'John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker' At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

Throughout, Mr Heckscher sees at work a perfectionist who adhered to tradition, delegated little and was constitutionally incapable of cutting corners, either by stinting on the rich mahogany he favored or dispensing with such labor-intensive construction features as cross-braced supports and tenoned brackets.

"There never was a time when Newport totally forgot its famous Eighteenth Century cabinetmakers, the Townsends and Goddards," Mr Heckscher begins in John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker, the 225-page catalog to the exhibition. The insularity and eventual decline of the town that grew rich on the "triangle" trade helped preserve a record that might otherwise have been lost.

"As I was working on this exhibition, it occurred to me that John Townsend's work exemplifies exactly what the leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement wanted to emulate," says Ms Zabar, who began her career as a dealer in English and American proto-modern decorative arts before coming to the Metropolitan in 2002 to work on its Candace Wheeler show.

Thanks to Doris Duke, the neighborhood where the Townsend family joiners lived and worked over six generations is little changed. Nearly two dozen tidy, framed houses once occupied by Townsends cluster together in Easton's Point, adjacent to the causeway leading to Goat Island. Down the street is Hunter House, where Ralph E. Carpenter Jr, to whom Heckscher dedicates John Townsend, organized the "The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1820" in 1953. Published the following year, Carpenter's catalog was the first to list the distinguishing characteristics of Townsend-Goddard furniture. Extraordinarily, says Heckscher, it was not until the 1980s that a successful effort was made to identify the work of individual craftsmen.

Regarded by many as the preeminent Newport cabinetmaker, John Townsend (1733-1809) was the son of Christopher Townsend (1701-1787) and the grandson of Solomon Townsend, who arrived in Newport in 1707 from Oyster Bay, Long Island. Solomon's sons Job and Christopher founded the cabinetmaking dynasty. In 1767, John Townsend married Philadelphia Feke, the daughter of America's first native-born portrait painter, Robert Feke. John's cousin Hannah wed John Goddard, linking Townsend and his closest rival by marriage.

Wallace Nutting's emphasis on John Goddard, cabinetmaker of choice to the prominent Brown brothers of Providence, helped establish a popular preference for the term "Goddard-Townsend" when "Townsend-Goddard" was, and remains, more apt.

Mr Heckscher's interest in John Townsend dates to his student days at Winterthur in the late 1960s. In 1982, the curator published on John Townsend's block and shell furniture in The Magazine Antiques. A desire to codify the distinguishing qualities of John Townsend's furniture, particularly in relation to similar examples by other makers, and an interest in documenting the current state of knowledge about the Townsend-Goddards motivated the present exhibition and volume.

The Metropolitan was a logical setting for the show. The museum has mounted only two other monographic treatments of American cabinetmakers: Duncan Phyfe in 1922 and Honore Lannuier in 1998. But a Newport block and shell carved desk and bookcase was one of the first pieces of American furniture ever exhibited by the art museum. In 1927, the Metropolitan had the foresight to purchase three pieces of labeled and dated John Townsend furniture. Associate curator Charles Over Cornelius published an essay on Townsend the following year.

"What should have been the dramatic debut of one of the most important and best documented of Eighteenth Century cabinetmakers went generally unremarked and had no noticeable corrective on the public infatuation with Goddard," writes Mr Heckscher. More recently, the museum was promised Townsend's earliest known signed piece, a dining table of 1756, and this past January at Christie's, it acquired a labeled chest-on-chest by cousin Thomas Townsend.

Days before "John Townsend" opened at the Metropolitan, the smell of fresh paint and the sound of hammers and saws lent the bustling aura of a cabinetmaking workshop. Leading a guest through the work in progress, the elegant and patrician Mr Heckscher seemed the perfect guide. The curator's voice and his affinity for the artist, a master of reductive design, come through distinctly in Mr Heckscher's lucid, simply stated book and exhibition.

"The show accommodates the space we have and the things that we borrowed," says Mr Heckscher, entering the first of eight small galleries that are deliberately "domestic" in scale. Four monumental case pieces - two Boston and Newport high chests, plus two Boston and Newport desks and bookcases - suggest at a glance Newport's initial debt to and subsequent independence from its stylish neighbor.

The second gallery completes the picture of Newport and the Townsend family's place in it. Highlights include an oil on panel overmantel, on loan from the Newport Art Association, depicting the city's skyline and harbor around 1740, when Job and Christopher Townsend established their shops. Three documents - a plan of Easton's Point showing the Townsend family allotments and maps by Ezra Stiles and Charles Blaskowitz - helped the curator reconstruct for the first time who lived where.

"This is a masterpiece, with very early shells," Mr Heckscher says, gesturing to a mid-1740s desk and bookcase with shell-carved doors and a broken-arched pediment. From a private collection, it is one of only two known signed pieces by Christopher Townsend. Made entirely of mahogany and signed in large script across a drawer bottom, the father's work surely provided an example for his son.

"Here we have John Townsend at the age of 23 with a fully developed, masterful piece of craftsmanship; delicate claw and ball feet; and an overstructured construction of the frame, which he refines and uses throughout his career," the curator says of the promised 1756 dining table that is displayed in a gallery devoted to cabriole leg chairs, tables and high chests by Townsend.

"The blockfront originated in Boston, as did the carved shell, but the idea of putting the two motifs together was Newport's genius," says Mr Heckscher. On loan from Chipstone Foundation is a unique signed documents chest of circa 1760-65. Thought to be John Townsend's earliest known effort in the tripartite block-and-shell style, it leads off a large display of block-and-shell furniture. Townsend seems to have made none of the famous block-and-shell carved desk and bookcases, one of which holds the record price for American furniture at $12.1 million. Perhaps he did not like the form.

The British occupation of Newport in 1777 bankrupted the city and ended its "golden age" of cabinetmaking. While the industry in general declined, Townsend himself made some of his best block-and-shell case furniture, along with Pembroke and card tables with delicately neoclassical stop-fluted decoration, after the war.

"It is sometimes said that, with the Federal style, John Townsend's heart was no longer in his work, but the labeled pieces belie that simplistic conclusion," writes the curator, offering as proof a signed and dated banquet table of 1796 from the Newport Restoration Foundation.

Owners of signed work by John Townsend form a very exclusive club, as the small list of public and private lenders to the exhibition makes clear. Democratically, everyone is invited to participate in a series of side-by-side comparisons of Townsend's work and that of his contemporaries. A Goddard cabriole leg is firmer and more muscular, we find. There are subtle differences in the lobed shells carved by each maker. No one was more fastidious than John Townsend, as two drop leaf tables displayed upside down with their drawers out reveal.

"Exquisite workmanship, but totally understated," Mr Heckscher says appreciatively of the Townsend example.

"There's still a lot to do," Mr Heckscher says modestly at the conclusion of the tour. "The ongoing survey, led by Patricia E. Kane, of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century cabinetmaker-related information in Rhode Island State and local archives will provide a comprehensive underpinning for all future work."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.