(seagulls) Furniture.

Elegant.

Ancient.

Handmade furniture.

Beautiful in itself, but more than that, for these exquisite pieces are also metaphors for their time.

Reflections of life as life was lived 250 years ago in a provincial New England village by the sea: Portsmouth.

Music As the merchants of the Piscataqua region began to attain greater wealth and began to amass some surplus capital, like anybody else in the British Empire, they wanted to put that money into show and conspicuous consumption.

And this began to happen first at quite some scale in the early 1700s.

I hate to call them pretentious, but I think that's the best way to put it.

The pretentious citizens of Portsmouth in the 1730s and 40s.

Conspicuous consumption in the 1700s in a town like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, seems like a contradiction.

After all, the town had only about 3,500 people living there in the mid-1700s.

It wasn't just small.

It was tiny when compared to, say, Boston or Philadelphia.

And yet, only Boston and Philadelphia had more trade through their ports, and only Boston and Philadelphia had more skilled craftsmen.

And, in fact, this tiny provincial city at the mouth of the Piscataqua River was one of the most sophisticated places in America.

So sophisticated that, in 1770, John Adams noted, I have avoided Portsmouth and my old friend, the governor of it.

I should have seen enough of the pumps and vanities and ceremonies of that little world, Portsmouth, if I had gone there.

But formalities and ceremonies are an abomination in my sight.

John Adams notwithstanding, these people were stylish, and early on their homes reflected not only what was au courant in America, but what was fashionable in England as well.

The great breakthrough occurred when some English immigrants came over from the London area around 1715 or 1716.

One of these men was named John Drew and he was trained in England.

He was trained in the London area and actually had built some rowhouses in Deptford, which is where the Royal Dockyards are near London.

So he was bringing a very urban or urbane experience over to Portsmouth, something that had never been available within the local population up until the early 1700s.

And the great result of his presence was the MacPheadris- Warner House, which is still standing today.

It's a great brick edifice, and it was the first house of its caliber or of its kind anywhere in northern New England.

We used to think that that was somewhat of a reflection of Boston architecture of the period, and it is, but even more so is a reflection of London architecture of the period, both inside and out.

And so that established what we call the Palladian or the Georgian style in architecture and every other merchant, and many of them were actually related to one another by marriage, wanted to build something comparable to the McPheadris House.

Music England, and specifically London, was the measure for style and the McPheadris-Warner House immediately became the measure of style for Portsmouth.

The home, as you see, has been beautifully preserved and is filled with 18th century furniture.

The homes of Portsmouth are a reflection of the tastes of the time, but in many ways it is the furniture that says the most about how these people lived.

Furniture made locally by craftsmen of surprising ability.

Such a man was John Gaines.

What fascinates me about Gaines is that he mastered turning, but he didn't really master all of the other aspects of chair making.

In fact, if you look at this chair very carefully, you will see that he did beautiful turn work.

But these legs, these curved legs, which are sawn and shaped with a variety of tools, he used rasps, scrapers, spoke shaves.

You'll notice that they're very crudely shaped.

You can actually see the facets left from the tool marks.

Our guide here is Brock Jobe, chief curator with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.

He is an authority on New England 18th century furniture, and it was Brock Jobe's enthusiasm that provided much of the impetus for this major museum show.

The show, under the auspices of the Society, is entitled Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast It opened here at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the fall of 1992.

This chair is actually marked very clearly on the inside seat rail with a Roman numeral, an XI for 11, that indicates that this was number 11 and a set of probably 12 chairs.

A very large set.

There are only four of these that survive, and Gaines chairs are particularly desirable, desirable because of the carved crests, the rather eccentric details, which I think many people equate with being American details, details that reflect the, the independent, creative spirit of, of American craftsmanship and indeed, this is, this is very, very creative in it's, the handling of the individual details.

Music Now we're looking at a piece of furniture made 20 years later than Gaines’ death, a piece dating from about 1765.

And one which represents a direct influence from England, quite specifically from London.

And I think we are looking at the work here of a man named Robert Harrold, who arrives in Portsmouth in 1765.

Harrold is an English immigrant who turns the world in Portsmouth upside down, and this large library bookcase represents the full flowering of the Rococo in Portsmouth.

Harrold meets with instant success.

He becomes the favorite of local patrons and the key, the, the individual who really takes Harrold's work and and purchases it, supports Harrold and and is responsible for this introduction of the Rococo is John Wentworth, the governor.

Music So Harrold gets these major commissions.

He becomes the, the, the, preference, the preferred craftsman for patrons in Portsmouth, one of whom, following in the footsteps of John Wentworth, was Jonathan Warner.

Warner had moved into a very grand brick house in 1760, now called the MacPheadris- Warner House.

When Warner moves in over a period of 5 or 6 years, he begins to refurbish the house and he refurbishes it in the new Rococo style.

You, looking to Robert Harrold in 1765 and 1766 for furniture.

And this is the grandest of all the pieces that Harrold made in this English manor in Portsmouth.

Jonathan Warner was a very affluent merchant, a trader, an individual who owned ships and was sending goods out on his vessels up and down the Atlantic coast.

He was a businessman, and as a businessman he needed a place to conduct business.

And this object, in a sense, is a one piece office.

It's the equivalent of the 20th century workstation.

And you have here a writing surface.

And I will take a couple of these drawers out and let's see if we can look at the secret compartment, which wasn't all that secret because everybody knew that desks were made with them.

But you can see it here.

It had a spring lock originally at the top, so that you would have to put your hands into the top inside of the top of the of the desk interior and project with your finger, project the spring lock up to release this compartment in order to pull it out.

And then at the back, once you had pulled it out, you had access to these small document drawers which were, which tended to be used for valuables.

It's made entirely of mahogany, but if you look at it carefully, you'll see that the small parts, the inner parts of the drawer, are made of native woods, white pine, for example, used for the bottom or for the side of the drawers.

Imported mahogany coming up from the West Indies or from Central America would be used only for the woods that show, these so-called primary woods, which you see right here.

And that's what it is about the old stuff.

It's not machine perfect, it's not computer perfect.

And a lot of times you can't really put your finger on exactly what it is that makes it different.

But there's something about it.

Their, their quality control standards in some respects were not like ours because we know what Machine Perfect is.

But they, you know, perfection back then was handmade.

Everything was handmade.

And so perfection was only as good as you can make it by hand.

And so that's my attitude.

I don't try to make something look like it was made by a computer.

I make it absolutely as perfect as I can by hand.

I don't try to make it look handmade.

I don't leave things sloppy or leave big plain marks on things where they weren't there.

I try to make it as perfect as I can by hand, and so in that way, I really do feel an affinity to the, towards these guys.

It's like they're, you know, it's like the original maker standing next to me, showing me how it was done.

This is Allen Brede, who has been engaged by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities to make duplicates of some of the pieces in the exhibition.

These pieces are to be left unfinished in order to show just how the work was done.

Allen works out of a shop located in York, Maine.

The work is very good.

It's, it's excellent.

They use some nice inlays and veneers and, just well executed.

Good work.

Music As we move up to perhaps the second generation, the fully blown Georgian style, and see it in the Wentworth- Gardner house, we see there that there is a certain element of carving on the exterior of the house.

We see, in that case, too, a certain amount of deception, in that the front of that house is clad in rusticated or grooved wood, which is supposed to look like stone but in fact, of course, is only pine again.

And we could enter the two houses, the earlier one and the later one, we discover that the earlier house has heavy paneling, heavy moldings, and practically no carving, whereas the Wentworth-Gardner House is dripping with carving.

It's just opulently enriched with carved moldings, carved capitals on columns and royal asters.

And it's just, much more elaborately finished in all of its surfaces.

Great changes were happening in Portsmouth.

Opulence was here.

Mark Hunking Wentworth built this house as a gift to his son Thomas, and not to be outdone, at about the same time, across town, John Moffatt built this grander home for his son Samuel.

The great fortunes were, it seems, vying in splendor.

Splendor that reached its peak 20 years later in the home of Governor John Langdon.

Here, the simple Georgian style has given way to Grand Rococo, all copied from the English stylebooks.

Music But the American Revolution had now been fought.

And with a new freedom came a new style, a style which took its name from the new nation: Federalist.

Here, for a different class, a different group of people, in this case a post-revolutionary merchant.

Not the old Tory oligarchy that existed in Portsmouth up to the period of the American Revolution.

This is a new generation of affluent merchants who want to put on the dog and show it off just as much as the earlier generations did.

And for this class of people, Portsmouth craftsmen produced these dazzling pieces of flamboyantly veneered furniture in the early 19th century.

The flamboyance is caused by the contrast of flame birch veneer.

This spectacular flame birch, which is actually cut from the crotch of the birch tree, where two limbs come together.

So you have the contrast of that bright feathered birch, which was practically white when it was newly cut, contrasting with, in this case, a flamboyant, very dark, rich rosewood.

The lid of this desk folds down to reveal a, you can see, in this case, a velvet lined writing surface.

It probably originally had a green base, a green wool that lined this.

This is the second covering, but you can see quite clearly how it was used.

A sloping writing surface.

And then behind the glass doors, a series of pigeon holes and small drawers for writing implements and various types of writing supplies.

The doors again, which provide just a a storage compartment.

But then on either side of these doors there are the large tall drawers which were called bottle drawers in the early 19th century.

And they're actually fitted with a series of partitions for the square liquor bottles that would provide a, I think, a very nice break from day to day activity.

I can imagine Jacob Wendell taking a snort from time to time.

Music But as we move into the period after the revolution and take a house, like the Rundlet-May House, which was built in 1807.

Now we're dealing with that new style, the so-called federal style, in which the elaboration tended to be concentrated at smaller scale.

There's less overall carving than we might find in some of the older buildings.

But there is a great deal of delicacy of carving.

The chimneys have now been moved to the outer walls of the house, so that you have more freedom within the house to move around.

The rooms are not so much obstructed, and, and they can be large, or sometimes two rooms can be thrown by sliding doors into one another so that you can end up with the grand parlor that extends all the way through the house.

Music This is a, this is a copy of a chair that was made in Portsmouth by Langley Boardman, who was a, cabinet maker that I believe came up from Salem, Massachusetts, and he he did a lot of work in Portsmouth.

And this is one of a set of, I think, 6 or 8 chairs in the Wentworth-Coolidge House in Portsmouth.

In the work of Langley Boardman, we see eastern Massachusetts design making its way up the coast to Portsmouth.

And in Portsmouth, the Salem's, the Salem style predominates through the work of Boardman for a good 15 to 20 years.

Right up to about 1820.

The thing that I'm surprised about in this chair is the way some of these joints were made, or that one particular joint, and I'll take it apart and show you.

(hammering sounds) Okay, there we go.

And this joint here, which is the rail that the splats in the back sit into, instead of taking a piece of wood and tenoning it into the leg, and then applying the molding on the outside, which is what I had suspected he would have done, he made this integral, it's all one piece and it's, it's a lot more difficult.

But when you consider, and this is one of the ways I sometimes explain these things, that they're, a lot of times they're working in probably fairly poorly heated shops.

And making glue joints required getting things warm, planing both surfaces true.

And if it was cool, you might not want to spend the time trying to glue it up or make it in two pieces.

Here, he made it in one piece so you can see that this rail has a miter, a mitered piece of molding integral in it.

So this is one piece and there's a tenon.

And it fits into here like so, just across there like that.

Music Grand furniture and grand homes.

All built from the profits of trade.

But what kind of trade?

Well, mostly lumber, lumber and fishing and furs.

And, of course, there was shipbuilding in Portsmouth.

But mostly the money came from lumber, trees.

Between 1770 and 1775, 74 million board feet of lumber went through the port.

The white pine of New Hampshire was wanted all over the world to frame houses in England and Spain and in the Caribbean, and the big primeval pine trees, straight and atlas, perfect for masts on Her Majesty's ships, were unrivaled in the world.

There was trade with England and Europe, but Portsmouth's biggest trade was with the West Indies.

Portsmouth sold them lumber and ships and wooden manufactured goods and got back.

Sugar and rum were the great things that were sent back from the West Indies.

This was a fairly complex trade because, it was really a triangular trade between New England, the West Indies and Great Britain.

And so goods were constantly being picked up at one port and carried to another one.

But the great product that we acquired from the West Indies was what they called West India goods in the 18th century.

And that meant rum, indeed.

And in fact, in addition to that, there were several refineries in Portsmouth that refined both sugar, raw sugar, into white sugar and also refined or produced or distilled rum.

So we had an actual production of rum right in the seacoast area, as well as bringing in rum that had already had been produced in the West Indies, so that, there was a very strong connection between Portsmouth and that area.

Music In general, Portsmouth has a tremendously high proportion of early buildings and remains a virtual museum of every style of architectural construction.

And, as we're discovering, it remained, has remained, somewhat unbeknownst to most of us, a virtual museum of furniture as well.

Music But the prosperity would finally end, With the embargo of 1807, all trade stopped, and while the fortunes remained, the source of the wealth ceased, and 100 years of architectural style and furniture making was frozen in time.

Much of it is still here.

The Georgian home designed for Archibald MacPhaedris, the carved chairs of John Gaines, the rococo desk of Robert Harrold, who turned the taste of the city upside down.

Here, the Wentworth-Gardner House, with its bold carved details and the Moffatt-Ladd House, with its delicate woodwork.

And the spectacular rococo of the Governor John Langdon Mansion.

And here the federalist style, the Rundlet-May House, and the furnishings of Langley Boardman, preserved in a town that, for 100 years from 1725 to 1825, helped set the trend for style in all of America.

That little world, Portsmouth.

Music