The Cabinetmaker
in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg
Illustrated capital T
The most historic piece of furniture in historic Williamsburg today is the throne-like Speaker’s Chair that stands in the far end of the House of Burgesses.
It is the very same chair that stood there when the portly Peyton Randolph was speaker of the House, and men like George Mason and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry raised aloft in that chamber the banner of human liberty.
The same chair was probably there in 1759, too, when a newly elected burgess stood in his place to receive the plaudits of the House for his bravery in the French and Indian War. From it Speaker John Robinson came to the embarrassed young man’s rescue with the words: “Sit down, Mr. Washington; your modesty is equal to your valour, and that surpasses the power of any language I possess.”
Perhaps the Speaker’s Chair was among the “several other things” that were saved—along with the colony’s records and the portraits of the royal family—when flames gutted the Capitol in 1747. If so, this chair may be the very one installed when the Capitol building was first completed in 1705. The Assembly had specified that the burgesses’ chamber should “be furnished with a large Armed Chair for the Speaker to sit in, and a cushion stuft with hair Suitable to it.”
Because of these historic associations the Speaker’s Chair may seem a most fitting key to open this account of furniture making in colonial Williamsburg. Its true aptness to the topic, however, lies in other circumstances: No one knows who made the chair or where it was made or even when it was made. And this kind of uncertainty pervades the entire subject of cabinetmaking in eighteenth-century Virginia.
A sketch of the Speaker’s Chair, reproduced full size from the 1777 journal of Ebenezer Hazard, a New England bookseller, historian, and surveyor general of the Post Office.
To continue for a moment with the same example, the Speaker’s Chair has the kind of scrolled arms frequently found on William and Mary furniture—a style that in 1700 was passing out of fashion in England. Its simple cabriole legs, with smooth knees and round feet, are typical of the early Queen Anne style just then coming into English fashion. The chair bears an overall resemblance, furthermore, to the one that stood in the House of Commons, as shown in contemporary prints. Finally, a great many items for the construction and furnishing of the Williamsburg Capitol were ordered from London.
All these circumstances give strong reason to think that the chair came from England. But they do not prove that it did. In fact, the stylistic concepts and the workmanship are such as might well have come from the shop of a Williamsburg cabinetmaker endeavoring, after the fire of 1747, to reproduce the original chair from memory.
The fact that it is constructed in part of American black walnut might seem to prove that the chair was made, if not in Williamsburg, at least in the American colonies. Unfortunately, it proves nothing of the kind. Because, among other reasons, they had found the American variety less susceptible to “the worm” than English walnut, English cabinetmakers preferred the American wood and used it extensively.
