chest of drawers with the drawers removed and shown in a conforming display stand. The case is of walnut, with white pine secondary.

The interior of the case lit to show the dustboard, the secondary wood and the tool marks.

The three stages of the cabriole leg: the pattern on the square-sectioned workpiece (left); the pad foot turned and the shape roughed in (center); the finished leg (right).

The similarity to other examples attributed to John Cogswell (1738-1819) suggests that this example may well have come from Cogswell’s shop. It descended in the Ames family of Boston.

The display shows the desk and bookcase 'exploded.' The bookcase has been set behind the top of the desk where it would normally rest, and the cornice has been lifted above the top of the bookcase. A door, the desk lid, and the drawers are shown partially opened.

Cylinder Desk, Boston, 1800-1810

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, American consumers demanded furniture such as this cylinder desk that enabled them to present their new sense of class identity, refinement, and educational attainment. This lightweight, portable desk was probably intended for men as a counterpart to a newly fashionable form for women, the lady’s writing desk. Its interior arrangement of compartments and drawers features a long slot large enough to accommodate account books – a feature omitted from lady’s writing desks.
The drawers on this desk are constructed in a manner consistent with other furniture from the Boston shop of John Seymour (1738-1818) and his son, Thomas Seymour (1771-1849). The sides are attached to the front and back with small, meticulous dovetails and the bottoms are fitted into grooves in the front and sides and nailed to the back. The joint between the bottom, front and sides is reinforced with closely-spaced rectangular glue blocks. The partitions of the box containing the interior drawers and compartments are attached to the box’s sides and bottom with tenons fitted into mortises and secured with wedges inserted at their midlines. The fluted legs, carved at their upper ends with acanthus leaves, are probably the work of Thomas Wightman, a highly skilled carver who immigrated to Boston from London in 1797 and worked as a journeyman carver in the Seymours’ shop until 1817.
Hidden at the back of the medial drawer support in tiny ink script is the whimsical notation “In the course of my life/I bought me a fife.”

Tambour lid
Tambour doors and lids in furniture were a French innovation introduced to England around 1750 and widely used in neoclassical designs to delight and to confound. The tambour lid was made of narrow strips of mahogany, each decorated with a double bead, that were glued side-by-side onto a canvas backing, which enabled it to flex as it ran in the curved grooves in the case sides.

Bookcase
The desk originally may have had a single bank of shallow side-by-side drawers on its top. Separate boards for the bookcase’s cornice and base are later embellishments and the bookcase itself departs from other similar examples from the Seymour shop.

Craftsmanship: Molding a Cornice

Decorative moldings, such as the cornice on this chest-on-chest, were produced by molding planes. Most cabinetmakers had sets of molding planes with concave and convex soles, called “hollows” and “rounds,” that could be used in combination to produce a wide variety of molding profiles including ogee moldings. Some, particularly in New England, also had specialized molding planes capable of producing compound moldings.
Architectural design books, such as (1785) by the English architect William Pain offered illustrated directions for designing and producing moldings. Pain’s book showed molding profiles laid out within larger rectangles that represented the outside dimensions of the stock. He shaded the areas of the stock to be cut away with the rabbet plane, leaving the curves of the molding to be removed with hollows and rounds.

Cornice molding
The molding process illustrated is based on the one Bates How would have used to produce the cornice on the chest-on-chest.
Using a compass and ruler, cabinetmakers designed the profiles of their cornice moldings. They then cut matching templates to mark the profile on each end of the stock. Using a marking gauge they scribed lines along the length of the stock to mark the transitions between the molding profiles’ angles and curves.
Cutting to the scribed lines with straight-edged rabbet planes, they removed the waste wood down to the edges of the profile. Then, using hollows and rounds, they shaped the convex and concave curves. The final stage was to smoothed “chatter marks” and other irregularities left by the planes. For this, they used scrapers cut from old saw blades and filed to match the curves in the moldings.
Some New England cabinetmakers made planes with soles cut to the shape of compound moldings. These custom-made planes, such as the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century one shown here, cut moldings in one operation, reducing the layout and production time.

Other planes in the cabinetmakers’ shop
Jack planes were used to dress quickly rough-sawn boards. A jack plane had a slightly curved blade that prevented the tear-outs that could occur from the corners of a straight-edge blade.
Try planes, with their long, flat soles, “trued” boards – that is, removed the ridges left by the jack plane and flattened their surfaces.
Smoothing planes had short beds and straight-edged blades set at a sharp angle. They produced the final, smooth surface.

Molding planes and their profiles. A scraper, cut from an old saw blade, hangs above.

Craftsmanship: Turning

Turners worked on lathes to produce turned elements for furniture, such as legs or posts, and decorative elements, such as split balusters and bosses, that were applied to furniture, particularly in the first period (before 1720). They worked either in their own shops or as laborers in the shops of joiners and cabinetmakers.
The most common type of lathe that turners used was the foot-powered pole lathe, shown in the engraving here. Its simplicity, portability (enabling the turner to work indoors or outdoors) and ease of use (requiring only the labor of the turner) contributed to its popularity. To operate the lathe, the turner wrapped a cord around his workpiece and set the workpiece between two fixed points in the lathe’s frame. He attached the cord’s lower end to a foot treadle and its upper end to the tip of a long, flexible pole suspended from a ceiling joist (when working indoors) or to a springy overhead tree limb (when working outdoors).

When the turner pressed down on the foot treadle, the workpiece spun toward him, pulling the pole down and allowing him to cut with steady pressure, bracing his cutting blade on a rest in front him. When the treadle reached the ground at the bottom of the down-cycle, he backed the cutting blade away from the workpiece and let the treadle up, allowing the pole (or live tree branch) to pull back to its original position and causing the workpiece to spin in reverse. While the lathe ran backwards, the turner could not use his cutting tools. At the top of the up-cycle, he again pressed down on the treadle and cut the workpiece, repeating his stop-and-start motions as many times as necessary to finish the turning.

Turning a split baluster. First the turner cut a square-sectioned workpiece in half lengthwise, and then glued the two halves back together with a thin fillet of wood between them (far left). He then turned a cylinder to the largest diameter of the baluster (second left). Using calipers, he turned the baluster shape (center and center right). The split baluster emerges when the glue is dissolved and the fillet removed (far right). The fillet ensured that the two split balusters were not exactly half-round in section, so they looked better when applied to a flat surface.

Turning tools had handles long enough to be held firmly with both hands against the rest. Turners used three types of blades: V-shaped parting blades, sharpened to a point; U-shaped gouges, beveled on one side and sharpened along their concave edges; and skews with straight edges set at a 30-degree angle, beveled on both sides and sharpened along their straight edges. V-shaped parting blades made narrow, straight cuts and established larger diameters in the design. Gouges shaped rough cuts for smoothing workpieces and defining convex elements in the design. Skews refined straight and gently curved passages and cut sharp details and scribe lines.

Craftsmanship: Veneering

Two highly skilled sawyers cut sheets of veneer, called flitches, from bolts of wood using a large double-ended frame saw with a wide blade especially designed for the task. They could cut flitches as thin as 1/8 of an inch.
The cabinetmaker ran a toothing plane whose blade was edged with small teeth over both sides of the flitch to remove the sawmarks and to rough the back so that it would adhere better when glued to the workpiece. The gaps between the teeth allowed him to run the plane in any direction on the flitch. He also used the toothing plane to rough the surface of the workpiece that would receive the veneer.
He then glued the veneer to the workpiece, using the flat surface of a veneer hammer to ensure even and consistent adhesion. After the glue had cured, he used the flat edge of a scraper to finish removing remnants of glue and to smooth any remaining marks of the toothing plane.
Veneered surfaces were frequently enhanced with patterned banding and inlays. Wood with fine-textured and strongly colored grain was best suited for inlay. Holly was a common choice for line inlay, or stringing, because the fine, even texture allowed workmen to cut and scrape it into very narrow strips. Also, its white color provided an excellent contrast to the surrounding wood in which it was set. Soft maple and birch were also worked into narrow strips and finely detailed shapes and often stained black in imitation of ebony. Holly was particularly suited to dying throughout its thickness by boiling in a vat of dye for an hour or more. This process was necessary for colored elements in patterned inlay to ensure consistent color when sawn from larger glued-up block. Tropical hardwoods such as red-tinted Brazilian Tulipwood, pale yellow Satinwood, mahogany, rosewood, and ebony produced some of the most brilliant naturally-colored inlays.

Sand-shaded veneer
Sand-shading created a three-dimensional effect through the illusion of shadow, and was a popular method of decorating inlay that was set into veneer. It was well suited to fan shapes, particularly quarter fans set into the corners of a surface or circular or oval fans in the center.
The cabinetmaker heated a small container of fine sand, testing its ability to darken a workpiece until it reached the desired temperature. He cut veneer into the desired shape for the inlay and dipped its edge into the hot sand, leaving it for a few seconds, just long enough to scorch its surface. Repeated quick dippings produced a consistently graduated change of color from light to dark. It took skill and careful timing to darken each piece of inlay; the longer it was left it in the sand, the darker it would become.