Rustic Furniture

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Bench ends are laid out as mirror images on a grid. Half-lap joints are notched with a bow saw, making all square, level,
and plumb.

Rails and braces are power-screwed to each end and redwood seat slats are carefully nailed on.

An early deal table and benches or a woven rush-seat chair is four-square, undecorated, and utilitarian. What embellishment peeks through is grudging—a knot enlivening the surface of a handplaned sideboard was endured as an intrusion of imperfect nature on the work of man. If it was not filed down to a civil smoothness, it was not from lack of will but because the time, energy, or tools were lacking. And when the homestead was established and crops were paying off, the good folks sent off for factory-made bedsteads, chairs, and tables and relegated the old rustic furniture to the barn loft.

The crude furniture of saplings, twigs, and bark that embody "the rustic tradition" did not originate with rustic people who yearned for the accoutrements of civilization but became a fashion with urbanites who had never experienced the hard freedoms of life on the frontier—civilized urbanites longing for wildness and rustic virtue.

Evolution of the Rustic Tradition

By the late 1700s, the frontier was but a memory, many generations past for America's affluent urban elite. But, like city people before them, they enlivened their townhouses with walled gardens—endosing, "civilizing;" and ordering nature. They mimicked European Gothic style: gardens with grottoes and "follies" furnished with rustic furniture featuring burls and snags that must have evoked grandmother's tales about the hazards of a walk in the woods inhabited by bears, wolves, and hostile Indians. The 18th century brought the "Enlightment" that condemned the corruption of city life and idealized nature—best exemplified by J.J. Rousseau's "Noble Savage" patterned after the Native American, uncorrupted by technology and city life, morally superior beings living simply and harmoniously with nature (although by that time, the tribes were largely eradicated east of the Mississippi).

The relationship between man and nature in the wild was idealized further by the 19th Centruy Romanticism as personified by James Fenimore Cooper's fictional frontiersman Leatherstocking and popluarized by Horace Greeley—the newspaper editor who said, "Go West, young man."

WHOSE TRADITION? Twig furniture, in fact, was reborn in the gardens of the urban elite, who'd never experienced frontier life.

The Romantic Period back-to-nature movement produced agrarian/utopian communes and re-emerged in principle 100 years later (communes and all) among those who quit the city and went homesteading in the 1970s. One of our spiritual mentors was Romantic Period writer Henry Thoreau—whose own dropout year at Walden Pond can be seen as a Romantic putting Enlightment theory into practice. His handmade house, bed, table, and three chairs were rustic and utilitarian as any pioneer's. Of course, Henry's term of self-imposed hardship in the cleansing wilds endured for only one season, and it was done to make a philosophical point more than to live the life-some would say, to do book research.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print