Popular Woodworking 2005-12 № 152, страница 42

towering monument to the art of furniture making has a weight and presence rivaling that of large, high-style casework built in the outside world.

A trio of enormous frame-and-panel doors conceals the cupboard's interior. The geometry of these doors consists of two horizontal series of rectangles unadorned by shaped edges. Above the doors, the case is surmounted by a wide cove moulding anchored in place by a pair of horizontal fillets. In the outside world, the doors would have been framed in moulded edges and the crown moulding would have presented a clutter of shadow lines. Such an iteration would certainly have had appeal, but I prefer the simplicity of the straightforward handling of forms in the Hamlin piece.

For me, this piece comes most sharply into focus when I examine the tiny wood escutcheons on the doors. The maker wisely chose to avoid the visual distraction of metal escutcheons on the front of a piece that, except for the slivers of visible hinge pins, is an unbroken seascape of wood.

Good joinery is evident throughout the piece. The lower case is built between a pair ofpost-and-panel ends with mortise-and-tenon joinery used to frame the

These wood escutcheons integrate nicely into the expansive wood doors of the Hamlin cupboard over case of drawers.

This nicely proportioned miniature blanket chest features dovetailed joinery on the case itself and simple nails to hold in place the chest's bottom.

Many Shaker utilitarian pieces, such as this hanging cupboard, made use of nails in structural contexts.

drawers, which are nicely dovetailed. The frame-and-panel doors of the upper case also employ mor-tise-and-tenon joinery, and the crown moulding is held in place with a series of glue blocks.

This use of good wood-to-wood joinery is evident almost everywhere in the Pleasant Hill furniture collection. There are, however, some exceptions, and that's where I think the story of Pleasant Hill joinery becomes very intriguing.

The Exalted Place Of the Lowly Nail

Shaker furniture makers have been revered, in particular since the Shaker chairmaking operation of Mt. Lebanon under the direction of Brother Robert Wagan won acclaim at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. In fact, at one point in the mid-20th century, this reverence had reached such a point that any country piece assembled with dovetails was apt to be identified as Shaker. That perception was inaccurate - as you'll see, there is some Shaker furniture built to different standards of craftsmanship than you might expect. And that perception was also unfair to those craftsmen in the outside world who made carefully constructed country furniture using dovetails, as well as executing many other signatures of fine workmanship.

While the craftsmanship in the very best Shaker work did, in fact, rival high-style furniture of the period, the Shakers were capable of employing techniques, even in their best work, that modern craftsmen might find unusual or disconcerting.

For example, Shaker craftsmen made widespread use of nails - and not just for the installation of mouldings, but also for structural applications.

During my visit at Pleasant

Hill, I did measured drawings of several pieces, including the miniature blanket chest and the hanging cupboard shown above, and several of those pieces, including these two, are held together, - at least in part - by nails.

The case and plinth of the miniature chest are, of course, nicely dovetailed, but the bottom of the chest is held in place through the use of nails driven through the chest's front and back into the edges ofthe chest bottom. This is not what most contemporary makers would describe as

good joinery. In fact, because the chest bottom has shrunk across its width, there are unsightly gaps visible on each side of that bottom panel when you look down into the open chest from above.

More properly that bottom would have been fitted into grooves plowed on the insides of the chest sides and ends. That technique would have eliminated not only the nails that hold the bottom in place but also the unsightly gaps.

The hanging cupboard, although an elegant manifesta-

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Popular Woodworking December 2005