Anderson on Marblehead Furniture Makers and Buyers, 26 Mar.

On Thursday, 26 March, at 7:00 P.M. the Salem Maritime National Historic Site in Salem will host a free talk by Judy Anderson on “Eighteenth-Century Furniture Craftsmanship and Patronage in Marblehead.”

This talk was inspired by the Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibit of work by the Salem cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould, which closes on 29 March. As noted back here, when genealogist Joyce King and furniture expert Kemble Widmer spotted Gould’s account books in the papers of his attorney at the Massachusetts Historical Society, they were able to match existing examples of Gould’s work with specific sales, shedding new light on both his business and his art.

One of Gould’s most important clients in the years just before the Revolutionary War was the wealthy merchant Jeremiah Lee, who was furnishing his home across the harbor in Marblehead. Anderson has been curator of the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, and in 2003 she collaborated with Widmer on a study of his town’s cabinetmakers. Her fully illustrated talk will explore furniture craftsmanship and patronage in Gould’s time. It includes “some remarkable surprises uncovered by the Gould research and several stories of compelling social history.”

Anderson will deliver the same talk on Friday, 27 March, at 11:00 A.M. at the Salem Athenaeum. For that event, she suggests $5 or $10 donations to benefit the Athenaeum.

Nathaniel Gould Furniture Exhibit in Salem, Starting 15 Nov.

On 15 November, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem opens a new exhibit called “In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould.” The museum explains:

At the dawn of the American Revolution in a city bustling with trade, politics and commerce, a craftsman of unusual ability was working tirelessly to create fine furniture for his wealthy patrons. Nathaniel Gould (1734-1781) established one of the region’s most sought-after workshops, producing thousands of technically sophisticated and aesthetically refined works for clients at home and for export. With an astute business sense, Gould thrived in one of the most tumultuous political and economic eras in American history.

Despite all of this, until recently, Gould’s life and legacy was largely unknown. Masterworks sat in anonymity in the halls of major museum collections, unsigned by their maker and identified only vaguely by their geographic origin. In 2006, everything changed. In the vaults of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among the records of Gould’s estate lawyer, researchers discovered documents that cast fresh light on — and forever enhance our understanding of — American furniture history.

Three of Gould’s bound ledgers kept between 1758 and 1783 document in detail the production of almost 3,000 pieces of furniture in his Salem workshop. Painstaking analysis has revealed the identity, preferences and transactions of more than 500 of Gould’s patrons as well as the names of his journeymen and probable apprentices. This veritable data dump of information has led museums, antique collectors and the general public to examine their collections with fresh eyes and piqued interest. Works whose significance was obfuscated by the passage of time and lack of provenance are now being reconsidered and reappraised.

The exhibition includes “Stately desks, bombé chests and scalloped-top tea tables made of the finest imported mahogany…alongside paintings, archival materials, decorative arts and an interactive workbench and desk.”

Even the press release is full of intriguing details:

• “Gould’s work is distinguished by its careful attention to graining, distinctive carved ball-and-claw feet, extended knee returns and superbly carved pinwheels and scallop seashells.”
• “Gould built his career on his ability to translate London’s latest designs — sometimes gleaned from British pattern books, including Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Director — into a more conservative style that pleased the tastes of the region’s wealthy elite.
• “The Gould ledgers reveal a high percentage of domestic furniture produced to fill wedding orders, mostly from members of the merchant class.”
• “His ledgers reveal 616 pieces of furniture that were sold in the Caribbean and of this inventory, 62 percent were desks, half of which were made of cedar — an aromatic wood prized for its ability to deter insects in the semitropical regions.”

The exhibit is scheduled to be up at the P.E.M. until March.

Finding Nathaniel Gould’s Account Books

Last week the Boston Globe and New York Times both reported, in their different ways, on the discovery of the account books of Salem cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould (1734–1781). Gould’s furniture is distinct and highly valued, but without his business records it’s been impossible for furniture historians to be sure of how many pieces he made and where they went. Now “three vellum-bound books...with lists of names, dates and prices scrawled on foot-tall sheets of rag paper” are answering lots of questions.

Had those account books been squirreled away in some descendant’s attic, or lost in the bowels of a small, underfunded local history association? No, they were in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, one of the country’s best and busiest. Specifically, in the papers of Salem lawyer Nathan Dane. In 1990 archivist Brenda M. Lawson catalogued them as “3 account books of client Nathaniel Gould (1758-81).”

In other words, these sources weren’t hidden at all. They just weren’t in a place where furniture experts would look for them. And the legal scholars who study the Dane collection had no reason to recognize their significance for folks in another field.

But Google’s search algorithm doesn’t care about scholarly disciplines as long as it finds the right characters. The M.H.S. put its finding aid for the Dane papers online in March 2005. Two years later, researcher Joyce King of Wakefield ran a Google search for Gould’s name, spotted the link, and told Newburyport furniture historian Kemble Widmer, “This may be important.” King and Widmer are publishing their findings in American Furniture.

Above is a desk and bookcase from Gould’s workshop, now featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s actually signed “Nath Gould not his work”—perhaps a signal that he didn’t get his own hands dirty on it, but offered genteel supervision to craftsmen working for him. Gould’s accounts show that he sold such a piece to Jeremiah Lee of Marblehead on 9 Apr 1775, nine days before Lee would be hiding in a cold field in Cambridge, fearing arrest by British officers.