Chats on old furniture

This volume has been written to enable those who have a taste for the furniture of a bygone day to arrive at some conclusion as to the essential points of the various styles made in England.

An attempt has been made to give some lucid historical account of the progress and development in the art of making domestic furniture, with especial reference to its evolution in this country.

Inasmuch as many of the finest specimens of old English woodwork and furniture have left the country of their origin and crossed the Atlantic, it is time that the public should awaken to the fact that the heritages of their forefathers are objects of envy to all lovers of art. It is a painful reflection to know that the temptation of money will shortly denude the old farmhouses and manor houses of England of their unappreciated treasures. Before the hand of the despoiler shall have snatched everything within reach, it is the hope of the writer that this little volume may not fall on stony ground, and that the possessors of fine old English furniture may realize their responsibilities.

It has been thought advisable to touch upon French furniture as exemplified in the national collections of such importance as the Jones Bequest at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Wallace Collection, to show the influence of foreign art upon our own designers. Similarly, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch furniture, of which many remarkable examples are in private collections in this country, has been dealt with in passing, to enable the reader to estimate the relation of English art to contemporary foreign schools of decoration and design.

The authorities of the Victoria and Albert Museum have willingly extended their assistance in regard to photographs, and by the special permission of the Board of Education the frontispiece and other representative examples in the national collection appear as illustrations to this volume.

I have to acknowledge generous assistance and courteous permission from owners of fine specimens in allowing me facilities for reproducing illustrations of them in this volume.

The proprietors of the Connoisseur have generously furnished me with lists of prices obtained at auction from their useful monthly publication, Auction Sale Prices, and have allowed the reproduction of illustrations which have appeared in the pages. of the Connoisseur.

In attempting to deal with the subject of old furniture in a manner not too technical, certain broad divisions have to be made for convenience in classification.

It will be found convenient to eliminate much extraneous matter, such as the early origins of furniture and its development in the Middle Ages, and to commence in this country with the Tudor period. Broadly speaking, English furniture falls under three heads - the Oak Period, embracing the furniture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the Walnut Period, including the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the Mahogany Period, beginning with the reign of George III. It may be observed that the names of kings and of queens have been applied to various styles of furniture as belonging to their reign. Early Victorian is certainly a more expressive term than early nineteenth century. Cromwellian tables, Queen Anne chairs, or Louis Seize commodes all have an especial meaning as referring to styles more or less prevalent when those personages lived. As there is no record of the makers of most oi the old English furniture, and as a piece of furniture cannot be judged as can a picture, the date of manufacture cannot be precisely laid down, hence the vagueness of much of the classification of old furniture. Roughly it may in England be dealt with under the Tudor, the Stuart, and the Georgian ages. These three divisions do not coincide exactly with the periods of oak, of walnut, and of mahogany, inasmuch as the oak furniture extended well into the Stuart days, and walnut was prevalent in the reigns of George I. and .George II. In any case, these broad divisions are further divided into sub-heads embracing styles which arose out of the natural development in taste, or which came and went at the caprice of fashion.

The formation of a definite English character in the furniture of the three periods must be examined in conjunction with the prevailing styles in foreign furniture showing what influences were at work. Many conditions governed the introduction of foreign furniture into England. Renaissance art made a change in architecture, and a corresponding change took place in furniture. Ecclesiastical buildings followed the continental architecture in form and design, and foreign workmen were employed by the Church and by the nobility in decorating and embellishing cathedrals and abbeys and feudal castles. The early Tudor days under Henry VII. saw the dawn of the Renaissance in England, Jean de Mabuse and Torrigiano were invited over the sea by Henry VII., and under the sturdy impulse of Henry VIII. classical learning and love of the fine arts were encouraged. His palaces were furnished with splendour. He wished to emulate the chateau of Francis at Fontainebleau. He tried to entice the French king's artists with more tempting terms. Holbein, the great master of the German school, came to England, and his influence over Tudor art was very pronounced. The florid manner of the Renaissance was tempered with the broader treatment of the northern school. The art, too, of the Flemish woodcarvers found sympathetic reception in this country, and the harmonious blending of the designs of the Renaissance crafts- men of the Italian with those of the Flemish school resulted in the growth in England of the beautiful and characteristic style known as Tudor.

The term Renaissance is used in regard to that period in the history of art which marked the return to the classic forms employed by the Greeks and Romans. The change from the Gothic or Medieval work to the classic feeling had its origin in Italy, and spread, at first gradually but later with amazing rapidity and growing strength, into Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and finally to England.

The Renaissance was in origin a literary movement, and its influence in art came through literature. The enthusiasm of the new learning acting on craftsmen already trained to the highest degree of technical skill produced work of great brilliance.

Never did the fine arts rise to such transcendent heights as in Italy from the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries. The late John Addington Symonds, in his work on "The Renaissance in Italy," deals in a comprehensive manner with this memorable period, during which every city in Italy, great or small, was producing wonderful works of art, in painting, in sculpture, in goldsmiths' work, in woodcarving, in furniture, of which now every civilized country struggles to obtain for its art collections the scattered fragments of these great days. "During that period of prodigious activity," he says, "the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form."

In the middle of the fourteenth century the Renaissance style in woodwork was at first more evident in the churches and in the palaces of the nobility in the Italian states. Some of the most magnificent examples of carved woodwork are preserved in the choir-stalls, doorways and panelling of the churches and cathedrals of Italy. The great artists of the day gave their talents to the production of woodwork and furniture in various materials. Wood was chiefly employed in making furniture, usually oak, cypress, ebony, walnut, or chestnut, which last wood is very similar in appearance to oak. These were decorated with gilding and paintings, and were inlaid with other woods, or agate, lapis-lazuli, and marbles of various tints, with ivory, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl,or with ornaments of hammered silver.

The Victoria and Albert Museum contains some splendid examples of fourteenth and fifteenth century Italian Renaissance furniture, which illustrate well the magnificence and virility of the great art movement which influenced the remainder of Europe. In particular, carved and gilded frames, and marriage coffers {cassoni) given to brides as part of their dowry to hold the bridal trousseau, are richly and effectively decorated. The frame of carved wood, with fine scroll work and female
terminal figures, is enriched with painting and gilding. The frame on the title-page of this volume is of carved wood, decorated with gold stucco. Both these are sixteenth-century Italian work. In fact, the study of the various types and the different kinds of ornamentation given to these cassoni would be an interesting subject for the student, who would find enough material in the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum to enable him to follow the Renaissance movement from its early days down to the time when crowded design, over-elaboration, and inharmonious details grew apace like so many weeds to choke the ideals of the master spirits of the Renaissance.

The front of the late fifteenth-century coffer is of chestnut wood, carved with a shield of arms supported by two male demi-figures, terminating in floral scroll work. There are still traces of gilding on the wood.

At first the lines followed architecture in character. Cabinets had pilasters, columns, and arches resembling the old Roman temples. The illustration of a portion of a cornice of carved pinewood appearing as the headpiece to this chapter shows this tendency. The marriage coffers had classic heads upon them, but gradually this chaste style gave place to rich ornamentation with designs of griffins and grotesque masks. The chairs, too, were at first very severe in outline, usually with a high back and fitted with a stretcher between the legs, which was carved, as was also the back of the chair.

In the middle of the fifteenth century Gothic art had attained its high-water mark in Germany before the new art from Italy had crossed the Alps. We reproduce a bridal chest, of the middle of the fifteenth century, from the collection in the Munich National Museum, which shows the basis of Gothic art in England prior to the revival and before further foreign influences were brought to bear on English art.

The influence of Italian art upon France soon made itself felt. Italian architects and craftsmen were invited by Francis I. and by the Princesses of the House of Medici, of which Pope Leo X. was the illustrious head, to build palaces and chateaux in the Renaissance style. The Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and the Louvre were the result of this importation. Primaticcio and Cellini founded a school of sculptors and wood-carvers in France, of which Jean Goujon stands pre-eminent. The furniture began gradually to depart from the old Gothic traditions, as is shown in the design of the oak chest of the late fifteenth century preserved in the Dublin Museum, which we illustrate, and commenced to emulate the gorgeousness of Italy. This is a particularly instructive example, showing the transition between the Gothic and the Renaissance styles. The French Renaissance sideboard in the illustratration is a fine example of the middle of the sixteenth century. It is carved in walnut. The moulded top is supported in front by an arcading decorated with two male and two female terminal figures. which are enriched with masks and floral ornament. Behind the arcading is a table supporting a cupboard and resting in front on four turned columns; it is fitted with three drawers, the fronts of which, as well as that of the cupboard, are decorated with monsters, grotesque masks, and scroll work.

The French Renaissance cabinet of walnut illustrated  is from Lyons, and is of the later part of the sixteenth century. It is finely carved with terminal figures, masks, trophies of ornaments, and other ornament. In comparison with the sixteenth-century ebony cabinet of the period of Henry IV., finely inlaid with ivory in most refined style, it is obvious that a great variety of sumptuous furniture was being made by the production of such diverse types as these, and that the craftsmen were possessed of a wealth of invention. The range of English craftsmen's designs during the Renaissance in this country was never so extensive, as can be seen on a detailed examination of English work.