FURNISHINGS : Simply Shaker, Beautifully Simple
Shaker furniture, designed to suit a spartan life in the 1800s, is catching the fancy of collectors and fetching top dollar at auction.
“The greatest irony is that we appreciate their stuff, and they didn’t care about stuff,” says Jean M. Burks.
Burks of Lincoln, Neb., is former curator of collections at Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire and co-author with Timothy D. Rieman of “The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture” (Abrams, $75).
Original Shaker pieces sell today for $5,000 to $20,000 each, with an occasional rare piece as high as $400,000. Part of the appeal is the idea that a tiny utopian sect that flourished in the 19th Century in a celibate rural commune was able to create perfection in the simplicity of its furniture.
Part of the appeal, too, is that the pieces made by cabinetmakers of little sophistication are taking their place at the top with Thomas Chippendale and assorted other European and American cabinetmakers of note.
“Shaker furniture is among the finest furniture I know of,” says Rieman, a former social worker and self-taught cabinetmaker. “Usually, cabinetmakers look at a piece of furniture and say: ‘How would I change that?’ With a Shaker piece, they say: ‘I don’t think it can be improved upon.’ ”
Rieman builds Shaker-style furniture in a converted granary at the New Lebanon Shaker Village Museum in Upstate New York, site of one of the sect’s major furniture-making facilities in the 19th Century.
He says he read about the Shaker communal life as a teen-ager. Then, in 1979 and 1980, he worked at Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock, Mass., as an interpretive craftsman. He built chairs, tables and small case pieces in the Shaker fashion, all the while explaining to visitors what he was doing.
“In slow times, I was able to get a piece of furniture out of storage and set it on my workbench, measure it and examine the joinery and construction details,” Rieman says.
Some of what he learned is that “it is a mistake to think of the furniture as without ornament. There are decorative details, but they are minimal. For example, there are finials on chairs. The shaping of horizontal back slats is rounded at the top, and the slats often have a beveled edge.”
While antique pieces are coveted by collectors and furniture manufacturers have mined the Shaker vein for design ideas, there appears to be little interest in how the people who made them lived.
“Their furniture is a reflection of their communal life,” Burks says. “The trestle tables are immense to accommodate a crowd; the built-in chests have many, many drawers because they were in rooms that housed four to eight people.
“They were not trying to make beautiful furniture. They simply wanted something functional and easy to maintain.”
The asymmetrical arrangement of drawers in some pieces is considered aesthetically advanced today. Originally, drawers were of different heights and widths because they were more convenient. Two-person sewing desks were created because women worked together to pass the time while mending and sewing.
In their picture-rich book, Rieman and Burks show that Shaker furniture varies in style according to where it was made. Discernible differences from, say, Pleasant Hill, Ky., to Canterbury, N.H., make it possible to identify unlabeled pieces.
The Shakers made furniture from the end of the 18th Century to the early part of the 20th Century. The best-known, exceedingly spare pieces date from about 1820 to 1850. They are characterized by severe lines, minimal ornamentation and, often, yellow, green, blue or orange painted surfaces.
“After 1850, the furniture tends to become more Victorian looking,” Burks says. “I personally like the later pieces better because of the way they interpret, but pare down, Victorian styles.”