Rhode Island gets its due

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Thanks to an active export market that sent its wares to the southern colonies, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, furniture makers of Rhode Island enjoyed an influence far greater than their industry’s small size. The region’s superlative, and often misattributed, craftsmanship from the colonial and early Federal periods is the focus of a new exhibition, Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830, at the Yale University Art Gallery. It is the culmination of more than a decade of research, writing, and mining material culture, helmed by Patricia E. Kane, the Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts. More than 130 objects and pieces of furniture will be on display, including high chests, chairs, bureau tables, desks, desk-and-bookcases, and clocks, which have been culled from different cultural institutions and private collections. The exhibition presents the most sweeping survey of its kind since the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Loan Exhibition of Rhode Island Furniture in 1965.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easy chair upholstered by Caleb Gardner Jr., Newport, Rhode Island, 1758. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. J. Insley Blair.

Desk-and-bookcase attributed to Daniel Spencer, Providence, Rhode Island, 1772–1790. Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection.

Card table attributed to James Halyburton, Warren, Rhode Island, 1795–1800. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Peter and Daphne Farago Purchase Fund.

Much attention is paid to furniture production in the region’s two major port towns and production hubs, Newport and Providence, as evidenced by a number of handsome pieces on view, such as a walnut easy chair made by an unknown artisan and upholstered by Caleb Gardner Jr. and a mahogany and American black cherry desk-and-bookcase attributed to Daniel Spencer. The exhibition, however, broadens its scope to include works that hail from Rhode Island’s smaller, lesser-known towns, such as Bristol, Westerly, and Warren, as well as pieces created solely for export.

The exhaustive catalogue, like the exhibition, not only recounts the history of and rise and fall of handcrafted furniture production in early Rhode Island over the course of roughly two centuries, but also examines the role of furniture makers in the local and international economy.

Taking scholarship on the subject one step further, the Yale University Art Gallery has launched the Rhode Island Furniture Archive, a website dedicated to the documentation of more than three thousand pieces of furniture and eighteen hundred furniture makers in Rhode Island from 1636 through the early nineteenth century. The site is a critical resource for chronicling the astounding breadth of styles, materials, and skills that came out of the region, and hence providing significant context and details for understanding furniture making in this small but robust pocket of  New England.

Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830 • Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut • to January 8, 2017 • artgallery.yale.edu

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