Featured Cool Old Rocking Chair I am working on Restoring

Gear heads are always first Ruth! they got engines in their stuff!

 

nice

 

Getting back to Flexner, I think his main argument is, when a piece of antique furniture or any piece of furniture really gets demoted out of the house to the attic, basement, barn, etc. it's chances of survival are GREATLY reduced. If that is correct & i think it is, anything that helps to keep it in the house (yes, including painting it shabby chic) is a good thing. Paint can always be removed but once a piece is lost, it's gone forever.

 

Well, Kirk's book wasn't just about painted pieces - though it is true that many of them are. The chapter on "ratty" isn't just about removing finish either - it also talks about being very sensitive when making repairs or alterations or even removing evidence of earlier repairs (e.g. iron patches). His general approach is about accepting primitive furniture as it is, rather than trying to modify it into something "better" or different.

I think the relevant part of the article you posted is this:

So what I read him saying is that: yes, you may well want to clean up a piece of unpainted early furniture, but you need to do it sensitively IF you do it at all. You do not want to overclean it, and you certainly don't want to strip the original finish before applying a new layer on top. Cleaning is different from stripping, and removing later layers of added finish is different from removing original finish.

 

I would argue that so far as 17th & 18th century american furniture is concerned, "original finish or surface" is mostly a fantasy, a marketing scam by some dealers for financial gain. Does it happen? yes, but it is very, very rare & not really a factor with furniture available on the market today.

 

Yeah, but two things. First, as I said earlier he was interested not only in 18th century furniture, but in 19th as well, and you do still run into some of that which has its original finish on it. Second, one does occasionally run into an 18th century piece which has been sent to the basement and has not been prettied up for resale in a high-end antique store (do these stores exist any more?). Sure, it doesn't happen often, but when it does it can be a great find.

 

Yes, I think that's correct, there is a lot of victorian era furniture that still has it's original surface. There are many reasons for this i would say, not as old, big difference between 150 & 300 years old, generally speaking the finish materials were of much better quality across the board and lastly, there was A LOT more of it. Population of USA in 1700 was 250,000 whereas in 1880 over 50 million! A lot more stuff to work with, no doubt!

 

I call some factory made pieces "Mess with me"s - they're not rare, just old, and if the finish has damage already... might as well mess with it.

 

I agree, a good quality finish is really required if the piece has any hope of survival and, that goes for 17th-18th century pieces as well. Bad things happen to wood that is not protected.

 

Just a point so I don’t leave the wrong impression about Kirk’s book. He was all about furniture made using hand tools, and not factory made. Americana. So yes he has furniture from the 19th century, but it is country made from hand tools, not the factory made stuff we all normally consider to be “Victorian” furniture.