Beautiful Bombe Style Furniture

By Robert Reed

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, August 2008 

They called it bombe from the French term to suggest a curving or out swelling built into the structure of fine furniture. It was in high fashion centuries ago. Surviving pieces are dearly treasured today.

This bulging style of bombe (pronounced bawn-bay) began in the early decades of the 18th century with some of the more skilled French and Dutch cabinetmakers. So historians suggest that early bombe adopted slowly because of the difficulty for craftsmen in affixing the expected fancy veneers to the multiple curves of the piece. Gradually however the striking convex surface was added to the front of commodes and eventually to both sides as well.

The remarkable bombe effect was, at the time in the early 1700s, just another element of the sweeping rococo style. Ultimately it included an inspiring array of curving forms, serpentine fronts, rare inlaid woods, and sculptured metallic adornments.

Two researchers later called the bombe-induced rococo style, “a stunning contrast to the decorative vocabulary of the previous century.”

The bombe chest with its curving bodies and out-reaching fronts was an example of “superb craftsmanship” noted Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz in Furniture of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, “an undercurrent of stability amid revisions in taste.”

Some pieces were even decorated with strips of silver or gold, as demonstrated by an existing bombe cabinet in a museum in Amsterdam. Veneered with burl walnut, it bore mirrored door panels, and had silver mounts on its bombe base. A bombe commode now in a London museum was decorated with kingwood marquetry and gilt-bronze mounts.

During the second half of the 18th century the bombe style had arrived in Colonial America, but with much less ornamentation than earlier European designs.

Most bombe style furniture made in America came from Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular.

As early as 1853 adaptations of the English and Dutch forms were being crafted in Boston. A study by Skinner Incorporated, a leading auction house, suggests the bombe style was most typically applied to chests on chests, chests of drawers, desks, and desks and bookcases in the Boston area.

The form in America was sometimes described as kettle-based or kettle front. However by any name it was a costly piece of furniture.

“Shaping, of course, added considerably to the labor involved in producing a finished bombe cabinet,” points out John Bowman author of the book American Furniture, “and was made of more costly materials, so one can assume that these pieces were comparatively more expensive....”

The Skinner study suggests further that because of the high expense, most American bombe furniture with documented family histories can be traced to the wealthiest families of Boston, Salem or neighboring towns.

One such piece, a magnificent mahogany bombe chest on chest, was carefully documented and traced to Robert Hooper, one of the wealthiest merchants living in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Hooper’s mansion was described as one of the most impressive in the port town shortly before the onset of the American Revolution. His Chippendale style bombe chest-on-chest with a carved scroll-top could have been crafted as early as 1765, or some years later. It is likely the piece stood in Hooper’s bedchamber. It may have been accompanied by an impressive canopied bed, according to Skinner’s, low chests of drawers, and easy chair, and perhaps a tea table. The bombe chest-on-chest functioned for storage of luxury clothing and textiles, set off by yards and yards of imported English bed and window drapery fabric typically found in successful merchant’s bed chamber.

The mahogany used in this particular piece was special too. Most cabinetmakers at the time used Bay mahogany, a softer and coarser grained wood taken from the Central America region near the Bay of Campeche. Hooper’s chest-on-chest however was constructed from a finer close-grained island mahogany, so named because it was imported from various West Indies Island.

Intensive investigation has not revealed the identity of the specific cabinetmaker.

Some makers at the height of it Colonial popularity included Ebenezer Martin, Thomas Sherburne, George Bright, John Cogswell, and Benjamin Frothingham. The Antique Buyer’s Dictionary of Names mentions that Frothingham established himself notably as a cabinetmaker in Boston well before the Revolutionary War. He interrupted his career to serve in the Colonial army, rising to the rank of major and becoming closely associated with General George Washington. Following the war Frothingham returned to cabinetmaking specializing in block-fronted furniture of the Chippendale and Hepplewhite styles.

Ironically the Hooper bombe chest-on-chest survived the Revolutionary War in the Hooper mansion, but it was removed from the home for safe-keeping during the War of 1812 and never returned there. The wealthy Hooper meanwhile fell on financial hard times partly because of the military conflicts and was more than $100,000 in debt at the time of his death.

Decades later the Hooper bombe chest-on-chest was discovered in an old barn and sold to an interested party for $27.50. Still later in 1884 the piece was inherited by a family member of the original purchaser.

Experts at Skinner determined the piece to be only one of six known chest-on-chest bombe designs made in the Boston area. Thus “making the form the rarest of all which were shaped with this very labor-intensive method.” Among the other five, the mostly closely related in exterior design is said to be the piece owned by Colonial Williamsburg.

Boston-made bombe pieces “have long been held to be masterful American re-interpretations of English designs based on Continental examples,” notes John Kirk author of American Furniture: Understand Styles, Construction and Quality and former professor of art history at Boston University.

Kirk’s own exploration indicated that on some American-made bombe pieces the interior drawer sides follow the curve of the drawer front. However at least one example crafted by the previously mentioned John Cogswell around 1780, has the sides angled, “when the drawers are opened the fronts project beyond them.”

A Boston-made bombe chest of drawers set a record as the most expensive piece of American furniture in 1977 when one sold at auction for $135, 00. In 2003, the legendary Hooper bombe chest-on-chest sold at a Skinner auction for a staggering $1.7 million.

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