Frame Maker Queen Street
Manric Hock
Joiners, turners, japanners, cabinetmakers, chairmakers, Windsor chair makers, upholsterers, and even a few specialists who made picture frames are included. Occasionally several occupations are listed for one man; secondary occupations are in parentheses.
Craftsmen endowed with ability and financing often engaged in several trades; more often men were forced by lack of ability and financing to try various trades. Some trades were closely related. The men who joined furniture, joiners and shop joiners, were often also housewrights, house joiners, house carpenters, or ship joiners. Japanners were often painters. Upholsterers sold fabric and so were usually shopkeepers, often attaining the rank of merchant. And everyone who became wealthy became a gentleman, an appellation usually omitted on this list. Some crafts were almost indistinguishable: turner and chairmaker, joiner and cabinetmaker, and, in the late eighteenth-century, chairmaker and Windsor chair maker.
Furniture craftsmen of surrounding towns (e.g., Charlestown, Roxbury, Dorchester) are not included unless they worked at some time within Boston. The men who made and sold pulls and other hardware for furniture are omitted. Also omitted are the housewrights, carpenters, and ship joiners, who, masters of the art of joinery, no doubt occasionally made a piece of furniture.
Abbreviations are as follows: b. (born), bapt. (baptized), i.m. (published intention to marry), and d. (died). The reader may assume that most craftsmen were working at their trade by the year of their marriage and usually were still working at the time of death.
These early frames were almost certainly not executed by the carvers whose work began to proliferate in domestic settings throughout Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. They were more probably made by the joiners who produced the panels for the portraits; the earliest of all being fitted to the painted panel with a system of grooved rabets and dowels to create a permanent setting, bonded to the painting [2]. Later on, plain moveable frames might be produced by the cabinetmakers who also made interior domestic woodwork (doors, wainscoting and cupboards); possibly, in the case of a great house such as Hardwick, by the carpenter employed on the estate.
There is no indication of how these portraits would have been framed, or whether they would have travelled simply as stretched canvases in their respective cases; however, they were much more likely to have been framed in London and sent as complete works of art, ready to hang, to avoid the complication of the newly-established couple having to provide their own frames.
One outcome of this trip was the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, the ceiling of which was executed several years before Rubens was commissioned to fill the panels with paintings, and which is basically a collection of giant picture frames ornamented with classical architectural mouldings, and reminiscent of the arrangement of ceilings in, for example, the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
When carved giltwood patterns did begin to make their way as acceptable frame designs in the fledgling American states, it seems to have been mainly in the form of French Baroque styles from the second half of the 17th and the early 18th centuries. This could have been due to a political inclination, since France had a much smaller colonial population and therefore less ability to exert power in the American continent, which may have helped to neutralize its deplorably Catholic tendencies from the viewpoint of the settlers. Further, in Britain the carved and gilded frame itself had begun to diffuse downward, into the middle and mercantile classes, losing something of its aristocratic exclusivity. Decoratively carved cushion mouldings had already begun to migrate from their architectural origins on cornices, doorframes and the undersides of stairs, forming simple gilded torus frames ornamented with garlands of leaves in the French style. They were attractive and more flexible for mass framing than, for instance, the architectural structures of the Sansovino style, whilst their running or centred ornament could be repeated in straight rails of any length and were therefore slightly easier and quicker to produce than the sculptural composition of an Auricular frame.
American pine could well have been obtainable in London; some raw wood (as well as the numerous ships which were built from it) crossed the Atlantic eastward, although the long voyage made it economically unviable for Britain to import enough of the wood it needed from America. Masts were one form of wooden import which did flourish, since fir trees from New England were large and plentiful, and those from Norway were gradually being exhausted[10]. Offcuts to ballast the hold, after cargo had been unloaded, was another possible source of wood transported back to Britain. The ships themselves were increasing exponentially in number, particularly from the port of Boston, which during the 17th and 18th centuries grew to be the largest and most prosperous city in America [11].
John Freake would have been counted amongst those thirty merchants (a multi-millionaire in 2019 terms), if he had not been killed in an accidental explosion of gunpowder the year before. He had been an ambitious and energetic man, whose estate was worth almost 2,400; he had left England in his late twenties, and had established his own family and eight children in Boston [13]. He retained the coat of arms of his family back in Dorset, however, quartering them with those of his wife; perhaps he tried to make a similar marriage of the Old and New World when framing the portraits of himself and his wife.
Looking at the list of Boston craftsmen who were producing furniture in the 18th century, compiled by Myra Kaye[14], there are very few specialist carvers who would have been working in Boston in the 1670s: George Robinson, whose son of the same name was born in 1680, making the former the right age to be working in the last quarter of the 17th century; William Shute, who married in 1690, and his father-in-law, Edward Budd.
Of course, other carvers on the list are undated, making it possible that they, too, may have had mainly 17th century careers; but given that where work can be tied to a named carver, it is usually associated with decorating chairs and chests, the likelihood of more than one or two of those producing picture frames is very small. This is especially true because of the divergence of ornament on American furniture from what might be used on a picture frame: chests, cabinets and chairs were generally given turned and geometric decoration, based on English Tudor and Jacobean styles. It seems to be only from the early 18th century that carved ornament and overall gilding began to be applied to frames as a matter of course (and in a more up-to-date fashion), and that the quality of colonial carving began to equal that of imported British work.
This second portrait of the queen by Cooper is the one which entered the collection of Yale University around the time that it was completed, in 1720, and is therefore almost certainly in its original frame. Like the setting of his oval portrait of Queen Anne, the carving is a cursory and primitive version of the pattern it imitates; it expresses the lower levels of a craft which may have lagged behind the development of other, more necessary skills in the colonies, but was now endeavouring to to catch up on almost a century of growth and refinement. It may perhaps have been carved by one of the craftsmen who specialized in carving ornament for cupboard cornices, chairs, and chests [17]. Both the Cooper frames, however, demonstrate knowledge of the fashion in frame styles, and they acknowledge the decorative power of overall gilding.
This is even more true for John Smibert, born in Scotland but an emigrant to America at the age of forty, who had practised (very successfully) as a portraitist in London in the style of Kneller [21]. He had also spent three years in Italy, painting portraits and copying Old Masters. When he settled in Boston, he traded as an oil and colourman, showing his Italian copies above his shop, alongside casts of classical antiquities. These not only served as a splendid advert for his own painting abilities, but brought European art into the heart of the city.
The fact that John Smibert was selling framed prints from Europe in his shop indicates that he could (at least in the beginning) also have imported frames directly for his own work. However, by 1735 he was writing to a client in Newport, Rhode Island, blaming local framemakers for a delay:
They also, as noted above, have a steeper, narrower and more erect ogee top moulding compared with British Louis XIV-style frames, and a greatly simplified recreation of the Brainesque foliate strapwork which was so well-known by English carvers as to vary relatively little from workshop to workshop. Both portraits above are in this type of Bostonian Baroque, and their versions of the ornament are similarly almost identical with each other: there is just enough difference in handling to need more explanation than the three years between them, and to confirm that either two workshops, or two carvers within the same workshop, were responsible. The sight edges are particularly unlike. An invoice for one of these frames reveals its greater cost in comparison with the cheaper Hogarth frames:
Baroque centre-&-corner frames were commissioned elsewhere by James Beekman, a New York merchant who had made enough of a fortune at the age of twenty-eight to buy a house, extend, enlarge and furnish it fashionably, commissioning as the finishing touch portraits of himself and his wife from the London emigr artist, Lawrence Kilburn. Payments for the paintings and their frames are recorded in his account books, quoted by Morrison Heckscher in an article on the Beekman portraits and their frames:
The style of the New York Hardcastle seems to have encompassed elements of the Palladian, which Kent reinvented, and motifs in English Rococo, which Chippendale would help to diffuse and transform. Both styles were present in the structure and decoration of English looking-glasses and chimneypieces from the 1720s-40s, perhaps indicating the area in which Hardcastle had been trained. The emigration of Hardcastle, and of others like him, was of even more importance to the development of carving and gilding in the colonies than the growing trade in European pattern books. With the arrival of such experienced artisans the craft was given an injection of the robust practicality which only the establishment of a flourishing workshop could produce.
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