Stool with needlework top

This New Zealand-made stool is in a neo-Grecian Regency style, and is likely based on a design from William Smee’s Designs of Furniture (c1838). The maker is unknown, but the brass cast hinges, cross-hatched flat-head wire nails and reciprocating saw marks on the base suggest a production date of c1850.

The kauri frame provides support for fabric lining on the sides of the stool, creating a distinctive sarcophagus shape. The needlework on the top of the stool is not original, but it appears to be Berlin work, which was popular in the late nineteenth century.

This stool would have been made by a professional cabinetmaker, for, as Stanley Northcote-Bade explains in Colonial Furniture in New Zealand, what distinguished nineteenth-century cabinetmakers was their use and interpretation of contemporary design books (Northcote-Bade 1971, 70). Professionals 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). If colonial New Zealand furniture could be said to have a distinctive style, it would be a modified Regency style for which English designers like Smee offered abundant inspiration.

Stools are a perennially popular form of furniture and tend to keep pace with fashion trends. It is likely that this style of stool was only popular in New Zealand for a short time, and was then superseded by the more ornate decorative forms of the Victorian style. It is therefore a rare example of mid-nineteenth-century colonial furniture design, demonstrating the market for fashionable metropolitan furnishings among New Zealand’s early settlers.

• Cottrell, William. 2017. Personal communication with curator.
• Heckscher, Morrison H. and Peter M. Kenny. 2000. 'English Ornamennt Prints and Furniture Books in Eighteenth-Century America.' Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/enpb/hd_enpb.htm
• Miller, Judith ed. 1998. Miller’s Antiques Encyclopedia. London: Miller’s.
• Northcote-Bade, S. 1971. Colonial Furniture in New Zealand. Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed.