Chats on Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture

by Arthur Hayden

A unique Dresser and Clock combined is illustrated (p. [131]). The form of the dresser, it will be seen, is quite different from other specimens. The back is only sufficiently high to carry a row of small drawers. The legs are circular and tapered, terminating in circular feet. In the centre of the dresser is a clock of the familiar grandfather form in miniature. This clock is not an addition to the dresser, but is a portion of the dresser and was made with it. The illustration shows the size of the door of the clock-case, with its hinges not cut down or in any way interfered with, and the lock on the other side is in the centre of the panel. It is obvious that no later hand has tampered with this fine example, and it stands as a remarkable dresser and unique in form in its construction with this clock.

Mid-eighteenth-century Types.—In the Lancashire Dresser illustrated (p. [135]) the top is reminiscent of early types. The cupboard has removed its position to the middle, a departure from all earlier forms. This is a very characteristic example, and the ample drawer accommodation shows the speedy transition from the old form of dresser through its varied stages to the later modern variety of the kitchen dresser, devoid of poetry and lacking interest to the collector, and yet to the student having traces of its ancient lineage.

The eighteenth-century farmhouse varieties offer no great departure. They aim at being capacious and massive. They make no pretensions to approach the niceties of the sideboard in use in the better houses. They supply an undoubted want in the farmhouse for storage. There were cordials and home-made wines and much prized linen and a bright array of silver and Sheffield plate and pewter, and no doubt tea services or porcelain from the new English factories of Worcester, Derby, Bow, or maybe Plymouth or Bristol, to be shielded from breakage. The farmer's wife and the farmer's daughters were less than human if they did not follow the new fashions in some degree, more or less, in tea-drinking and in becoming the proud possessors of tea services and dinner services somewhat more delicate than the old delft and coarse Staffordshire ware. The cupboards had ample accommodation for these more valuable accessories of the farmhouse parlour. The cabinet-maker therefore developed on lines exactly suitable for the country clients whom he served.

UNIQUE DRESSER AND CLOCK COMBINED.

The clock is not an addition, but is a portion of the dresser, and was made for it.

(In the collection of D. A. Bevan, Esq.)

The late forms show this marked tendency to provide innumerable drawers and cupboards, in the farmhouse dressers contemporary with Chippendale. Many examples are found which are practically elongated chests of drawers; the old characteristics of the dresser are absent, the back has disappeared altogether. There is no top with shelves. Eight large drawers and two capacious cupboards give great storage room in a piece often 9 feet in length. There is nothing finicking in this type of furniture. It stands for homely comfort and love of domestic order. We may be sure that the good dame who used this lower piece, with its eight solid drawers with sound locks, was a person of frugal habits and love of the old farmstead. We may safely assume that she had a well-filled stocking hidden away somewhere in this old-fashioned repository, put by for the rainy day.

In conclusion it may be said that a good deal has been talked about Welsh dressers, as though they were a type absolutely apart from any other. The differences are not great, as the carving, in which the Welsh craftsman offers characteristics of his own, is absent in pieces of furniture such as the dresser. Then there is the Normandy dresser, a much-abused term: a considerable number of these, and others, too, from Brittany, have been imported and the terms have become trade descriptions. But in the main the English dresser has passed through the phases we have described, and the outlines herein suggested may be filled in by the painstaking collector. In the chapter dealing with local types there is an illustration of a Lancashire dresser (p. [273]) which adds one more example to the gallery of dressers we give as types in this chapter.