The eighteenth century has been seen as a Golden Age of design and craftsmanship. This book goes well beyond these ideas and investigates the various developments in the infrastructure of the eighteenth-century furniture world.

This economic, social and cultural analysis of the nature and variety of production and consumption activities in households in Kent and Cornwall yields important new insights on the transition to capitalism in England.

The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts covers thousands of years of decorative arts production throughout western and non-western culture. With over 1,000 entries, as well as hundreds drawn from the 34-volume Dictionary of Art, this topical collection is a valuable resource for those interested in the history, practice, and mechanics of the decorative arts. Accompanied by almost 100 color and more than 500 black and white illustrations, the 1,290 pages of this title include hundreds of entries on artists and craftsmen, the qualities and historic uses of materials, as well as concise definitions on art forms and style. Explore the works of Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, and the Wiener Wekstatte, or delve into the history of Navajo blankets and wing chairs in thousands of entries on artists, craftsmen, designers, workshops, and decorative art forms.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the complex cultural exchanges that took place between Britain and America from 1750 to 1900, The Materials of Exchange examines material, visual, and print culture alongside literature within a transatlantic context. The contributors trace the evolution of Anglo-American culture from its origins as a product of the British North Atlantic Empire through to its persistence in the post-Independence world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While transatlanticism is a well-established field in history and literary studies, this volume recognizes the wider diversity and interactions of transatlantic cultural production across material and visual cultures as well as literature. As such, while encompassing a range of fields and approaches within the humanities, the ten chapters are all concerned with understanding and interpreting the same Anglo-American culture within the same social contexts. The chapters integrate the literary with the material, offering alternative and provocative perspectives on topics ranging from the child-made book to representations of domestic slaves in literature, by way of history painting, travel writing, architecture and political plays. By focusing on cultural exchanges between Britain and the north-eastern maritime United States over nearly two centuries, the collection offers an in-depth study of Britain’s relationship with a single region of North America over an extended historic period. Contributors have resisted the temptation to prioritize the relationship between New England and England in particular by placing this association within the contexts of Atlantic exchanges with other northeastern states as well as with the South, the Caribbean and Scotland. Intended for researchers in literature, visual and material culture, this collection challenges single-subject boundaries by redefining transatlantic studies as the collective examination of the complex and interrelated cultural t

The vernacular furniture used by ordinary people has only recently been considered a subject worthy of study. In this magisterial book--the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of English vernacular furniture--Christopher Gilbert demonstrates that common furniture possesses as much interest as fashionable pieces made for country houses. Gilbert investigates over twenty well-defined vernacular subgroups that have never previously been explored in detail, including furniture made for workhouses, schools, prisons, Quaker meetinghouses, army barracks, alehouses, lunatic asylums, shops, railway premises, and ships. He also discusses such facets of vernacular furniture making as regional differences in the production of chairs and beds; mainstream cottage and farmhouse domestic furniture; and traditional straw and wicker crafts. Although Gilbert's main focus is on the English vernacular tradition, he also touches on furniture form Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the channel Islands. He makes extensive use of provincial Books of Price sand various Parliamentary Reports on living conditions that often contain splendidly detailed first hand evidence about domestic interiors, and he has provided numerous illustrations of securely provenanced items to support his text.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

This work explores the British country house between 1700-1830 and looks at the lives of the noblemen and the servants who inhabited them. Reference is made to the whole of the British Isles and there is a discussion of their political significance.

The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century represents a new synthesis of gender history and material culture studies. It seeks to analyse the lives and cultural expression of single men and women from 1650 to 1850 within the main focus of domestic activity, the home. Whilst there is much scholarly interest in singleness and a raft of literature on the construction and apprehension of the home, no other book has sought to bring these discrete studies together. Similarly, scholarly work has been limited in evaluating gendered consumption practices during the long eighteenth century because of an emphasis on the homes of families. Analysing the practices of single people emphasises the differences, but also amplifies the similarities, in their strategies of domestic life.

In a comprehensive listing of entries from "Aalto, Hugo Alvar Henrik" to "Zui Weng Yi," Boyce illuminates readers about furniture styles, construction details, terminology, furniture designers, and design movements throughout history and throughout the world. Styles covered include European-inspired classical, baroque, pop, rococo, and modernist. This extensive guide will be helpful for furniture enthusiasts, historians, and those interested in redecorating their homes.

This book is a comprehensive resource covering the principles and practice of the conservation and restoration of furniture, and other decorative art objects made wholly or partly of wood. It integrates theory with practice to show the principles which govern interaction between wooden objects, the environmental and conservation treatments and the factors which need to be taken into account to arrive at acceptable solutions to conservation problems. The practical knowledge and experience of a team of conservators active in the field are bought together with theoretical and reference material from diverse sources and unified within a systematic framework. Specialist conservators from related disciplines cover diverse materials often incorporated into furniture.