Puller, Isaac

‘The Golden Plow’, South side of St Paul's Churchyard, London; cane chair maker (app. 1673-d. 1721)

Apprenticed 4 September 1673 to Anthony Watts, Basketmaker, and turned over to Thomas Puller, Merchant Taylor. Active on his own account by 1691 when he was recorded buying rattans (cane) from an East India merchant, Abraham Wilmer. In 1696 both men were cited in an East India Co. documents listing bundles of rattan imported in the ship Sarah, ‘weighed unto Mr Abr. Willmer p. Isaac Puller’. Puller was a key figure in the unsuccessful campaign by the Basketmakers’ Company between 1694 and 1698 to gain a Royal Charter for caning chairs. In 1701 recorded at Old Fish Street, which ran perpendicularly from the southeast end of St Paul’s Churchyard towards the Thames. If on the corner of Fish Street and the churchyard, this was conceivably the same property as The Golden Plow. His trade card, dated 1714 [Landauer Coll., MMA, NY], states that he made and sold ‘Cane-Chairs, Stools and Couches of all sorts: and also Easie Chair-Frames, Chair-Stool Frames both round and square, to cover: and sells Rattan-Canes, whole and split’.

Image

Copyright (Attribution/Credit)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Trade card of Isaac Puller, with inscription dated 1714. Puller used this trade card as a receipt for cane sold for 12s (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ref. 47.71.14). Made available by a Creative Commons CCO .1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Puller worked with a number of other chair makers, members of the Joiners’ Company, and the likelihood is that he caned their chairs. For instance, the Orphans Court inventory of the chair maker Simon Sheffield shows debts owed by Puller to Sheffield, perhaps indicating that Sheffield supplied chair frames to him. The business relationship between Puller and the cane chair maker Thomas Warden was particularly close. In Warden’s will (proved 15 November 1701) Puller was named as an executor, and Warden’s apprentices were turned over to him. The following year he appears to have acted as guardian to Warden’s children. In 1705 he took Warden’s son, William, as an apprentice and on 26 May 1713 William married Puller’s daughter, Sara. Puller also took on apprentice joiners, for instance, John Allon, who in 1716 was admitted free of the Joiners’ Company while in Puller’s employ. In 1722 another apprentice, David Jones, was admitted to the Joiner’s Company and was turned over to Joseph Wormell because Puller had died the year before. The 1721 inventory of his house and workshop lists numerous chairs and chair frames, wood and cane. His wife, Catherine, received the leasehold of two houses in Old Fish Street. The remainder of his estate was divided into four parts: one to daughter, Sara, the other three to his son, Jonathan, executor and successor to the business.

Source: DEFM; Dewing, ‘Cane Chairs, their Manufacture and Use in London, 1670-1730’, Regional Furniture (2008); Lindey, ‘Thomas Warden (c. 1660-1701) and Cane Chair-Makers in the City of London’, Furniture History (2016).