he unusual quality of its workmanship and evolved the type known as the American Block Front.”
There are records of North America merchants visiting Cuba to buy mahogany for cabinetmaking. However, Goodwin’s theory antedates the discovery of the Boston block front furniture of the late 1730s. Mooz thinks it is “probable that Newport furniture designs, individual though they are, were originally drawn from precedents outside Newport. The form was based on blocking developed in Boston and the ornament may have been taken from French designs, but the creative genius that combined these elements and perfected the style was Newport’s alone.”
The hundreds of eighteenth-century sacristy chests of drawers in Cuba today remain a tribute to the skill and innovative sense of design of their anonymous makers. They serve as an impetus for further study of the confluence of cultures in colonial Cuba and how it affected the development of the tradition of craftsmanship on the island.
(2) Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo, Havana: History and Architecture of a Romantic City, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (Monacelli Press, New York, 2000), p. 72.
(3) Sherry Johnson, The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2001), p. 10.
(4) Symonds, “English Eighteenth Century Furniture Exports,” pp. 57, 59.
(5) Rafael Domenech Gallissa and Luis Perez-Bueno, Muebles antiquos espanoles/Antique Spanish Furniture, trans. Grace Hardendorff Burr (1921; Archive Press, New York, 1965), p. 20.
(6) David B. Warren, “The arts of viceregal Mexico, 1521-1821: A confluence of cultures,” The Magazine ANTIQUES, vol. 161, no. 4 (April 2002), p. 126.
(7) R. Peter Mooz, “The origins of Newport block-front furniture design,” The Magazine ANTIQUES, vol. 99, no. 6 (June 1971), p. 882.
(8) Quoted in “Speculations on the Rhode Island block-front in 1928,” comp. Wendell D. Garrett, ibid., p. 891.
(9) Mooz, “The origins of Newport block-front furniture design,” p. 886.
MICHAEL CONNORS is the author of Cuban Elegance published by Harry N. Abrams in March.