OAK TABLE.
Showing clumsy corners and indicating the naïveté of the country cabinet-maker.
OAK TABLE.
Showing transition from cabriole leg to straight leg of 1760.
The Early Georgian Types.—Treating of the early-Hanoverian period from the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and including the reigns of George I. from 1714 to 1727 and George II. from 1727 to 1760, furniture of all types begins to assume a complexity of construction. At the final outburst the fine masterpieces of creation of the great schools of design during the last half of the eighteenth century, embodied the life-work of Chippendale, the brothers Adam, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and many others. This period from 1750 to 1800 was the golden age of design in England. It has had a far-reaching effect, and still casts its glory upon the present-day schools of designers, whose adaptations and lines of progress are based upon the finest flower of the eighteenth-century styles.
The massive walnut chairs with deep underframing and broad hoop backs departed from the solid splats of the Anne style and endeavoured to become less squat by the employment of banded ribbon-work, coarse, heavy, and ponderous in style. Settees, arm-chairs and single chairs in this style came as the final efforts of the walnut school. The graceful ribbon designs interlacing each other in knots, and the flowing carving in mahogany of Chippendale, put a period to all dullness and heavy design. With the new style and the new wood a splendid field was opened to cabinet-makers, and the quick appreciation of these opportunities signalised their work as of permanent artistic value.
Among more important pieces, though still falling under the category of farmhouse styles, may be mentioned the Queen Anne glass or china cupboard, and the Georgian corner cupboard, illustrated p. [171].