Rare form. Probably made of the new fashionable wood about 1740. Use of Spanish foot dying out. Diameter of top, 4 ft. 5-1/2 ins. × 4 ft. 4 ins.
(By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin.)]
Its Adoption in Modern Days.—After William Morris and his school had preached the revival of taste and the return to the simple and the beautiful, and Ruskin with flowing rhetoric had instilled a love for homespun into men's minds, there came newer ideals which, with gradual dissemination, have grown into a great modern movement which has become so overwhelmingly popular that the pendulum has almost swung the other way. It has now become almost a truism that the person of taste to-day sees nothing good in anything that is not old. With this in view, artists and persons of advanced notions, if they could not procure the old, had copies made for them of some of the most beautiful styles suitable for modern requirements. In this there was always the great Morrisian principle in view that the highest art must show a full utilitarian purpose; so it came about that the gate table was revived and came gloriously into its own again. To-day, as in the seventeenth century, there is no more popular form of table, and the modern cabinet-maker is manufacturing hundreds of these tables.
The life-history of the gate-leg table is, therefore, shown to be an interesting one. It is one of our oldest forms, and its construction nowadays, save that it is now produced in a factory, is singularly similar to that in the days when Oliver Cromwell was establishing our power as a voice in Europe, when James II. had an eye towards the supremacy of our navy, and when later our troops fought in Flanders.
CHAPTER IV
THE FARMHOUSE
DRESSER
CHAPTER IV
THE FARMHOUSE DRESSER
The days of the late Stuarts—Its early table form with drawers—The decorated type with shelves—William and Mary style with double cupboards—The Queen Anne cabriole leg—Mid-eighteenth-century types.