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By
Dr Eurwyn Wiliam
Director
of Collections & Research and
Deputy
Director General Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales
The
sole precursor of this work, in 1950, was L. Twiston-Davies and H. J.
Lloyd-Johnes's Welsh Furniture. An introduction. That volume
established the seminal and long-held view that until the eighteenth
century most Welsh people were content to make do with locally-made
furniture, regrettably out of fashion as it may have been. This view
reflected the then-prevailing model of cultural diffusion, with
innovations being introduced in the centres of power and fashion -
normally in London - and then spreading like ripples in a pond to the
outer reaches of these islands, there to be copied, as well as they
could, by the peasantry. Today we would say that form is defined by
function - milking stools had three legs not because their makers
were behind the fashion but because three legs were better suited to
the uneven floor of a cowshed. Similarly, dressers need not
necessarily have derived solely from the high-status court cupboard,
for examples are known from the Neolithic site of Skara Brae (in
stone, for there was little timber).
The
first comprehensive modern study of British furniture was Victor
Chinnery's Oak Furniture. The British Tradition. (1979). Over 50
Welsh pieces were illustrated and described in this substantial
volume, most in the national collection housed at St Fagans. However,
Chinnery's views still reflected those of Twiston-Davies and
Lloyd-Johnes. Whilst acknowledging that much quality furniture
survived in Wales, he felt that many of the better pieces were of
English or Anglo-French manufacture, and that the rest were often
late ('retarded') versions of English types. The one saving grace was
'The fact that few conclusions are yet available as to the precise
character of Welsh joinery and carving is emphatically not to suggest
that there was no furniture of quality in Wales before c. 1680; only
that it lacks a proper study'. Which brings us to today&ldots;.
But
a number of important studies were published in the meantime. Bernard
Cotton's The English Regional Chair showed that vernacular
chair-making traditions had appeared in many if not all regions by
the mid-eighteenth century, and that wood-turners were as important
as carpenters in their creation, since the commonest type of seat was
not a Chippendale derivative but rather the rush-seated chair.
Christopher Gilbert's comprehensive English Vernacular Furniture
1750-1900 included items made for workhouses, chapels and ships as
well as for homes, and put far more emphasis on use and context than
on details of manufacture. Claudia Kinmouth's Irish Country Furniture
1750-1950 dispelled the myth that nothing survived of Irish furniture
from before the Great Famine, but sadly had to note that many of the
most elaborate examples of Irish furniture had been stripped of their
original paintwork and exported since the 1960s.
In
Wales, there has latterly been a flowering of interest in the study
of vernacular architecture and native art. For the former, there are
now Pevsner guides for all the Welsh counties apart from Gwynedd, and
the Royal Commission continues to follow in Peter Smith's footsteps,
most recently with its exemplary study of Radnorshire houses. Peter
Lord, single-handedly, has redefined how we look at Welsh art.
Industrial history has been equally well-served again by the Royal
Commission, and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales has
re-presented all its industrial sites. The Museum is now updating its
interpretation of Welsh life at St Fagans, and will in time tell
there the story of Wales from prehistory to the present day, whilst
giving enhanced prominence to Welsh art at National Museum Cardiff.
Welsh
Furniture 1250-1950 sits perfectly within this canon of new work,
and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales is delighted to be
associated with it. From its early days, with the creation of the
iconic 'Welsh Kitchen' by Cyril Fox in 1926 and the subsequent
appointment of Iorwerth Peate to lead a new department (later museum)
charged, inter alia, with the preservation and presentation in
context of appropriate examples, the Museum has been deeply
interested in Welsh furniture. But it has perhaps been more
interested in a holistic view of Welsh culture rather than in the
detailed study of any one component (though with some outstanding
contributions in studying the minutiae also), and that is one reason
why this study chimes so well with the work done at St Fagans.
Richard
Bebb's work is a tour de force, and its breadth is astonishing. The
statistics alone are impressive: 750 pages and over 1,500
illustrations - mostly commissioned specifically - and sixteen years
of study. The time-scale studied is wider than the norm; by 450
years, and the story is brought up to 1950. But all this would have
been meaningless if the author did not have a tale to tell. Rest
assured, he does, for not only has he examined personally thousands
of pieces of furniture and hundreds of documents, but he has created
from it all a record worthy of his labours. This is not just the
history of furniture, but of society in the round. Rejoice, too, for
the peasants have revolted! The bastille of complacency and arrogance
that has surrounded furniture studies in Wales has been breached.
'Country furniture' now emblazons a banner that can be waved proudly,
another definer of nationhood. We were not 'retarded'; our rural
ancestors were as capable of innovation and development as their
metropolitan cousins: it only needed a different lens to see it. And
Richard Bebb has here provided magnificently that clean, new lens.
But
a more measured conclusion may be called for. Here it is. In their
preface to Benno Forman's American Seating Furniture 1630-1730,
Robert Blair St George and Robert F. Trent summarised, as they saw
it, the conflicting roles of the traditional furniture historian and
the ethnologist: 'The obligation of the connoisseur was to pronounce
transcendental judgement; the duty of the contextual historian of
furniture was to reconstruct the systems of fashion, transmission,
and replication that framed an object as it moved through a specific
social structure. Whither lieth the truth?'
For
us in Wales, and for those beyond, henceforth surely the truth lieth
in these magisterial pages. |
