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A Thorough Examination of Campaign Furniture

British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, 1740-1914
by Nicholas A. Brawer

(Harry N. Abrams, New York City, 2001, 232 pages, hardbound, $45)

by Michael Connors

British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, 1740-1914 by art historian Nicholas A. Brawer is the first book ever written on this fascinating and long neglected collecting field.

While there have been scattered articles in the past about furniture that is designed to be folded up, packed, and carried on the march, for the first time this sparsely documented subject is covered in one comprehensive and meticulously researched book.

British Campaign Furniture includes 275 photographs and illustrations, most showing shots of the furniture both assembled and disassembled for travel. Using these photographs as his backdrop, Brawer discusses campaign furniture as a reflection of British society and its characteristics, as well as how and why the demand for campaign furniture grew throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Of special interest to collectors, dealers, and furniture historians will be Brawer's compilation of the first-ever directory of British campaign furniture makers, outfitters, and patentees.

This useful guide reveals "the quality, variety, and ingenuity of the British campaign furniture available to military officers from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth." The various entries in the directory show that campaign furniture could be used for both military and domestic purposes. Not only could the furniture be used to outfit a ship's cabin, a barracks room, or a tent, it could also be used at home to accommodate an unexpected guest or make a trip to the races a more civilized affair.

Although the scope of British Campaign Furniture is large and covers 175 years, Brawer adroitly handles this by carefully delineating the distinctions between Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian campaign furniture.

With a portfolio of images broken down with headings such as "Life Under Canvas," "Writing the Evening Dispatches," "Gentlemen at Ease," and "Personal Kit," Brawer's book is accessible to the specialist and nonspecialist alike.

Brawer points out that the finest cabinetmakers of the day, including Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Chippendale, all created designs for portable furniture that maintained the same standards of fashion and quality that could be found in stylish pieces of household furniture. Such pieces were necessary, both for the comfort of Britons abroad as well as for maintaining their national identity and social rank.

With sea voyages that typically lasted over three months and journeys across terrain that ranged from tropical jungles to scorching deserts, ease of transport and assembly were essential factors in the design of this portable furniture. The gentleman-officer class, accustomed only to the best, required that all of their traveling furniture—sofas, beds, chairs, dining tables, chests of drawers, and more—be designed in the most fashionable taste. Thus, entire living room suites that graced the tents of officers in the field could appear equally at home in a fashionable London townhouse. During the Regency period, for example, dining tables were advertised that could seat up to 70 people while still being capable of being knocked down into a box only 16 inches deep. Similarly, 12 dining chairs, with legs that unscrew and upholstered seats that detach, could fit in the space of two common chairs.

Brawer's well-researched and carefully written book interweaves tales from the field, fraught with humor and intrigue, with original inventory lists, broadsheets, and diary entries from Britons living abroad to illustrate the social climate and culture in which this furniture developed. Furniture made to be used in tents by armies on the move resembles the lavish pieces more often found in a gentlemen's club. Brawer reminds us that the gentleman-officer class, no matter where they might find themselves on military campaign, continued to carry on as though in England.

British Campaign Furniture is replete with anecdotes and historical details from the period of the British Raj. For British officers, ordinary pieces of furniture were not quite enough. They also required games tables, wine tables, four-poster beds, bookcases with leather-bound books, silk curtains, and card tables. Some tents were even outfitted with electrified lamps and open fireplaces. For the gentleman-officer class, campaign furniture helped make life "under canvas" anything but rough and uncomfortable.

Because campaign furniture could be packed flat, the British tended to take huge quantities of baggage with them on campaign. As Brawer points out, one of the ironies surrounding the production of campaign furniture is that the more portable the furniture became, the more of it officers insisted on taking with them. In order to transport it, an enormous amount of manpower was required. Brawer cites the remarkable example of the Honourable Emily Eden, who, when traveling "up the country" from Calcutta with her sister and brother, the Governor-General of India, had "60 horses, 140 elephants, `two or three hundred baggage camels,' and `bullock carts without end.' They also had twelve thousand camp followers, `with their tents, elephants, camels, horses, trunks, etc.' to help them along."

Brawer brings his discussion of campaign furniture through the Boer War, where rapid mobility became a necessity for survival, and the heavy, domestic campaign furniture of the Victorians gave rise to a lighter, more portable kind of camp furniture characterized by X-folding legs and canvas seating. Brawer draws an analogy between the designs of some of these later pieces and those of modernists such as Le Corbusier, Käare Klint, and Marcel Breuer.

British Campaign Furniture provides insight into the social customs of the gentleman-officer class and the furniture that was developed to meet its requirements. Although the cultural assumptions and attitudes that gave rise to campaign furniture are today considered anachronistic, the elegant pieces that survive are treasured today by connoisseurs and collectors alike.

Fascinating, beautifully produced, and scholarly, British Campaign Furniture should prove the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.