  Every swing in London fashions in clothing, music, wigs, and the decorative arts was normally echoed a few years later by a similar but muted swing in colonial fashions. In each case the peak of the vogue (not necessarily the first evidence of it) in the colonies came a decade or two after the same style had reached its height in London. The eighteenth century was the golden age of furniture design in England. The decorative tastes of the Restoration and of the reign of William and Mary set the stage for the appearance at the opening of the century of the curvaceous style known as Queen Anne. There followed a succession of partly overlapping, sometimes ill-defined and sometimes distinct styles in English furniture design and interior design. These succeeding fashions have since become known by the names of reigning monarchs or of men whose books of collected designs set or summarized the predominant taste of the years in question. We know these styles, and style periods, as early and late Georgian, Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton. In the American colonies the Queen Anne style did not come into full flower until 1725 or thereabouts. The “decorated Queen Anne” or early Georgian substyles cannot be clearly discerned in colonial furniture before the advent of “Chippendale” influence, about 1750, swept all before it. Thomas Chippendale’s famous Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, published in 1754, was but one of a number of books of designs issued in London and widely used in colonial cabinetmaking shops. It was foremost among them, however. And even if such characteristic features of colonial Chippendale as the claw-and-ball foot, for example, do not appear in Chippendale’s book, his name has become a label—perhaps ill-fitting—for the whole middle period of colonial furniture making. Chairs. Three design chairs—the one to the right offering alternative treatments of certain details—from Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director: Being a large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture, in the Most Fashionable Taste. (Third edition, London, 1762) This period lasted through the Revolution; the wartime breach of relations with England all but cut off the transfer to America of the Adam style that was the rage of London Throughout the century, too, some regional differences can be discerned. New England followed old England in social customs and tastes but with a tinge of stateliness and a restraint of design in furniture that may have had distant Puritan ancestry. In New York, certainly, the ideas of the original Dutch settlers persisted in coloring later English influences in matters of taste. German immigrants to Pennsylvania brought sturdy non-English preferences to the areas they settled outside Philadelphia. The city itself, of course, always remained a cosmopolitan center—if a somewhat sober one—whose furniture showed the English origins of many of its chief makers. The southern colonies, and particularly Virginia, were more closely tied to the mother country in sentiment and economy than were the others. Virginians, therefore, probably mirrored English tastes more faithfully than many of their compatriots. |
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