Townsend furniture show at the Met
Jeremy Osner
>So tonight I finally got to see the Townsend retrospective after thinking about it for a month or more. Can't recommend it highly enough -- obviously the furniture is breathtaking in design and execution, and the wood -- but the great thing is the selection of pieces, and the way they're arranged to let you compare them. They have at a rough guess 30 or 40 pieces, mostly tables, chests of drawers, desks, and cabinets, and a few chairs, and some miscellany -- so you can go from one (say) desk to the next, to the next, seeing how they are basically the same and what differences are introduced from piece to piece. Also there is some comparison of pieces by John Townsend with cheaper copies done by other Newport shops, which I found interesting.
In one of the rooms, pieces are displayed upside-down -- so you can examine a lot of the joinery pretty closely. (And even in the other rooms, the way the furniture is layed out it is fairly easy to look behind and under stuff without attracting much adverse attention from the guards.)
I went in to this show knowing that Newport furniture is not really my bag -- and came out pretty well confirmed in that opinion. I mean, a cabriole leg with a talon on the end of it is really beautiful and admirable; but I don't feel any real impetus to duplicate it. What surprised me about the show was how interesting I found the drop-leaf tables -- a piece of furniture that has never really been high on my list of things to make -- some of the ones I saw there had me thinking Yeah, I could build something like that and have it come out pretty nice! So, I'm going to keep that in mind as a possible project for later on.
