New Mexican Furniture 1600-1940—The Origins, Survival, and Revival of Furniture Making in the Hispanic Southwest [SOLD]

NEW MEXICAN FURNITURE 1600-1940 The Origins, Survival, and Revival of Furniture Making in the Hispanic Southwest

by Lonn Taylor and Dessa Bokides 

Museum of New Mexico Press

Hardback with slip cover, 1987 first edition, 288 pages

Trastero, Banco, Escabel, Harinero.  These words, foreign to many, have been in the vocabulary of the carpinteros—Spanish woodworkers— of New Mexico for nearly four centuries.  New Mexican Furniture, 1600-1940, is a rich unfolding of the origins, survival, and revival of furniture making techniques and designs in the Hispanic Southwest.  Its beginnings are traced to the first permanent Spanish settlements along the Rio Grande after 1598, when carpinteros made doors and windows, shaped beams and corbels, and fashioned furniture.  By 1790, the census listed forty carpenters in New Mexico, or one or more for virtually every Spanish village from Santa Fe south.

New Mexican Furniture 1600-1940 presents nearly 300 photographs, many in full color, of furniture of the carpinteros.  A 19th-century open mortise-and-tenon chair with gouge carving; a Taos chest enhanced by the popular pomegranate motif; an incised floral design on a traditional Hispanic chair; an elaborately curved wardrobe displaying Gothic influences; cupboards, beds, benches, footstools, washstands and writing desks—all presented in the most thorough and elaborate discussion of Hispanic furniture making in New Mexico ever published.