SMALL OAK TABLE. C. 1680.
Showing two forms of mouldings in legs and stretcher.
(By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin.)
JACOBEAN CHEST OF DRAWERS. C. 1660.
Height, 2 ft. 11-3/4 ins.; depth, 1 ft. 11 ins.; width, 3 ft. 3-1/2 ins. The ball foot, not always present, indicates genuine example.
The treatment of the stand or legs of these chests exercised the ingenuity of various generations of cabinet-makers. In the specimen illustrated p. [69], the eighteenth century is reached. The transition from passing Jacobean styles into those of Queen Anne is clearly seen. The bevelled panels still remain, with added geometric intricacies of design, and a new feature appears in the fluted sides. But the most interesting feature is the cabriole leg, so definitely indicative of the eighteenth century.
The Slow Assimilation of Foreign Styles in Furniture.—Farmhouse furniture almost eschewed fashion. In seventeenth-century days it pursued the even tenor of its way untrammelled by town influences. England in those days was not traversed by roads that lent themselves to neighbourly communication. A hundred years later Wedgwood found the wretched roads in Staffordshire, where waggons sunk axle-deep in ruts and pits, a hindrance to his business, and William Cobbett in his Rural Rides leaves a record of Surrey woefully primitive at Hindhead, with dangerous hills and bogs, where the "horses took the lead and crept down, partly upon their feet and partly upon their hocks."