Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 664
•
Trim: 9 x 11¼
978-1-4422-7038-1 • Hardback • December 2017 • $168.00 • (£131.00)
978-1-4422-7040-4 • eBook • December 2017 • $159.50 • (£123.00)
Oscar P. Fitzgerald is a nationally known historian, author, lecturer, and consultant on American furniture from colonial times to the present. He retired as the director of the Navy Museum in Washington, DC and curator of Tingey House, to pursue full time his first love which is the history of furniture from antique to modern. As a member of the faculty of the Smithsonian Institution/George Washington University Master's program in Decorative Arts & Design History he teaches all the furniture classes. As a decorative arts consultant, he advises on the furniture collections of a number of historic houses including the Frederick Douglass House, the Clara Barton National Historic Site, and the Custis-Lee Mansion. His publication range from a study of The Green Family of Cabinetmakers: An Alexandria Institution (of the Mercy Street TV series fame) to the catalog of the studio furniture at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
1.The Jacobean Period: Joiners and Cabinetmakers in the New World
2.William and Mary: The Years of Transition
3.Queen Anne: The Line of Beauty
4.The Chippendale Style
5.Furniture of the Federal Period
6.American Empire
7.Windsor Chairs
8.Country Furniture: New England
9.Southern Furniture
10.Furniture of Rural Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Mid-West
11.Shaker Furniture: The Gift to Be Simple
Color Plate Signature
12. Victorian Furniture: Gothic and Rococo Revivals
13. Victorian Furniture: The Renaissance Revival
14. Eastlake, the Aesthetic Movement, and the Colonial Revival
15. American Mission Furniture and the Arts & Crafts Movement: 1900-1915
16. Traditional Revivals for a Conservative Public
17.Modern Furniture, 1920-1941: Is It Here to Stay?
18.America Takes the Lead: Mid-Century Modern, 1950s and 1960s
19.Post-Modern and Avant-Garde Furniture since 1975
20.Studio Furniture and Furniture as Art
21.Connoisseurship of American Furniture
This is a great improvement over earlier editions of Fitzgerald’s surveys—Four Centuries of American Furniture (1995) and Three Centuries of American Furniture (CH, Jun'82). Fitzgerald adds material on the 20th and 21st centuries and a final chapter on connoisseurship. He takes a chronological approach, moving from the early l7th century to the present with great detail. All the well-known pieces are here, plus many that will be less familiar. Fitzgerald considers both the exceptional and the ordinary, both high styles and country-rural forms. He explores styles, construction, materials, regional characteristics, forms and types, upholstery and fabrics, design origins, use and taste, trade, and technological innovations. Each section has comparisons with architecture; chapters have notes; and the bibliography of books, catalogues, theses, and articles is annotated. The visuals are extensive—some 800 in black and white and 48 in color. . . Lengthy explanatory captions are helpful. New terminology is used throughout except for style names (e.g., “Chippendale”), which are kept for familiarity. An outstanding achievement in American cultural studies with up-to-date research, collection of sources, and detailed scholarship, this indispensable reference is an important addition to the literature on American art and culture.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
— Choice Reviews
This lavishly illustrated volume contains over eight hundred photographs, of which forty-eight are in color. This book combines and expands information from the author's previous publications Three Centuries of American Furniture and Four Centuries of American Furniture with additional content into the twenty-first century. As a result, it is probably the most extensive and comprehensive volume on American furniture from the seventeenth century up to the present. Twenty-one chapters provide in-depth analysis of various types and histories of American furniture such as Queen Anne, Federal, American Empire, Shaker, Gothic, Rococo, Eastlake, Mission, Revival, Post-Modern, and Avant-garde, to name but a few. Each chapter has numerous black-and-white photographs referred to in the content. The color photographs feature a number of re-created and historical rooms from around the United States, in order to show how Americans decorated rooms in various time periods, from rich mansions to humble rural dwellings. A wonderful addition to any public or academic library's holdings.
— American Reference Books Annual
Both serious readers and casual visitors to the book...will unearth a cache of diamonds in Fitzgerald's history.... In addition to his lavish use of photographs and their accompanying commentary, Fitzgerald, a renowned expert on furniture, a teacher, and a curator, deserves our applause for the wealth of information he has packed into these pages and the straight-up style with which he delivers this gift..
— Smoky Mountain News
Anyone with an interest in furniture, past or present, owes a debt to Oscar Fitzgerald for this magnificent and comprehensive survey. He has put the entire story of American furniture between two covers for the first time, and has done so with commendable intelligence. Drawing from a wealth of recent scholarship, and ranging across an incredible span - urban and rural, north south east and west, expensive and everyday - this book immediately takes its place as an indispensable reference work, not to mention a most enjoyable read.
— Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar, Yale Center for British Art
In American Furniture: 1650 to the Present Oscar Fitzgerald offers a long-needed, sweeping look at the history of American furniture. Deftly balancing high style and vernacular examples, 17th century and contemporary work, and small shop and factory production, Fitzgerald provides a comprehensive examination of the context, materials, styles, and forms of American furniture in a single volume. This volume will immediately prove invaluable to collectors and students alike, dispensing with the chronological or regional subdivisions that characterize the field and encouraging readers to embrace the full measure of American furniture.
— Edward S. Cooke, Charles F. Montgomery Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University