The Artisan of Ipswich: Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England
by Robert Tarule
Format: Trade Paperback
Date: 2004
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 978-0801887529
Status: In Print (2007 Reprint)
Date Read: 15 April 2022
Rating: âââââ
The book centers around the life and craft of Thomas Dennis, a joiner who emigrated from England in 1663 and settled in the town of Ipswitch, Massachusetts. He’s known to us today through several surviving pieces of furniture that have been attributed to him.
Thanks to these items, surviving records, and the work of previous historians of both Ipswitch and early furniture, Tarule is able to give us an engaging snapshot of life in a 17th Century American village.
An outgrowth of Tarule’s doctoral thesis, the book first sets the stage and describes the terrain in and around Ipswitch, it’s resources and the reasoning behind siting the town in that location. He goes on to describe resource management, especially that of the forest, in these early villages. Considering the shear number of trees needed to build an entire village from scratch, all the fencing needed for livestock and to heat the houses through the long New England winters, managing the forest resources is critical and the subject of many rules, fees and fines in the 17th Century.
Wood for use by craftsman such has Dennis is just a small part of what’s needed. Tarule follows this with an overview of the various types of craftsman present in the village during Dennis’s life and the trades they followed.
The final third of the book is the heart of the matter and the reason I picked this one up: Tarule presents a step-by-step, somewhat fictionalized account of Thomas Dennis constructing a carved chest for a customer from felling the tree through to delivery.
The account is fictionalized in that Tarule wraps a story around the description of building the chest.
Tarule’s actual thesis was a ‘earn by doing’ project where he reproduced a chest from Ipswitch attributed to Dennis using the tools and techniques Dennis used to make the original. This was possible because Tarule worked for many years as a joiner in the Plymoth Plantation Living History Museum and became intimately familiar with the tools, processes and results of the 17th Century joiner.
The section will appeal even to folks that aren’t historical furniture geeks like yours truly as he doesn’t dive too deeply in the minutiae of construction details. Instead, he keeps it moving, helping you understand how much Dennis would likely get done of the chest each day, the order of operations, preparation of the stock, etc. Once the chest is complete except for assembly, he turns to the carving.
Popularized recently by the work of Peter Follansbee, the chest is carved in the Mannerist style imported from Devonshire and the Southwest of England in the early to mid 17th Century by the joiner that emigrated from that region.
Tarule steps through the process of laying out and carving the designs, noting the very few tools necessary to create the carving the how the design is an expression of a vocabulary of images and themes, there is no pattern in the modern sense. Just a selection of pieces that can be endlessly combined in different ways as the needs of the space to be carved demands.
He wraps up with a section on where to go for more information on the various topics making it a great jumping off point for exploring this interesting period in American history and material culture.
An annotated bibliography can be found on my wiki. It’s a mix of books recommended by Tarule and myself.