American Fancy
American Fancy

Author: Sumpter T. Priddy

Publisher: Chipstone Foundation/Milwaukee Art Museum

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780972435390

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Between 1790 and 1840, millions of middle-class Americans throughout the nation encountered "Fancy": they rode in a Fancy sleigh, dressed up in Fancy clothes, blew their noses in Fancy handkerchiefs, bought goods at Fancy shops, ate at Fancy tables on Fancy dishes, and slept under Fancy coverlets. Not just fancy but Fancy: an early nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon born out of new and enlightened ways of seeing, understanding, and responding to the surrounding world. Fancy expressed itself in just about everything that pleased the senses; generally colorful and boldly patterned, it elicited delight, awe, surprise, whim, and caprice. Whether experienced in the form of painted surfaces, kaleidoscopic quilts, or imaginary landscapes, Fancy engaged the emotions and expanded the imagination, expressing the core of human fancy. "American Fancy" offers an appropriately fantastic experience of this uniquely American sensibility. Author Sumpter Priddy has assembled and produced an original oeuvre in the field of decorative arts, going beyond the traditional modes of furniture analysis, which concentrate on style, history, and construction, to consider the perceptual and emotional responses through which the original users and viewers would have interacted with these material things. To this end he employs the interpretive methods used in the fields of literature, fine arts, philosophy and even psychology. Rich, fully illustrated, wondrously researched, and bound in a cover that imitates a typical Fancy pattern, "American Fancy" does its marvelous subject true.

If These Pots Could Talk
If These Pots Could Talk

Author: Ivor Noël Hume

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13:

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Lively prose and wonderful color photographs portray a veteran's passion for British household pottery.

The Artisan of Ipswich
The Artisan of Ipswich

Author: Robert Tarule

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-10-15

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1421405857

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Thomas Dennis emigrated to America from England in 1663, settling in Ipswich, a Massachusetts village a long day's sail north of Boston. He had apprenticed in joinery, the most common method of making furniture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, and he became Ipswich's second joiner, setting up shop in the heart of the village. During his lifetime, Dennis won wide renown as an artisan. Today, connoisseurs judge his elaborately carved furniture as among the best produced in seventeenth-century America. Robert Tarule, historian and accomplished craftsman, brilliantly recreates Dennis's world in recounting how he created a single oak chest. Writing as a woodworker himself, Tarule vividly portrays Dennis walking through the woods looking for the right trees; sawing and splitting the wood on site; and working in his shop on the chest—planing, joining, and carving. Dennis inherited a knowledge of wood and woodworking that dated back centuries before he was born, and Tarule traces this tradition from Old World to New. He also depicts the natural and social landscape in which Dennis operated, from the sights, sounds, and smells of colonial Ipswich and its surrounding countryside to the laws that governed his use of trees and his network of personal and professional relationships. Thomas Dennis embodies a world that had begun to disappear even during his lifetime, one that today may seem unimaginably distant. Imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed, The Artisan of Ipswich gives readers a tangible understanding of that distant past.

The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs
The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs

Author: Joseph Cunningham

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13:

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Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936) ranked among the most innovative furniture makers at the turn of the twentieth century. Praised by the international press and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, his beautiful works grew out of an interesting mix of styles that included Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and proto-modernism. This book presents the first major study of this important American designer and craftsman, drawing upon new photographs and fresh sources of information. Alongside traditional historical approaches, the book presents detailed formal, structural, and stylistic analyses of Rohlfs's well-known masterpieces from major museums, together with lesser-known objects in public and private collections. Topics include discovering the contribution of Rohlfs's wife--mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green--to his designs; the far-ranging sources of his idiosyncratic motifs; his influence on Gustav Stickley's designs; his commissioned interiors; his efforts at self-promotion and marketing; and his attempts to define a conceptual framework for his artistic endeavor. Handsomely designed and illustrated, the book also features a complete set of unpublished period illustrations of over seventy works.

Chair
Chair

Author: Galen Cranz

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780393319552

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Traces the history of the chair and provides guidelines to assist the reader in choosing a chair that suits one's body.

Ceramics in America 2020
Ceramics in America 2020

Author: Robert Hunter

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780986385780

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The 2020 volume of Ceramics in America is a celebration of the depth and diversity of ceramics in the American context. Beautifully illustrated articles explore the use of clay from the most basic building bricks to refined earthenwares promoting the political and economic issues of the American Revolution. Of special interest is the origin of the ceramic manufacturing spark in America, looking at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia cited by historians and connoisseurs as the height of recognition of achievement for ceramic production in the United States. The archaeological discovery of rare "black delft" teapot fragments from Charleston's Drayton Hall is recounted in an exciting collector's narrative. Other articles will include a profile of North Carolina potter David Stuempfle who continues the old-age tradition of producing wood fired stoneware, a study of Thomas Jefferson's Chinese porcelain, and Pueblo pottery collected by a German Museum in the early twentieth century.

American Furniture 2009
American Furniture 2009

Author: Luke Beckerdite

Publisher: American Furniture Annual

Published: 2010-01-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780976734451

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An annual publication forging a link between social history, American studies, and the decorative arts.

American Furniture at Chipstone
American Furniture at Chipstone

Author: Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

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A lavish presentation of this fine Milwaukee collection. Two hundred pieces of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century American furniture. Each entry includes all known information about the particular object's history, cost, design sources, regional origin and unique qualities, as well as a photograph of the piece and a description of its salient construction features. Complimenting this rich catalogue are two essays. The first summarizes stylistic developments in the period 1680-1820 and seeks to place the Stone collection in historical perspective. The second, by Stanley Stone himself, discusses a personal approach to collecting that mixes obvious aesthetic joy and keen judgment--two qualities everywhere evident in this remarkable collection.