SMALL OAK TABLE. 1700-1720.
Height, 2 ft. 4-3/4 ins.; width, 2 ft. 3 ins.; depth, 1 ft. 9-3/4 ins. Graceful proportion with cabriole leg.
OAK TABLE.
Showing at a later period the last traces of the cabriole leg.
The varying phases of town life, of which the above quotations give a passing glimpse, found little reflex in the sturdy unchanging life of the provinces. Generation after generation, men farmed the same lands and their dependents lived in cottages adjacent; tillers of the ground, herdsmen, toilers in the fields, living by the sweat of their brow. They were content with simpler pleasures, which centred round the alehouse and the village green, or maybe the village church, if the hunting rector and the studious vicar were not too heedless of the fate of their flock. But other influences were soon to be at work to break the lethargy of those of the clergy who slumbered. Wesley founded the Methodist movement. Whitefield began his sermons in the fields and looked down from a green slope on several thousand colliers grimy from the coalpits near Bristol to see, as he preached, tears "making white channels down their blackened cheeks." Later again, Hannah More drew sympathy to the poverty and crime of the agricultural classes.
The Influence of Walnut on Cabinet-making.—If oak was the wood which the country joiner loved best, he was not without some sympathetic leaning towards the effects which could be produced in the softer walnut. Such styles accordingly began slowly to have a marked influence upon the farmhouse furniture in early-Georgian days. It was not easy to produce curved lines in the refractory oak, tough and brittle, but the village craftsman essayed his best to please his patrons whose taste had been caught by the newer fashions observed in the squire's parlour when paying rare visits.
In the two examples illustrated of farmhouse cupboard and bureau bookcase (p. [163]) it will be seen that here is the country maker definitely trying his skill in his native wood to emulate the finer walnut examples of town cabinet-makers. This is even more noticeable in regard to some of the tables actually found in farmhouses belonging to as early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The two specimens illustrated (p. [165]) exemplify this tendency to imitate the designs of trained workers. The country touch always betrays itself in the cabriole leg, whether in chair or in table. The upper table has less naïveté than most examples found. There is a balance in its construction rarely found in provincial work. The legs, always the stumbling-block to the less experienced artificer, are here of exceptionally fine proportions, terminating in club feet. The lower table shows a less capable treatment of the cabriole leg. The hoof foot and the carved knee have obviously been copied from a fine Queen Anne model. In the underframing of both tables there is an experiment in ornament and form rarely attempted except in the highest flights of the country maker, and as such these two fine examples must be regarded.