Abstract
Claudia Kinmonth's first book Irish Country Furniture 1700–1950 (1993) was a landmark publication in the field of Irish design history and material culture. In the intervening three decades, the author has carried out a substantial amount of new field work. This new book brings the analysis forward to 2000, expands the number of illustrations from 320 to 450 (the majority now in colour) and includes an additional chapter on small furnishings and utensils, encompassing objects made from horn, woodturners’ work, country pottery and earthenware, coopers’ ware, noggins, basketry and flour bags.
The majority of surviving examples date from the nineteenth or twentieth century, though the author is quick to note that the date span used in the book's title is not overly prescriptive. The focus is firmly on domestic settings and on ordinary homes. Highlighting a tendency among furniture historians to elevate élite objects and élite patrons, Kinmonth focuses instead on the less affluent community of ‘tradesman, farmers, fishermen, weavers and spinners, labourers, cottiers and itinerants’ (p. 1) who made up the majority of the rural Irish population.
That is not to say that there is no consideration of the ‘big house’. Connections have been made between furniture supplied to gentry households by local craftsmen, and the adaptation of such types for more modest homes. To illustrate how designs could percolate from the castle to the cottage, Kinmonth explains how a form like the four-poster bed was reimagined in the latter context, with woven straw curtains replacing costly textile hangings and the function of excluding draughts a more pressing imperative than showy display. Inevitably, the visually arresting, often ingenious, and regionally distinctive types of furniture illustrated in the book, were made by a disparate range of largely anonymous craftsmen, from carpenters and wood-turners to basket makers and coopers.
The tenacity and thoroughness of Kinmonth's fieldwork are evident in her sure analysis of materials and techniques. Her emphasis on material culture is informed by her background in furniture restoration and conservation. She points out that since rural woodworkers often made their own tools, ‘the individually shaped moulding planes cut a familiar yet anonymous signature along a cornice, leaving a unique profile’ (p. 5). These personal interventions were not a conventional signature in the manner of a surname, but a distinctive maker's mark nonetheless (at least to the author's well-attuned eyes). A keen awareness of the relationship of form to function underpins the writing. In chapter one, Kinmonth explains how the prevalence of floors formed from beaten earth or ‘daub’ in modest Irish homes, encouraged the use of stools and chairs with legs that could be individually removed. Seat furniture with legs rigidly joined by stretchers was unsuited to uneven floors. The more flexible design allowed householders to replace components when they became worn or loose.
By analysing noggins, small wooden drinking vessels used at all levels of society, Kinmonth deftly deploys modern technology to uncover design secrets. Three-dimensional radiographs of these staved drinking vessels reveal an ingenious interlocking system of construction, which resulted in light, watertight, ergonomic forms, suitable for all life stages. The unique patterns of these vessels were passed down in families through generations and were clearly valued.
Indeed, one of the themes that emerge in the book is the resourcefulness of rural Irish homeowners, creativity borne of necessity. As Kinmonth writes, ‘What we know today as ‘recycling’, sustainability and material economy was an integral, essential and normal part of rural life in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 24). Driftwood, small pieces of timber foraged from hedgerows, semi-fossilised timber dug from peat bogs, butter boxes and flour bags were used for furnishings. Versatile flour sacks were retained and repurposed – well-suited for bedding. The breadth of documentary as well as artefact evidence deployed by the author is impressive. Poor Inquiry reports, the accounts of visitors to Ireland, paintings, prints and photographs help to recreate the context in which Irish vernacular furniture was made, used, repaired and recycled. A painting by the Irish artist John G. Mulvany (1766–1838), depicting a scene in a country inn kitchen (p. 203), includes a dresser against the back wall with spoons hung vertically at eye level. Kinmonth urges readers to carry out tactile eye-level searches for spoon holes like these in-country dressers, running hands along the shelves for evidence of such openings, the number of which can provide clues to the means of an individual household.
The author's research facilitates commentary on continuity and change over time (she acknowledges the challenge of dating individual pieces). She notes that the rate of change of style was slower in rural Ireland than in England, citing poverty as the reason, and the mether, a square-topped wooden drinking vessel that endured across centuries, as an example. A small caveat is a fact that commentary sometimes ranges very broadly. For example, on page 130, the analysis segues over three consecutive paragraphs, from a twentieth-century account of vernacular seats in Co. Cork to a diary entry of 1831 describing seat furniture for Corpus Christi rituals, and finally, to homes submerged by the creation of the Poulaphouca Reservoir in County Wicklow in the late 1930s. But this is a minor critique of what is an original, wide-ranging and thoroughly impressive study. The author's mission to recover, record and share unrivalled knowledge of this aspect of Irish vernacular craftsmanship is laudable, and her research is original and innovative. A gazetteer at the back of the book lists the main museums in Ireland displaying Irish vernacular furniture and furnishings, and is accompanied by a glossary of useful terms. Readers are spurred on to study the furniture typologies introduced in the book in three dimensions, encouraged by Kinmonth's informative and accessible style and the excellent illustrations, many of them the author's own.