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The First Joiner
How early is the first known use of the mortise
and tenon joint? Tudor? Medieval? Think earlier, much earlier.
According to William Bryant Evans in his
book Oak, the Frame of Civilization (an excellent read, by the
way), the first known example
of a mortise and tenon was in a small pergola-like structure, probably
a temple, that was framed in oak in Holland in about 1475 B.C.
The joint was really quite complex, with the tenon on the post
and mortises in each of the two beams it supported.
Oak, of course,
is what we’re all most interested in, but if we change the
material to stone, then Stonehenge (2,500 – 2,000 B.C.) comes
out a clear winner. The uprights all ended in large tenons that
fitted into mortises carved into the lower edges of the horizontals.
It makes us wonder how some of those top stones got knocked off. That indefatigable traveler and diarist, Celia Fiennes (pronounced
Fines, incidentally), rode side-saddle to Stonehenge in the 1680s
and noted in her diary:
The good Celia was correct: there are 91 stones, but her fellow
diarist John Evelyn counted 95, Daniel Defoe 72, and another
contemporary, a Lieutenant Hammond, counted 90. We visited Stonehenge
last April,
but forgot to count! Sorry about that.
Celia’s observations on the
gardens and the interiors of the houses that she visits on her
travels through England are of
enormous interest, and her breathless prose (most of the little
punctuation that there is has been added by her modern editor!)
sweeps us along. She’s a good companion for a winter evening. The edition I like is Christopher Morris (Ed.), The Illustrated
Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685 – c. 1712. MacDonald,
London, 1982.
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The
Swansong of the Carver
We bought a couple of walnut caned chairs
recently. What a pity, I thought, as I sat and admired them,
that carving as good as this
should be the end of the line. There was none of the tiredness
or decadence that are typical of the late examples of a style that
was once dominant. Not at all. It was exuberant, confident and
flowed freely -– as good as you’ll find anywhere on
English seventeenth-century furniture.
But it was the swansong. As the
century drew to its close, the “in” look
was that of walnut veneer: carved oak was so passé. Veneering, of course,
required the smooth surfaces produced by the new cabinetmaker and his dovetails:
you can inlay joinery, but you can’t veneer it. Cabinetmakers preferred
walnut and, later, mahogany: the oak that built seventeenth-century England –- its
houses, ships and furniture -- was relegated to the unseen secondary wood,
and sometimes rejected entirely in favor of Baltic deal.
Now, we mustn’t allow oaken nostalgia to blind us to the beauty of walnut,
particularly seventeenth-century English walnut with the dramatic color-contrasts
and curving lines of the veneers cut from the branches and crotches of the
tree, and the swirls and curls of the burl cut from its roots. I’ve heard
a theory that the strongly marked figuring of this early walnut was the hallmark
of first-growth English trees that had grown slowly during the mini-ice age
in the fifteenth century. Whatever the reason, these English walnuts, grown
at the northern edge of the trees’ habitat, produced a far, far more
interesting timber than the French and Virginian walnuts that replaced them
in the early eighteenth century: they had grown faster in warmer climes, so
their grain was straighter, more open, and more boring.
The carving on these chairs, to
return from our walnut digression, took traditional carving a step
or two into the new styles of
Restoration England. It still
showed the economic naivety (the ability to get the maximum effect from the
fewest strokes of the chisel) that characterized the work of earlier carvers -– and
of folk art in general. But it was more naturalistic, and rounded, not flat
carved, so that it gave the impression of bas relief. It wasn’t, because
it was carved into the surface, like the traditional flat carving, whereas
bas relief protrudes above it. The common motifs of the cherub and the unadorned
S-curve came from continental Baroque, not English mannerism. The laurel
wreaths on one chair are purely Roman, not mannerist, but on the other their
place
in the design is occupied by a very English motif, the Tudor rose. The crown
of course in these “boyes and crowne” chairs, as they were called,
celebrates the Restoration.
The hoof feet with hairy ankles
on one of the chairs are particularly interesting. They derive
from the goat feet of the Roman satyrs,
and they look forward
to the cabriole leg that was just beginning to sweep every other form of
chair
leg out of sight. The form came from China but it was quickly adopted into
European traditions. The earliest cabriole legs sometimes had goats’ feet,
and the word itself means “the leap of the goat” -– a meaning
it still retains in ballet in the leap called the capriole.
There was still so much vitality and adaptability in traditional
English carving at the end of the century that it really didn’t deserve to become as
rapidly and completely extinct as it did. But at least its finale was a high,
sustained note, not a slow fade.
P.S.
The Antiquarians among you may be interested in some early references
to caned chairs:
The earliest occurs in the inventory of Robert Mannynge, of Holborn,
1674: “2 elboe chairs canne botham.”
In 1667, Richard Price of London delivered to Charles II one “Elbowe
Chaire of wallnutt Cutt with scrowles all over.”
In 1686 an invoice from his widow, Elizabeth Price, to the Royal
Household included “[8 elbowe chaires of] Wallnuttree Carved
with Boyes and Crownes att 12s.”
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Does
Anyone Here Speak Latten?
At a recent show, we saw two early spoons that were described
as made of latten. One was tinned brass and the other was of a
dark, brownish-yellow metal. They were clearly not the same, and
we all sat down to puzzle out what exactly was latten? Bronze?
Brass? Bell metal? Or something in between? At the end of the discussion,
we were as confused as at the beginning.
Back home, a quick search in our library and a
few minutes googling suggested that confusion was a justifiable
state of mind.
Wikipedia (trust it or not) told us: “Latten” refers
loosely to copper alloys, much like brass, employed in the Middle
Ages and through to the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, for
items such as decorative effect on borders, rivets or other details
of metalwork (particularly armour) and for funerary effigies. It
was commonly formed in thin sheets and used to make church utensils. "Latten" also
refers to a type of tin plating on iron (or possibly some other
base metal), which is known as white latten; and black latten refers
to latten-brass, which is brass milled into thin plates or sheets.
In general, metal in thin sheets is said to be latten such as gold
latten; and lattens, plural, refers to metal sheets between 1/64" and
1/32" in thickness.”
In Old Domestic Base-Metal Candlesticks (1978),
Roger Michaelis claims that “References to latten in historical
records probably relate to the copper-tin alloy of approx 66% copper
to the balance
of tin and zinc combined, or was applied indiscriminately to almost
any yellowish alloy of copper and white metal; in later years,
however, it came to be used to designate true brass (i.e., copper
and calamine, or copper and zinc), and should be looked upon today
as a synonym for brass.”
In our opinion, the most convincing account
is in John Caspall’s
Fire and Light in the Home pre-1820 (1987): “Brass
continued to be imported into Britain principally in the form
of ingot and
latten sheets from ... Dinant. Indeed, Edward III in 1329 actively
encouraged this vital source of latten by permitting … merchants
of Dinant to establish a 'battery' in London. Here
the imported ingot brass was cold hammered into latten, or sheets
of about 1/8th inch thickness. The beaten latten was then … made
available for sale to the British craftsman brass workers.”
Rupert Gentle and Rachel Field in their
classic Domestic Metalwork, 1640-1820 (1975; revised
1994) agree with Caspall: “Brass
in sheets, probably owing its name to the French laiton.
The form in which brass was first imported into England. Sometimes
known
as “metal prepared,” latten was the name used to distinguish
thin sheets of brass which had been hand hammered from cast plates
of brass.”
So there we have it. Latten is not a specific
metal or an alloy, but is the form in which the workman obtained
his brass. Perhaps
we should stop using the word, and stick with brass, bronze or
bell metal about which there is little confusion. “Tinned
brass” seems much better than “white latten.”
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