OAK CHAIRS.
With cresting rail, of Charles II. period, retained and perforated arch centre peculiar to walnut designs.
With elaboration in turned legs, and uprights, of William and Mary period retained, and having Queen Anne splat of 1710.
With sunk seat for squab cushion, turned uprights and legs and curious back, showing transition from lath back to splat back.
The middle chair more closely approaches the upright chair of the Charles II. period. There is a straight top-rail, supplemented by a lunette, giving the top a character of its own. This specimen is exceptionally interesting. The right-hand chair in its seat and legs is pronouncedly Jacobean. But the back with the three splats and the coarsely carved top-rail betray the hand of the country craftsman following in oak the more graceful curves of the worker in walnut of the days of Charles II.
It will be seen that these three chairs, each in varying manner, evade the difficulties of the light cane-back by the substitution of thin rails, and, as will be seen from the illustration of three other chairs (p. [209]), the next stage of walnut design with fiddle-shaped splat offered equal problems to the makers of cottage furniture. Sometimes they eliminated the splat altogether, while adopting other points of design found in chairs with the Queen Anne splat of 1710. In every case the fondness for old established styles is exhibited in the fact that the country cabinet-maker clings doggedly to these and appears too conservative or too timid to break wholly away from tradition. In consequence, his work, with patches of newer design welded on to the old, is quaintly incongruous. There is thus an absence of "thinking out" the design as a whole. The minor maker thought out the parts as he went along. Some of his results are extraordinary in their characteristics: they resemble that freak of fashion termed "harlequin" tea services, where the cups are of one pattern and the saucers of another. Bearing in mind these unfailing proclivities of the maker of cottage and farmhouse furniture, the collector should not find it difficult to recognise the country hand at once. Now and again one is struck with the extraordinary ingenuity of some of the work, or one is charmed with the faithfulness with which designs have been translated from the golden bowl to the silver, or, to be literal, from walnut and mahogany to oak and elm and beech. But one is never amazed at the delicacy of proportion, the balanced symmetry, or the fertility of invention—these attributes belong to cabinet-makers on a higher plane.