Winter 2016

Peter Ford (active 1785–1820, died 1820). 5 Advertising as a solo proprietor in June 1790, Aitken gave what remains the only listing of furniture he made: chairs of various patterns, some of which are entirely new, never before seen in this city, and finished with an elegancy of stile peculiar to themselves, and equal in goodness and neatness of workmanship to any ever made here. Likewise, desks, bureaus, book cases, bed steads, tea tables, card ditto, dining ditto, &c. 6 From his first shop at 50 Chestnut Street, Aitken led the city’s master cabinetmakers during a labor dispute that lasted from 1794 to 1796 and concerned the reissue of the book of prices that established fair wages for journeymen and reasonable retail prices. Aitken became a member of the Saint Andrew’s Society of Philadelphia, a Scottish benevolent group, in 1794. On November 12, 1796, he married Jane McDowell (1774–1831), at New London, Pennsylvania. The marriage secured his social and economic position in southeastern Pennsylvania—and possibly provided professional connections since Jane was the daughter of Elizabeth Loughead McDowell (1738–1825) and Captain James McDowell (1742–1815), a prosperous, Irish-born merchant of Scottish ancestry who served gallantly in the Revolutionary War. His marriage to McDowell may have influenced George Washington’s choice of Aitken to make furniture early in 1797 when the former president and his wife prepared to return to Mount Vernon. Washington paid “John Aitkin for a desk for Miss Custis & a screen for Mrs. Washington” on January 18, 1797; $402.20 for twenty-four side chairs and two sideboards on February 21; and $145 for a tambour secretary on March 13. 7 The sideboards and chairs were the centerpieces of Washington’s “New Room” at Mount Vernon, and the desk was for his plantation off ice—with the ensemble representing a paradigm for Philadelphia furniture of that period. Aitken’s chairs (Fig. 5), for instance, were derived from currently fashionable splat designs in Thomas Sheraton’s pattern book, but not progressive; however, he did show an enterprising side when, in March 1797, he advertised a considerable sum of mahogany and logwood for sale and his need to charter “a Vessel of 70 or 80 tons, to go two or three trips to Virginia,” presumably to deliver the Washingtons’ furniture. 8 Such a venture almost certainly also speaks to his scouting for and pursuit of markets for his furniture in the active ports along the Potomac River. While Aitken maintained his own shop at Second and Chestnut, by 1796 he was also seemingly carrying on a venture partnership with chair and cabinetmaker William Cocks (died 1799), trading in ports beyond Philadelphia under the name “Cocks & Co.”  9 The pair made “rich and Beautiful Furniture” in Philadelphia and shipped it to Charleston, South Carolina, where they advertised “A MOST elegant ASSORTMENT of FURNITURE, just imported from Philadelphia . . . a SIDE-BOARD . . . A TAMBOUR SECRETARY and BOOK Winter 138 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com of brothers John (1777–1851) and Hugh Finlay (1781–1830) furnished that city’s Dancing Assembly rooms. But what Latrobe designed for the Walns was strikingly different—especially in form. In his chair design for Aitken, Latrobe abandoned the dainty columnar carved chair backs that were then in vogue, and drew inspiration directly from ancient examples, producing a more literal interpretation of the classical aesthetic. On August 25, 1808, Latrobe sent the Walns, who were still in New York, another update: “I never was less in a humor to design anything elegant in my life. My mind & body have been 150 miles asunder. However, I have designed a side chair & I think it will be tolerably handsome. It will at all events be new. But the pattern “I never was less in a humor to design anything elegant in my life. My mind & body have been 150 miles asunder. However, I have designed a side chair & I think it will be tolerably handsome…” chair was the ugliest thing ever. I have ordered another pattern. To make a chair requires as much taste as to design one. Aiken has the sideboard already in hand.”  4 In this final surviving correspondence referring to the production of furniture for the Walns’ drawing rooms, Latrobe mentions another pattern chair, or prototype, for the set of klismos chairs that Bridport painted later that autumn. His quip that “it requires as much taste . . . to design” a chair as to make one underscores his struggle “to design anything elegant,” as well as the significance of successful collaboration with the maker—here, Aitken—in the execution. The pattern chair he references could be one of the PMA’s chairs, which is made of different woods, has tenoned joints secured with nails, and has slightly different dimensions, construction and decoration nuances (Fig. 4). Aitken’s klismos chairs, Grecian sofa, acroterion-ended settee, and French- style mirror-backed sideboard placed the Walns’ Philadelphia interior at the cutting edge of international fashion, as seen in the best drawing rooms of London, Paris, and Italy. Facts about John Aitken’s early life and training remain vague. He was born in Scotland, probably between 1760 and 1765, though the exact location is not known. He first appears in the Philadelphia directory of 1785 as the proprietor of a grocery store with Joseph Ribaud (died 1801) at the corner of Second and Chestnut streets, and that same year he operated a cabinetmaking business two blocks east on Chestnut Street with the cabinetmaker