a few odds and ends
I’ve been looking at/reading a couple of books lately that, while peripheral to my study of 17th-century joinery, ended up in my house because of my interest in joinery. And oak carvings. And English churches. One is Devon’s Ancient Bench Ends by Todd Gray, another The Angel Roofs of East Anglia: Unseen Masterpieces of the Middle Ages by Michael Rimmer. As I was poring through these books, I dug out another - The World Upside-Down: English Misericords by Christa Grossinger.
These books got me to thinking about my introduction to English village churches 25 years ago - my first trip to England. Victor Chinnery took me into St John the Baptist Church at Inglesham, Wiltshire. As I set out today to write this blog post, I realized I had trod this ground in the exact same detail before. So here’s what I would have written today -
Church
When I first was studying 17th-century oak furniture here in New England it was almost all museum collections, then in time I got connected to some private collections here and there. Historic house museums sometimes feature one or two pieces of the early work - depends on the period of the house. Auction houses sometimes get one or two bits of oak furniture - I can’t keep up with them though. Too much stuff to sift through to find a few nuggets. Some of the major museums with collections of this sort of work are the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Several others have smaller collections of this period. But a great place to study the joinery, carving, turning and all the rest is in England. Not in museums, in churches.
Meanwhile, the books are wonderful - I’m always so impressed by such nice publications for such a narrow field. The Devon book has many details of the carvings - including impressions of the background punch (used on the foreground).
The Angle roofs are something altogether different.
This is a book about wooden sculpture more than about carving like what I do. Astounding examples of very large carved angel-figures in the roof framing of 15th century churches in East Anglia. I see that the author has a website - well worth looking at. The work that went into these buildings is mind-boggling.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Follansbee's Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.