Consider books as works of art, in this case a gorgeous two-volume set in a handsome slipcase. Before delving more deeply, thumb the pages and marvel at the rich design and illustrations (1500 plates, most in color). The elegant cursive letters on the title page are printed with a faint shadow behind them, giving them the illusion of floating above the page. No cost seems to have been spared, and the £150 price tag, plus £50 overseas air freight (that’s a total of nearly $400, but see note below), actually seems warranted. Such production values normally are lavished on coffee-table books featuring more formal or “high-style” decorative arts (e.g., Chippendale and Sheraton), raising the question: does the subject--folk furniture--merit such treatment? The answer is an unqualified “yes.”
Richard Bebb is a Welshman and high-end antiques dealer specializing in Welsh furniture. In that trade he soon began to explore his country’s woodworking history, spending sixteen years on the present work. His discoveries in pursuit of seven centuries of continuity and change in one of Wales’ most highly-developed traditional arts establish him as a cultural historian par excellence, and his degree in social anthropology from the London School of Economics surely contributed to his research skills. Nor was he without institutional support, gaining full access to the collections of the National Library of Wales and the National Museum Wales (especially its facility St. Fagans: National History Museum--what used to be called the Welsh Folk Museum) and acknowledging the assistance of both on the title page. The National Museum (Amgueddfa Cymru) recently made the author an Honorary Research Fellow, and its Deputy Director General wrote the book’s foreword. The publisher, Saer Books (the word is Welsh for “woodworker”) is Bebb’s imprint and consists mainly, so far as I can tell, of him, his daughter Serretta as editor, and his assistant Allison Hurren as designer, working with Cambrian Printers in Aberystwyth. Welsh Furniture is the first in a projected series and is distributed by Bebb’s main business, Country Antiques (Wales) Ltd.
All this is preliminary to addressing the author’s subject and approach. Wales, one might conclude from this book, is to Great Britain’s furniture what Chaucer and Shakespeare are to her literature. Glorying in their use of local oak, the ornate heraldic carvings of the Renaissance and the sleek surfaces, relieved by sensual arched panels, of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represent the “golden age” of Welsh furniture. Drawing on hundreds of examples in museum and private collections, archival documents, early illustrations, and travel accounts, Bebb establishes for this heritage a meaningful historical and cultural context. The organization is chronological, with the first volume extending from the scant evidence of the Middle Ages (while considering possible earlier Celtic and Roman influences) to 1700, the second volume continuing the story into the twentieth century. This scheme is complicated by numerous foci on particular furniture types, local “schools,” known or suspected makers, and owner families.
The first of the author’s two main theses might come as a shock to British furniture historians with an upper-class bias, but not to American folklorists such as Michael Owen Jones (a good Welsh name!) and Robert Blair St. George. Challenging the notion that rural Wales was incapable of high-quality craftsmanship and design innovation, and that examples found there were either made in England or were debased derivatives of fashionable urban models--an idea voiced by, among others, Lord Raglan, known to folklorists for his myth-ritual theory in The Hero--Bebb demonstrates that the most isolated areas of Wales, such as the Teifi and Conwy valleys, often produced the finest and most vernacular pieces. At the same time, he establishes that makers had the flexibility to shape their regional design traditions to their clients’ tastes and budgets and were thus able to satisfy all classes in Welsh society.
The book’s second thesis--that there is a recognizable Welsh furniture “style”--supports the political movement, most apparent in public use of the Welsh language, to distinguish the native culture from that imposed by England. One example highlighted by Bebb as a Welsh type is the two-piece dresser, consisting of a shallow shelving section for displaying plates above a deeper storage base with serving- or work-table surface. Loaded with pewter or showy factory-made pottery, it was so prevalent in homes of every class that it became an emblem of Welsh identity, leading to the generic term “Welsh dresser.” Bebb’s case for a distinctly national furniture style could have been strengthened by contrasting the features of types such as the dresser with those of their counterparts elsewhere in the British Isles. That would have gone beyond the scope of his book, however, and the details he provides make possible such comparison by others.
The only map in Welsh Furniture (at the front of each volume) is an 1833 facsimile containing so much detail that, for readers unfamiliar with the country’s geography, finding the counties and other places referred to in the text can be difficult; adding a more readable modern map would have eliminated this problem. Bebb also might have taken a clue from cultural geography-minded folklorists such as fellow Welshman E. Estyn Evans (Irish Folk Ways) by including distribution maps (e.g., one showing the northwestern domain of the cwpwrdd tridarn, a three-section cupboard that arose in the 1600s). Bebb’s photographic settings suggest that many of the illustrated pieces have passed through his Country Antiques showrooms; some of his “chase” narratives would have added a personal touch and softened his rather formal tone. Folklorists especially would have appreciated a clearer idea of when traditional furniture-making ended in Wales, if it did (beyond the manufacture of reproductions), for there is no indication that it is still active; its last gasp continued at least into the 1930s and included the creation of “bardic” chairs customarily presented to winners of local and national eisteddfods (folk festivals). We do get a glimpse of a few historic workshops and their interiors; a list of the carpentry tools used to build the furniture, with both their Welsh and English names, would have supported discussion of the hand-based technology.
This in-depth craft study for a country not well known to many Americans may seem esoteric, until one considers the place of Wales in American settlement history and her potential impact on American folk culture. Welsh immigrants, many of them religious dissenters, represented a goodly proportion of Mid-Atlantic settlers in the late 1600s and continued as a presence through the 1800s in the Pennsylvania coal-fields and in slate mining elsewhere; the author mentions the work of Welsh carpenters in the frontier community of Paddy’s Run, Ohio (Vol. 2, p. 154). It may be that what is generically labeled “Dutch” (German) in Pennsylvania folk arts, including furniture, owes some of its influence to Wales, and Richard Bebb’s impressive labor of love can help us explore such possibilities. If readers of JFRR have their libraries order it, as I did, they can feast their eyes on one of the finest studies of material folk culture to come along in recent years.
NOTE: A discount of £30 can be obtained by ordering online at www.welshfurniture.com and quoting the code “Folklore.”
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[Review length: 1192 words • Review posted on July 1, 2008]