French and English furniture / distinctive styles and periods described and illustrated

by Esther Singleton

PLATE XI

Its use was universal, as it was an article of convenience, beauty and ceremony. On Plate [X.] a characteristic specimen of a Seventeenth Century “court cupboard” of oak is shown. This is preserved in the Vestry in Jamston Church, Nottinghamshire. The lower part would resemble the ordinary side table of the day, if the back supports were like the two turned baluster legs in the front. The long drawer with carved panels is appropriated for linen, or cutlery. The enclosed cupboard is cut in the form of half a hexagon,—a favourite device of the period for cupboards, and has three doors enriched with carved panels and mouldings. The top slab or “cupboard head” is supported by spirally turned columns. The proper way to adorn this piece of furniture is to place a cupboard cloth, or “carpet” (of damask with fringed ends, or a strip of the same material as the hangings of the room) upon the top, allowing the ends of the scarf to fall over the sides (but not the front), and then to arrange on it a few choice pieces of plate, or porcelain. It is interesting to compare this example with No. 8 and No. 1 on the same plate. No. 8 is a portion of a cupboard of later date. This has a “double head,” and under the first stage the ornament is a pendant, instead of a column or pillar. This stands on a ball foot, of an older form than the foot of No. 1 or No. 3. This example, moreover, has its lower portion enclosed with panelled doors. The earlier specimens of the “court cupboard” are generally (and often richly) carved. Sometimes the pillars have Ionic capitals, sometimes they are ornamented with the swelling bulb or acorn enriched with the acanthus leaf, as exhibited in No. 2, Plate [X.] The devices for the mouldings and panels open to the carver were innumerable. Towards the close of our period, cupboards were decorated with applied ornaments of ebony (or an imitation of it) in the form of eggs, spindles and lozenges, as shown in the cabinet No. 1 on Plate [X.]

The cabinet is a development of the enclosed cupboard. The characteristic cabinet of James I.’s time is adorned with pillars, arch panels and spindle ornaments. The specimen just referred to on Plate [X.], No. 1, has these decorations. It stands on a frame of six legs,—a frame that was also used for the lower part of the high case-of-drawers that was coming into fashion towards the end of our period.

The cabinet was always a handsome piece of furniture equipped with shelves, drawers, compartments, and doors,—a repository for jewels, documents and curios. It was sometimes defined as a set of boxes, or drawers for curiosities, and from it the cabinet-maker, “one whose business it is to make cabinets and the finer kind of joiner’s work,” took his name.

The cabinet was known in England at an early date. In 1550, we read of a “fayre large cabinett covered with crimson velvet with the King’s arms crowned.” In the Seventeenth Century, the cabinet was panelled and carved, adorned with turned pillars, pendants or swelling bulbs, or it was of the newer style with applied ornaments and turned supports. Frequently also an imported cabinet was to be seen in the English home of this century,—a beautiful specimen of Dutch marquetry, of Italian inlay, of Oriental lacquer, or, indeed, of Boulle work, to say nothing of the splendid examples of Flemish carving.

Some of these cabinets were very ornate specimens of workmanship. Inlay or marquetry was the leading feature of decoration for them. Natural flowers, birds, animals and foliage in bright colours, or in the colours of the exotic woods, undyed, were in use. Ivory and mother-of-pearl, as well as shell were also employed. Even before the days of William and Mary, when the Dutch marquetry became universally popular, there was much inlaid furniture.

In 1697, John Evelyn notes:

“Emblema, continued to this day by the Italians in their Pietra Comessa.... St. Lawrence at Florence, where the pavement and all the walls are most richly encrusted with all sorts of precious marbles, serpentine, porhirie, ophitis, achat, rants, coral, cornelian, lazuli, etc., of which one may number thirty sorts, cut and laid into a fonds or ground of black marble (as our cabinet-makers do their variegated woods) in the shape of birds, flowers, landskips, grotesks, and other compartments.”

The above reference shows that the English cabinet-makers were accustomed to work in inlay.

One of the designs of marquetry that came into vogue in the Seventeenth Century was the “herring-bone” pattern. A clock made by Daniel Quare late in the Seventeenth Century, and preserved at Hampton Court Palace, has its case inlaid with a border of herring-bone pattern.