An early 18th century Japanned Tall-Case Clock strikes a global pose
Written by: Brian Roche
In a quiet sunlit corner of Framingham History Center’s Old Academy Building stands a rather tall grandfatherly figure from Boston decked out in the latest fashion. And by fashion we mean what was considered high culture in the early 18th century, and what displayed the gentleman’s social standing, financial means and global curiosity in the most tasteful and eye-catching way. In this instance, we are referring to an elegant “Japanned” tall-case clock decorated and painted in an East Asian style – an imitation of popular style in England called “chinoiserie”, which was itself an imitation of expensive and hard to obtain lacquered furniture from China and Asia.
An Early American Clockmaker
Although we may not know the name of the cabinetmaker or jappaner, we do know the name of the clockmaker, making this piece a very rare and early example of Colonial American clockmaking. Inscribed on the elaborate brass clockface is James Batterson, Boston, Fecit (fecit being a Latin phrase meaning “he made this”). James Batterson (1682 –1730) was among the very earliest American clockmakers; in October of 1707 he advertised that he had lately arrived from London (via Philadelphia) and had opened a store in Boston for the sale of watches and clocks. This puts the age of the clock circa 1710, certainly one of the earliest known examples known of American tall-case clocks.
As in England, we find that many of the early clocks made in America were for churches and steeples. Gradually a small number of tall-case clocks started being built for some of the more well-to-do citizens of Boston and beyond. Up until 1810, the brass movements would still be imported from England. Like its sister port to the north, Salem, much of the great wealth generated in Boston came from a booming economy based on the global exchange of goods. Among the luxury Asian goods (called East India goods) flowing into England, and now America, were Indian calico, teas, Chinese porcelain, and exquisite examples of lacquered furniture and boxes coming from China and Southeast Asia that particularly excited the English and European audience
An Influential Treatise
In 1688 John Stalker and Geroge Parker published A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing. “Like most English and Americans at the time Stalker and Parker seemed to have an imperfect understating of Asia geography; they used the terms Japan and India interchangeably even though they distinguished lacquerwork done in Japan from that of China or Indonesia,” writes Phyllis Whitman Hunter in The Magazine Antiques (“Japanned furniture: global objects in provincial America”, May 2009). “Unlike their countrymen across the Atlantic, Americans did not adopt a wholehearted chinoiserie style but rather incorporated Asian inspired objects into their genteel lifestyle. They understood japanned furniture not as an exotic curiosity but as one of the many global products that signaled their participation in a transatlantic polite and commercial culture.”
The most up-and-coming Colonials were adopting more cosmopolitan lifestyles, and their architecture reflected that. Houses were built or renovated to include larger rooms with high ceilings and generous clear glass sashes to create light-filled spaces for entertaining. Hunter explains that “in such airer, more spacious rooms larger pieces of japanned furniture – high chests of drawers and tall-case clocks – could show to most advantage; their reflective surfaces and elaborate gilded decoration could take possession of a room and reflect the luster back onto their owners. In such an environment, it is not surprising that several jappaners flourished in Boston. As the center for American furniture manufacture until 1750, Boston had as many as a dozen jappaners at work during the first half of the century.”
Simplifying the Process
An authentic lacquered and gilded finish could take months to complete. The lacquer used was derived only from the Japanese varnish tree (Rhus verniciflua), which grows only in Asia, making these items rare in the places where they were made – Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. To satisfy Western demand for the glowing objects that usually featured Chinese motifs of flowers, figures, or landscapes on a highly polished background of ebony or scarlet, the English developed a technique using repeating layers of varnish that approximated the Asian finish and called it japanning.
“Boston japanners simplified the European process in two ways”, writes Dean A Fales, Jr. (“Boston Japanned Furniture”, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2017). “The base paints were applied directly over the wood, usually maple in casepieces and pine in clocks, rather than paint being put over a layer of whiting which was used by the English and New Yorkers to fill in the surfaces of oak or other coarser-grained woods.”
“An inability to obtain the proper techniques of true Oriental [sic] lacquerwork did not dissuade the American jappaner,” writes Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Elizabeth Bidwell Bates in American Furniture 1620 to the Present (Richard Marek Publishers, New York 1981 ps. 129-130). “He modeled figures and landscape ornament such as trees, rocks and flora in shallow relief directly onto the wood with gesso – a mixture of gum Arabic, glue whiting and other powders. When this was dry the surface was smoothed with sharkskin and red-brown stain was applied. Over this ground color, lampblack powder in oil resin was dashed broadly with a brush to simulate tortoiseshell and lacquer.”
Fales explains that “in English japanning the colors were transparent ones with seed-lac (shellac) varnish mixed in with the pigments. The Boston japanner used oil colors and after raising his figures with whiting, gilded them with metallic powders or leaf, painted in details with lampblack, and then varnished the finished product.”
The final polished layer would be a shellac made exclusively from the deposits left by insects from India. “The shellac varnish gave the surface a brilliant luster and optical depth which simulated effectively the surface of Oriental [sic] lacquer,” writes Fairbanks and Bates in American Furniture. “The composition of imitation lacquer did not ensure the longevity of the ornamentation…making these pieces the most vulnerable and fragile pieces of art in American collections.”
Delightful Designs, Anonymous Designers
The FHC’s Tall-Case Clock shows many of the characteristics that intrigued the original owners and audiences of these japanned items. As Fales points out, “the designs themselves were delightful. Chinese buildings, bridges, faceless people, birds, and strange flora of all sorts mingled with griffins, fierce dragons, double-humped camels, unseaworthy boats, plodding wheelbarrows, and pompous horsemen in a scaleless world of make believe.”
As Fales surveys many japanned pieces he notes that “many motifs reappear with much variation and little or no duplication on several pieces…and with many qualified japanners working in Boston, it is virtually impossible to separate their work with few exceptions.”
“For decades, scholars have been looking with fascination a colonial japanned furniture made in Boston. They have lavished attention on these pieces, elegant or gaudy, according to your eye, and their writings have expressed a deep yearning to know who decorated them,” writes Sinclair H. Hitchings (“Colonial Japanners: The Documentary Record”, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2017). “As so often happens, history has not been co-operative. No one, in the past, has been able to combine documentary evidence and decorative detail to form vocabularies of ornament and technique attributable to individual jappaners… The record as we know it suggests to me that the application of decoration to japanned furniture was, like the making of other decorative details, a secondary craft which would seldom be occasion for signed work.”
Jappaning was much more than a passing phase – it lasted for the full length of the 18th century and beyond. Boston jappaning’s “heyday occurred during a fifty-year period preceding the Revolution,” Fales writes. “Later jappaning was done in Boston after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century, the figures not being raised and the decoration limpidly differing from the earlier work.” Fales reminds us that “whether or not these were actual productions of the East or not made little difference. Precision was not a requisite to the eighteen-century mind when sublime remoteness could provide delight through flights of fancy “
Contrary to the often-staid impression of Colonial Boston’s upper crust, Fairbanks and Bates believe that the japanned furniture and items of this time “are some of the most stunning examples of Colonial taste. The classic Baroque proportions of the furniture contrast dramatically with a whimsical disregard for Western tradition in the ornament. In spite of seemingly opposed stylistic views, East and West are harmoniously blended with a bold freedom that documents an age of enterprising mercantile and artistic adventures.”
Looking back through history, Fales writes that “the exoticism of the East has long whetted the imagination of Western man. In our early decorative arts, the Colonies felt shimmers of the Orient through ceramics, textiles, furniture, and books.” Who would have thought the quiet, dignified gentleman standing in the corner of the Old Academy building, who long ago stopped keeping track of time, would have so much to say?