Newport's furniture-design revolutionary finds a showcase at the Met in New York

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, May 22, 2005

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

NEW YORK -- He signed his name with the same confident, even cocky, flair as another John: John Hancock. But don't look for his signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Instead, as chronicled in a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this John -- John Townsend of Newport, R.I. -- signed his name to some of the finest desks, tables and chairs ever crafted by an American furniture-maker.

Granted, that may not be news to Rhode Islanders, who are used to hearing experts extol the virtues of furniture from Newport's fabled Townsend-Goddard workshop. But the Met show, "John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker," isn't just another "Greatest Hits" survey of early American (or even early Newport) furniture.

Based on the latest scholarship, the show and its accompanying catalog make a strong case for Newport as the birthplace of America's first truly homegrown design movement.

Newport cabinetmakers, it seems, were more likely than their counterparts in Boston and Philadelphia to tinker with prevailing British designs, altering proportions and adding new motifs -- notably rows of alternating concave and convex scallop shells -- that made their designs at once more striking and harmonious.

The result: Quaint Newport, not wealthy Boston or cosmopolitan Philadelphia, wins bragging rights as the cradle of American furniture design.

What's more, the show argues that John Townsend was the most talented and innovative of the Townsend-Goddard furniture-makers. That's a change from traditional scholarship, which has long regarded Townsend's cousin-in-law, John Goddard, as the mastermind behind the Townsend-Goddard dynasty.

If the show's organizers are right, it was John Townsend, not John Goddard, who introduced a number of distinctive features to Newport furniture, including the ball-and-claw foot (a design element Townsend borrowed, then tweaked to perfection) and the convex-concave shell pattern (believed to be a Townsend innovation). He was also a relentless perfectionist whose design skills, woodworking prowess and labor-intensive construction methods left most of his rivals far behind.

60-plus pieces

To make the case that Townsend was, in effect, the Michelangelo of early American furniture, Met curator Morrison H. Heckscher and his assistant, Lori Zabar, have assembled more than 60 examples of early American furniture, including some 40 works either signed by or attributed to Townsend.

Many are from the Met's own collection, but there are also some major loans. Among them: a circa-1760 mahogany document chest (now owned by the Wisconsin-based Chipstone Foundation) believed to be Townsend's first use of the alternating scallop shell pattern and a 1765 "fall-front" desk (on loan from the U.S. State Department) decorated with the three largest shells Townsend ever carved.

Rhode Island institutions are also well-represented.

A majestic chest-on-chest, thought to be one of Townsend's late masterworks, is on loan from the RISD Museum. Other works, including another fall-front desk, an elegant maple-and-mahogany side chair and a "tea board" (basically, a wooden tea platter), hail from the Newport Restoration Foundation and Redwood Library.

The show also highlights the work of Townsend's contemporaries, including several pieces by other members of the Townsend-Goddard clan.

Perhaps the most striking is a massive desk and bookcase made by Townsend's father, Christopher Townsend (1701-1787). Built around 1750, and now in a private collection, it towers over the rest of the exhibit like a skyscraper in a residential neighborhood. (If the NBA's reigning beanpole, Yao Ming, ever needs a writing table, this is it.)

Interestingly, scholars know that Christopher Townsend made this particular piece because his looping signature appears on the bottom of one of the desk's lower drawers. Apparently, signing one's work was a Townsend trademark.

A design prodigy

Though parts of the show are clearly aimed at a scholarly audience (one display invites viewers to compare different types of dovetail joints), even non-specialists should be able to follow its main themes.

One is the development of John Townsend's own furniture-making style, beginning with his earliest known work: a drop-leaf dining table from 1756. Though Townsend was only 24 at the time, the table's elegant proportions and boldly sculpted ball-and-claw feet -- believed to be the first appearance of this motif in Newport furniture -- testify to his precocious skills as both a carver and a designer.

Precocious, too, is Townsend's signature, which fills virtually the entire underside of the table's center section. Clearly, this was one cabinetmaker determined to escape the anonymity that awaited most Colonial-era artisans.

Another table, a mahogany card table dated 1762, is even better.

Though physically smaller than the dining table, it cuts an even more impressive figure, thanks to its thick block-front top and sturdy yet elegant cabriole legs. Completed when Townsend was only 30, it's as much sculpture as it is furniture. (Townsend apparently thought so highly of the piece, he signed and dated it twice -- once on the back rail and again on one of the supporting cross-braces.)

Trademark shells

The show also tracks the development of Townsend's most distinctive design innovation: the alternating convex-concave scallop shell pattern.

Like the ball-and-claw foot, the scallop shell was a familiar design element in European and American furniture long before it ever appeared in Newport. But it wasn't until Townsend and other Newport furniture-makers combined it with another 18th-century innovation -- the so-called "block-front" style pioneered by Boston-area cabinetmakers -- that the scallop shell truly came into its own.

The beginnings of this style, known as "block and shell," can be seen in the great desk and bookcase designed by Christopher Townsend.

Rather than treating the scallop shell as a single stand-alone element, Townsend placed it at the top of the raised slats or "blocks" that form the desk's two upper doors. The result is a much more dynamic composition, with the shell's fan-shape outline echoing both the desk's curved cabriole legs and arching scroll-shape top.

John Townsend took this innovation a step further.

Beginning around 1760, he began experimenting with a new form, in which chests, desks and other large furniture pieces were divided into three vertical sections, each topped with a dramatically carved scallop shell. For even larger pieces, such as desk-bookcases and chest-on-chests, Townsend simply doubled the formula, adding three blocks and three shells to both the bottom and the top.

Another Townsend innovation -- the use of alternating convex and concave blocks and shells -- completed the effect.

The block-and-shell style proved to be so popular that it became one of the hallmarks of Newport-made furniture. Even Townsend, restless as he was in other respects, continued turning out block-and-shell pieces throughout his career.

But Townsend wasn't done yet.

In what may be the show's most surprising section, Heckscher and Zabar demonstrate that Townsend's work continued to grow and evolve well into the so-called Federal Period of the 1780s and '90s. During these years, Townsend adopted a more linear style that reflected the post-Revolutionary vogue for the classical designs of ancient Greece.

Though not as flamboyant as his block-and-shell pieces, these later works introduce a flurry of new design features, including slim, tapering legs, inlaid decorative patterns and neo-classical columns and pediments.

A down note

Sadly, after the cocky swagger of Townsend's youth and the brilliant craftsmanship of his middle age, the show ends on something of a down note.

Townsend's last known commission -- a suite of shield-back dining chairs -- is little more than a knockoff of a popular Federal Style chair pattern. Dated 1800 (and completed nine years before Townsend's death in 1809 at age 76), these handsome but otherwise unremarkable chairs could be the work of almost any talented cabinetmaker. Townsend's own unique genius is nowhere in evidence.

Despite the focus on John Townsend, the show and its catalog also shed new light on the entire Townsend-Goddard clan, as well as the city in which they worked. For example, it's wrong to speak of a single Townsend-Goddard "workshop"; instead, members of the Townsend and Goddard families were involved in a number of different furniture-making ventures spanning nearly six generations.

The clan's patriarch, Solomon Townsend, moved to Newport from Long Island in 1707. He was followed by two sons, Job (1699-1765) and Christopher, both hugely talented furniture-makers who helped propel Newport -- and the Townsend name -- to the top rung of early American furniture production.

By the 1750s, more than half a dozen Townsends and Goddards were active in Newport's bustling furniture industry, much of it centered in the city's Point section and fueled by the so-called Triangle Trade in slaves, rum and molasses. (Access to cheap mahogany, a Caribbean hardwood that became the medium of choice for Newport cabinetmakers, was another byproduct of the slave trade.)

Of this third generation of Newport cabinetmakers, the two outstanding figures are John Townsend (Christopher's oldest son) and John Goddard (1724-1785), who married Job Townsend's youngest daughter, Hannah.

Though both were brilliant, it was Goddard, Townsend's elder by 11 years, who tended to attract wealthier clients and higher-profile commissions. (Goddard, for example, made the famous six-shell desk-bookcase for Providence merchant Nicholas Brown. Sold by the Brown family in 1989, the desk still holds the record -- $12.1 million -- for a piece of American furniture at auction.)

Now we know Goddard wasn't the only genius in the family.

"John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker" continues through Sept. 25 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. Admission is $15, $10 for seniors, $7 for students. For more information, call (212) 535-7710 or go to www.metmuseum.org.