Pattern book, Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide

This is a very rare example of an early nineteenth-century pattern book which can be assigned to, and is inscribed by, a cabinetmaker in New Zealand. It was used by Henry Mason in the 1840s and 1850s.　

Professional cabinetmakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries used pattern books as a source of inspiration and a reference for customers, and they were a primary means by which London designs were disseminated throughout the English-speaking world (Heckscher and Kenny 2000).

George Smith’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide was published by Jones and Co. of London in 1826. Like Smith’s earlier work Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1808), it was strongly influenced by the revival of neo-classicism in the early nineteenth century but also incorporated Gothic and Louis Quartorze styles (Cottrell 2016, 54). The latter would become the defining style of mid-Victorian furnishing, and Smith’s patterns must therefore have appealed to the more fashion-conscious among New Zealand’s earliest settlers.

Henry Mason brought this copy to New Zealand when he immigrated in 1843. It is unique to him, as copies of the Guide were purchased by subscription one plate at a time and personally bound. Mason set up a cabinetmaking business in Wellington soon after his arrival in New Zealand, but by 1847 had moved to Auckland and was working there. In 1851 he advertised a range of ‘Elegant Articles of Cabinet Work in the New Zealand Woods,’ including ‘Loo, Card, Occasional, Dejune, and Ladies Work Tables, &c., with tops inlaid with Mosaic Work, Crests, or other designs to any pattern’ (New Zealander, 23 August 1851).  

By the 1860s, as factory-made furniture became more common both in New Zealand and in England, large manufacturing companies began to issue their own trade catalogues, while subscription magazines outstripped pattern books as a source of new designs (Cottrell 2016, 13). This pattern book was probably only useful as a reference tool for a decade or two after Mason’s arrival in New Zealand, but it nevertheless provides invaluable insights into the design of our earliest colonial furniture and materialises an important aspect of the practice of cabinetmaking.

References

• Cottrell, William. 2016. ‘Patterns and impressions: an investigation into the copying of British furniture designs, the cabinetmaker’s pattern book and trade catalogue in New Zealand 1820-1920.’ PhD thesis, University of Canterbury.
• Heckscher, Morrison H. and Peter M. Kenny. 2000. 'English Pattern Books in Eighteenth-Century America.’ In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Ponsonby, Margaret. 2007. Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750-1850. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.