page_title: Thomas Day (cabinetmaker)
section_title: Furniture Craftsmanship
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Day (cabinetmaker) / Day's Technique and Artistry / Furniture Craftsmanship
caption_attribution_description: Furniture exhibit in the North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
context_page_description: Thomas Day was a free black furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina. Born a free black man in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day moved to Milton in 1817 and became a highly successful businessman, boasting the largest and most productive workshop in the state during the 1850s. Day catered to high-class white clientele and was respected among his white peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic. Day came from a free and relatively well-off family and was privately educated. Today, Day's pieces are highly sought after and sell for high prices; his work has been heavily studied and displayed in museums such as the North Carolina Museum of History. Day is heralded in modern society as an incredibly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman, specifically in regards to the challenges his race posed to his success in the Antebellum South.
context_section_description: In his furniture workshop, Day tended to employ his own design style for all of his pieces; this style evolved with popular stylistic trends throughout his few decades as a successful and skilled craftsman. Day's work is characterized by improvisational subscription to popular urban styles of the time and his designs were methodical and symmetrical. Scholars of African and African-American art and design widely agree that this facet of Day's style could reflect his racial heritage, since African and African-American art was highly creative and improvised, with visible rhythms in the designs. However, American design scholars warn against attributing Day's entire design style to his African heritage, because American rural furniture designers of all races often creatively and spontaneously elaborated on popular stylistic themes as well. Essentially, Day took basic structures and ideas from urban trends on furniture designs and elaborated on them utilizing his personal creative taste. This habit of utilizing popular designs, combined with the cost-efficient production methods in his workshop through steam power, made Day's designs not only symbols of status for customers through their style, but also competitively priced. Based on stylistic analysis, it appears that Day pleaded many of his basic design structures for his various furniture pieces from a craftsman pattern book by John Hall, the Cabinet Makers’ Assistant, especially his use of s-shape curves.
  Day enjoyed employing both horizontal and vertical curvature ornamentations that balanced each other out. Scholars argue that his craftsmanship focused on creating a balance of motion in his pieces, where curvilinear designs as well as scroll motifs suggested motion to the eye, while the interplay between the horizontal and vertical directions, as well as the negative space between such curves, created a sense of balance in the piece. On many of his tables, Day carved animalistic paws, even adding carved fur, onto the clawed foot style that was fashionable at the time, as well as adding carved foliage resembling tobacco leaves. These stylistic choices further illustrate Day's tendency to take popular designs and add his own regional twist, with the tobacco leaves referencing his own tobacco farm as well as the tobacco-growing tradition in North Carolina.
  Day's earlier works tended to follow the fashionable Grecian Style, which combined German, French, and English versions of the Greek Revival style to create a design trend wholly American in the way that it took popular styles and combined and elaborated on them. Day's Grecian Style pieces involved intricate moldings and often took pieces common to other types of furniture, such as placing wardrobe-style cornices on a bookshelf. Also demonstrated in Day's pieces under this style are his unique craft methods to create pieces of quality efficiently. For example, to create the illusion of multiple single glass panes in the doors on his bookshelves, Day would place one long, horizontal pane of glass behind singular frames. Day also employed dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joint techniques in his crafting.
  Day often used mahogany veneers on his furniture, a technique he came to be known for. Common motifs found in Day's furniture include s-scroll and s-curve shapes as well as thumb shapes in both positive and negative space. The scroll and curve shapes were often used as support pieces for his furniture, such as armrests and legs on chairs and tables, and were employed as a distraction from the large size and heaviness of some of his pieces, especially those that followed the early Gothic trends of large arched designs topping wardrobes and bookshelves. Furthermore, Day's scroll shapes emphasized his personal craft style of creating a balance of motion to draw the eye and create a sense of rhythm in his work. The scroll motif also had a practical usage: Day used scrolled armrests on some of his chair designs to enable military personnel to sit down without having to remove their swords. Playing on this idea of balance, too, Da
caption: Writing Desk, c. 1840-1850 - North Carolina Museum of History
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