Where Yesterday Meets Tomorrow

A Tale of Two Cradles

Patina

Patina is the color that materials take on over time. Every material very gradually changes color as it reacts with the atmosphere, with kitchen odors, etc. That patina is very difficult to fake. So study the patina carefully. If it’s a dresser, look inside the drawers. You should get less discoloring where the surfaces were less exposed. If there is uneven discoloring or some boards (of the same type of wood) are different than others, you’ll know something has been changed or added.

The first picture below shows a wonderful dark early patina on our cradle. The second picture shows the color of golden oak stain as applied to pine.

While considering the finish on the piece, you should also smell the piece, both inside and out for evidence of recent finishing. If you smell the finish, be very suspicious of the entire piece.

And finally, rub your fingers gently over the surface. Does the finish feel sticky or tacky? Can you feel the “alligatoring” that indicates an old finish? And while you’re at it, can you feel the slight scalloping that indicates hand planing to smooth the surface?

Materials

Often the fastest way to test the age of a piece is to measure that thickness of the wood. If the piece is made from very uniform 3/4 inch thick wood then it’s a new piece. The early craftsmen hand planed their wood, usually working with 1/2 inch to 5/8ths inch thickness or 1 inch to 1 1/4 inch thickness. Even if they wanted a 3/4” piece, it would not be consistently 3/4” from end to end and from side to side. Uniform wood means machine planed wood. From perhaps 1900 to 1930s (very rough estimates) machine planed wood was 7/8ths inch thick. More recent wood is always 3/4” thick.

But of course, a scoundrel could simply buy 3/4” wood and plane it down to 5/8ths. Another good indicator is the width of the boards. Modern boards come in standard widths. “Six inch” boards are 5 1/4 inches wide. “Eight inch” boards are 7 1/4 inches wide, etc. The widest board you can buy at a lumberyard today is a “12 inch” board which is 11 1/4 inches wide. In the 1950s, boards were very slightly wider. So, if the widest board in the piece is 11 1/4 inches or 11 1/2 inches, you’ve got a new piece.

In the fake cradle, both the bottom and sides are 11 1/4 wide. Additional width is obtained by gluing pieces. In early furniture, boards were rarely glued together to gain width.

And a final note about construction materials. The early craftsmen took pride in their work. They did not make items from wood with defects. Knots, cracks, stains, rotted areas were not allowed! Wood with such defects was used to heat the workshop - not produce furniture for the customers. An occassional small tight knot might appear in some utilitarian item, but never in furniture that was going to be seen.

The wood in the fake cradle is full of defects. The sides of the cradle are made from the pulpy “heart wood” at the center of the tree trunk, causing severe shrinkage and cracking. Our artisan forebearers would have discarded that part of the tree when cutting planks!

Construction

The joinery on the two pieces is radically different. The early cradle has wonderful skillfully done hand cut dovetails.

The fake crib is held together with screws countersunk and covered with wooden plugs cut from doweling.

This entire construction is wrong! Screws were expensive. They were hand made one by one. The threads were filed by hand, and the slot across the head was hand cut. In the picture below, note that the slot is not straight.

Screws were recognized as a very strong fastener, but they were only used where nothing else would do. Thus the sides are dovetailed. The cost of an apprentice cutting dovetails was less than the cost of an apprentice filing metal rods down to make screws! The authentic cradle has 4 screws - one at each corner to hold the rockers in place. The cradle also has hand smithied square nails.

The wood plugs used to cover the screw heads are exactly 1/2 in diameter and are precisely round. Again, that is standard lumberyard fare, not hand craftsmanship. And the early craftsmen didn’t use wooden plugs to cover screw heads. They might have pegged a joint but these aren’t pegs.

Other Indicators Of Age

Two other indicators of hand work are evident in the early crib. First, there are slight assymetries in the pieces. For instance, the decorative scrolling on the sides of the crib are not exactly identical. Sometimes, the difference is visible to the eye. Other times, as here, it takes a ruler and a caliper to measure the differences. Minor assymetry suggests early hand work. Major assymetry suggests sloppy workmanship, and therefore, recent age.

A final evidence found on this crib are scribe marks. The early craftsmen didn’t generally use pencil marks - they use a sharp point to scribe (scratch) a mark in the wood. The scribe marks are visible on this piece around the cutouts in the bottom of the crib. The craftsman marked the locations, then cut them out with a hand saw. The curves at the ends are assymetric, and the cutouts don’t follow the scribe marks in the floor.

Conclusions

This is the real world, so nothing is as neat as we’d like. In evaluating furniture, you have to look at the totality of the evidence. Sometimes you have conflicting signals. In the case of the modern cradle, we find two elements that are typical of earlier pieces. First, although most of the wood is 3/4 inch thick, several pieces are thinner. Perhaps they were sanded down. And second, the shaping of the rockers and end pieces shows assymetry. But even on a modern cradle, those pieces would be hand cut, and the assymetry is so substantial it suggests the sloppiness of modern work. All the other evidence is overwhelmingly against this piece, so we are confident in pronouncing it a rather poor fake.

In fact, it is so poorly done that it may not have been intended as a fake - it may simply be a someone’s shop project. And that illustrates one of the problems with copies. Even if no fraud is intended, they often end up in the antiques market and someone still gets cheated. If the maker of the cradle had shown sufficient pride in the work to sign and date the piece, it would have been a nice decorator item worth a substantial price instead of an expensive error.

© 1997-2002 Coxsackie Antique Center

Last Modified: