The carving on the group of joined furniture known collectively as "Sunflower" is among the most recognizable decoration of any group of seventeenth-century New England furniture. Almost 100 Sunflower pieces are known to exist, a handful of cupboards, a few chests and chests with single drawer, but mostly chests with two drawers. Current scholarship places their manufacture between Weathersfield and Windsor, Connecticut, about 20 miles apart on the Connecticut River.

The Sunflower group is characterized by aggressively turbulent split turnings glued singly and in pairs to the stiles, muntins and drawer fronts, and by carved three-panel fronts. In the great majority, the central panel contains three circular flowers, and the two flanking panels contain distinctive, abstracted flowers resembling tulips. These "tulips" are arranged on either side of a vertical axis culminating at the top in another tulip-like flower that spans both halves of the panel. These "tulip" panels (varying only slightly in design) are found on every Sunflower chest. Logically, perhaps, the group should be known as Tulip chests, but the Victorian collectors of "Pilgrim Century" furniture decided that the flowers in the central panel were sunflowers, and the name has stuck. Recent eyes see them as roses, or marigolds, or as no flower in particular. The central panel on the "HW" chest shown here is anomalous: This is, in fact, a Sunflower chest without a sunflower.

Close mates of the Sunflowers, the chests of the "Hadley" group, which numbers about 200, were made further north on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts and were contemporaneous. By sheer dint of numbers, the Sunflower and Hadley groups have come to represent seventeenth-century American carving. (The only other group that competes is the body of work centered on the Searle-Dennis shops of Ipswich, Massachusetts, but only a few dozen extant works represent this group.)

Thinking in the wood

By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when the Sunflower and Hadley groups arose, woodworking shop traditions were well into their second and third generation of New World-born practitioners. Most of the first generation of joiners were born in England between 1590 and 1620, and left for the New World during the "great migration" between 1630 and 1640. They would have just finished apprenticeships or would have been early in their careers as journeymen or masters. In this period, carving was the predominant decoration.

Had I apprenticed in England in the seventeenth century, carving would have been second nature to me. The tools would have been around the shop, there would have been lots of old-timers who knew all the methods and tricks, and everywhere I looked I could have seen examples of the best carving of the past, in churches, in fine public and private buildings (in wood and stone), and on the accumulated furniture of the past, some possibly made by my father, grandfather, and various uncles.

Had I apprenticed in New England in the seventeenth century, I would have had none of this visual environment. I might have had an English-trained master who had the knowledge and tools, but I would not have lived surrounded by the accumulated artisanry of the past, there would have been nothing to fill the mind's eye of a boy and inform his ability to design in wood.

Further, the necessities required for a European, agriculture-based living in the wilderness - fences first, then cattle, barns and houses; roads, wharves and bridges - meant that decoration was often an unaffordable luxury. Decorating a façade with either carving or moldings and split turnings could easily double the cost of the piece itself, and for the middle-class farmers and artisans who were the majority of immigrants to New England, adequate fences were more immediately important than decorated furniture.

Had I been a second or third generation joiner to apprentice in the Connecticut River Valley I might well have had the physical and visual tools to produce woodworking equal to that of a contemporary in England, and I might have been able to use carving tools with similar adeptness, but a vital conceptual skill would have been less well developed -- the ability to "think in the wood," to see how to fill space with forms and to embellish the small details that mark a living tradition. Since my English-trained master was called on infrequently to decorate with carving, I would have had little chance to observe the process (a major part of learning in a traditional apprenticeship) and less chance to try my own hand. I might have been a brilliant copyist, able to reproduce what was put in front of me, but generating in the form would have been awkward.

But had my clients wanted a decorative surface, and had I some facility with carving tools, I might well have come up with the techniques used on the Sunflower and Hadley groups. To modern eyes both sorts seem highly elaborate and detailed. But each is highly regulated, and the methods of applying the decoration eliminated almost any need to design: they compensated for my reduced ability to think in the wood. The Hadleys use a stencil, which in the case of the common sort of two-drawer chest, lays out everything but the center panel. The Sunflower group depends on the arc of a circle made by a gouge struck straight down.

Designing with the gouge

To illustrate the technique, I will recreate the process by which the anonymous carver produced a tulip panel of Historic Deerfield's "HW" chest, a two-drawer Sunflower chest that bears those initials in its center panel.

The origins of Sunflower carving are unclear, and are still the subject of scholarly debate, but attempts to find the antecedents in a regional English style may be beside the point. By the time the technique was developed by second or third generation joiners any original design influence had been so diluted by time and distance as to have become as good as irrelevant. The method, indeed, seems sui generis, native born in the New World. The basic move - the downward blow of a gouge to separate foreground from background - was well known in English carving, but it was only one of several techniques routinely used. In the Sunflower carving it is the only technique used, and this makes it uniquely North American. Indeed, even the straight lines, the rectangular border and the straight-sided stalk, are formed by a chisel struck straight down rather than with the V-tool that performed the job in England. In the Sunflower carving every demarcation of foreground from background is made with a downward strike - of a U-gouge for curves and straight-edged chisel for straight lines.

All panels of the Sunflower group are bordered by a three-quarter inch wide molding applied to the sides of the panel. One-quarter inch inside this molding the carver scratched layout lines to locate the borders of the carving. Then he drew two converging vertical straight lines to give the central axis of the panel. I learned by trial and error when I started doing this sort of carving that one could make only the curves that the different tools allowed, and that it was impossible to work from the outside of a carving to the center, and end up with any certainty at a predetermined place. So when I need to fill a given space, I have to work out the design on a piece of scrap wood until I figure out the right gouges to give the right lengths of the curves.

Most Sunflower and Hadley carvings were laid out with dividers, with which the carver could quickly separate a panel face into halves one way and thirds the other without reference to inches and fractions of inches. But the "HW" carver used a ruler: his panel faces were exactly 10 inches by 7 inches, and the bottom of the tulip is exactly 3 inches from the top of the carving.

Sunflower carving displays a high degree of regularity. The framed spaces for the panel are 12 inches high. The widths are all full inches, not fractions, and the scribed line enclosing the carving is 1 inch inside the framing. The carved faces of all panels in the group are 10 inches high, by 7, 8 or 9 inches wide. This regularity of dimension seems to indicate standardization, and may have allowed the shop to produce parts in advance: the turner knew the length and width of his turnings, and the carver could use slack time to stockpile carved panels. The turnings on different pieces in this group are also identical, implying that there was a common pattern to which the various turnings conformed.

The carving of the Sunflower panel is extremely simple. Once I've split the panel into right and left halves by the vertical stem and determined the base of the top flower element, then I can generate the rest of the design by eye and experience. The "HW" flanking panels are typical. To carve it, the first thing I needed to know was what gouges to use. Using the rubbing and my circle template, I discovered that five gouges and one chisel were all the tools I needed. Most of the work was done with two gouges, 2 inches and 1 ½ inches in diameter, and the others did the small details.

The competence of the "HW" carver is not in his execution; sticking a tool straight down and moving it along its path are hardly tasks requiring great skill and adeptness. Rather, his competence lies in having a clear idea of where a given curve would take him, and how best to provide foreground while minimizing background. Thus, the carving of this artisan/shop is easily recognized. Just as the turnings on this group of Sunflower furniture are quite uniform, there is a similarity to the carving. If all the extant furniture could be examined in person, and all the tools inventoried, it might well be determined that they were all produced by a single hand, or at least by a single kit of tools used by different artisans in the same shop. (It is, of course, quite possible that different shops had identical kits of gouges from the same English manufacturer, so while it is likely, it is not certain, that all Sunflowers came from the same shop.)

Once I've struck the outline, my next task is to remove the background. There is no direct impression of the tool originally used for this, but I've discovered through experience that it was probably a fairly shallow, narrow gouge; the shallowness leaves a relatively flat, though slightly rippled bottom, and the narrowness lets the tool get into tight spaces.

After removing the background, I texture it with a stamp (or punch.) Stamps were made by the carver, probably from a nail or similar piece of square or rectangular iron, whose end he shaped into a series of points with the fine triangular file that he used to sharpen his handsaw. The "HW" stamp has two rows of four points. Stamps were always made by the artisan, and the patterns they leave on the wood are part of his signature: every stamp is different. The alternative to stamping was to smooth the background more thoroughly with the grounding gouge, a relatively slow job. I find that stamping takes less time. It also mats the surface, providing a better contrast with the foreground, especially in reflected lamp of candle light.

The Sunflower panels, then, exemplify the work of a practiced artisan, a New Englander through and through who had departed almost completely from his English antecedents. He had few tools, but knew them well, and with them could generate a complex design involving geometry with adroitness. His designs abhor background, and he found ways to fill space that make design sense. Anyway, the more foreground there is the less background to waste, clean up and finally stamp - a time-consuming process that his style kept to a minimum, allowing him to complete his carvings faster and more economically.

Carving on seventeenth-century furniture, as well as the split turnings and applied moldings, is meant to be seen in situations of poor interior light. The effect of the carving was highlighted by the effects of raking light. In this regard, the simplified carving of the Sunflower chests achieves its goals every bit as successfully as the more complex carving of the Searle-Dennis school. ■

About the author: Rob Tarule, formerly the Head of Mechanick Arts at Plimoth Plantation, now makes seventeenth-century furniture in Vermont. He is the author of The Artisan of Ipswich: Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Acknowledgement:

The author thanks Joshua Lane of Historic Deerfield for the photographs and for the rubbing of the panels on the chest.