The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Furniture Finishing

Of the Colonial furniture of Virginia and the South during all three periods we know but little. At Mt. Yernon may be seen a Sheraton chair, a Louis XVI chair, a rush-bottom Jacobean chair and a Windsor chair. For the rest it would seem that no purely local furniture was developed, the wealthy plantation owners importing direct from London and Philadelphia cabinet makers and discarding old styles for new as fast as they appeared. It is interesting in this connection to note that Thomas Jefferson on his estate at Monticello built the first swivel chair and in Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin invented the first rocker.

In respect of finish as in point of design American cabinet makers closely followed contemporary European methods. Modern Colonial mahogany reproductions are stained red or reddish brown and filled to match. Walnut is stained a shade between French and Antique known as American. Birch Windsor chairs are usually stained with brown mahogany oil stain, although originals were for the most part painted black or dark green. Oak is stained Jacobean brown, pine dark brown, gray or ebony black, maple a rich, golden amber. Except for carving decoration took the form of bands or stripes of dull green, red or blue, panels embellished with conventionalized floral groups, yellow or gold on a black or other dark background.

Duncan Phyffe and American Empire (The post colonial period, 1793-1840)


ASIDE from Savery of Philadelphia but one other American cabinet maker executed designs touched by anything like the genius of Chippendale and Sheraton in England. Migrating from Scotland as a boy in 1783, Duncan Phyffe learned his trade at Albany, and on moving to New York a few years later soon attracted attention. He became very prosperous, numbering among his patrons such leading citizens of the new Republic as Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and John Jacob Astor. One of the last of the old time cabinet makers, he saw before his death in 1854, the dawn of the industrial period in furniture manufacture.

At first Phyffe drew for inspiration on Hepplewhite and Sheraton, but with the opening of the nineteenth century, an increasing vogue for things French caused him to combine with his English models elements of Directoire and Napoleonic Empire. Still later, as the latter attained its full flower, he adopted its massive proportions in entirety but much simplified as to ornamentation, and with all of his earlier faithfulness to sound construction and careful selection of woods. Before retiring Phyffe had practically become a manufacturer with his own yard for lumber seasoning and a shop employing as high as a hundred men.