Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [274]
When Scotland-born Duncan Phyfe came down to New York in 1792, all of twenty-four years old and just out of his apprenticeship to an Albany cabinetmaker, he faced an uncertain future. The city’s economy was rebounding from the shock of that year’s financial panic, and with the outbreak of war between Britain and France shortly thereafter, local taverns and countinghouses rang with talk of the windfall profits that lay just ahead in neutral commerce. Cabinetmaking was a fiercely competitive line of work, however. There were already scores of cabinetmakers in town, plus scores of chairmakers, carvers, gilders, turners, upholsterers, and practitioners of other closely related crafts. More were on the way too, carried toward the city on gusts of revolution from France, the British Isles, and the West Indies. For young journeymen like Phyfe, merely surviving, let alone getting ahead, didn’t promise to be easy.
One thing in Phyfe’s favor was the latest of those abrupt shifts in taste that periodically shook the Anglo-American markets in art, architecture, and interior design. On the very eve of American independence, British builders and designers had made their own break from the increasingly intricate Greco-Roman motifs characteristic of Georgian country houses and Chippendale furniture. Recent archaeological excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum had thrown new light on the classical world and inspired more nuanced interpretations of antiquity.
The best of these interpretations came from architect-decorator Robert Adam and a pair of talented cabinetmakers, George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton. Soon after the war, their work—lighter, thinner, more decorative than Chippendale’s—began to attract attention among the propertied classes of the United States as well as England. Its appeal on this side of the Atlantic derived partly from the traditional linkage of classical learning to social status (New York’s Columbia College, for example, still required applicants to prove their competence in ancient Latin and Greek by translating long passages from Cicero and the Gospels). At the same time, however, the purity and restraint of the new classicism seemed tailor-made for a republican political culture, and during the Federalist administrations of George Washington and John Adams its influence became so pervasive in America that it has since been called the Federal style.
Phyfe, who had a nose for opportunity, built up an affluent clientele with adept interpretations of Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton designs (later incorporating French Directoire motifs as well). He was no mere copyist: his workmanship equaled or excelled the best that London or Paris had to offer, and his finely carved lyres, eagles, acanthus leaves, wheat ears, reedings, and moldings were matchless. He wasn’t cheap either. A single cane-bottom mahogany side chair could run as high as twenty dollars—close to a month’s wages for an ordinary workingman. Card tables fetched sixty-five, and a carved rail sofa $122.
A chance encounter in 1798 with John Jacob Astor’s daughter, who touted his work among her friends, sent demand for Phyfe’s work soaring. Orders began pouring in from other parts of the country too, and by the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century well-to-do residents of every state regarded a Duncan Phyfe settee, sofa, or sideboard as the ne plus ultra of refinement; Henri Christophe, the black emperor of Haiti, wanted a Phyfe bed for the royal bedroom. Phyfe had meanwhile become a rich man and was investing heavily in Manhattan and Brooklyn real estate.