Church

I didn't know it was the best place to study joinery

rosettes, Somerset, 17th century

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.

pulpit, St. John the Baptist, Inglesham, Wiltshire

Back about 1999 I started corresponding with Victor Chinnery, (1944-2011) author of Oak Furniture: the British Tradition. We then met over here - spent two or three days looking at local collections. One thing I remember Vic telling me is he wished I could see English oak “in context” - seeing the furniture in the settings for which it was made. Very rare to find New England pieces sitting where they’ve always sat - I did see one or two that way over time. 

In 2000, I got to make my first trip to England, to spend 2 weeks with Victor travelling around and getting a crash course in English oak furniture. The first place he took me was to church - St. John the Baptist Church in Inglesham, Wiltshire. I was overwhelmed by the age of the building, I had no reference point to be able to take this work in. At least the oak work I could understand. My memory is that the 17th-century box pews, pulpit, sounding board and communion table all seemed to be the work of one person or at least one workshop. Wikipedia says the pews are 1660s, the pulpit 1630s.