A dressing-table veneered with walnut containing three drawers with brass handles has the faces of the drawers inlaid with boxwood and ebony. A band of inlay also ornaments the top. The four legs are cabriole with web feet. A dressing-table, contains two deep drawers and a central one with brass key-plates and handles. On the lower side the front is cut into three cusps with two pendants between them. A chest-of-drawers, veneered with walnut, contains two short drawers and three long ones, inlaid on their faces with narrow strips of sycamore and rosewood. Around the top is a deep cornice, below which is a deep rounded moulding forming the face of a drawer in front. The chest is placed on a stand, containing three drawers, upon short turned legs. The front is cut into cusps and curves on the lower side. Another chest-of-drawers veneered, contains three long drawers below and two small drawers above, and a shallow drawer in the stand upon which the chest rests. The chest is surmounted by a cornice and the stand by a moulding. The lower part is cut into three circular arches, with a decorative beading. The feet are four square piers resting upon turned discs. Each side is cut into a flat arch without beading. Another chest-of-drawers contains five drawers, with handles and key-plates of or moulu, the whole of walnut decorated with inlaid arabesque ornaments in oval medallions. A combination dressing-table and secretary with a swinging glass, the whole of walnut, decorated with beading and moulding. The dressing-table stands on four cabriole legs carved with a shell ornament. The looking-glass of walnut slightly carved and gilt, the glass bevelled at the edges.
Of cabinets, we may note a walnut cabinet supported on four spirally turned legs with curved stretchers, opening with two doors and furnished with brass lock-plates. A cabinet of oak standing on large turned feet. It has a flat top with a slightly overhanging moulded edge. At the top is a drawer and below it two doors shutting in six drawers. The drawers and doors are panelled and moulded, with turned ebonized handles in the centre of each panel. The sides of the cabinet are also panelled. A cabinet of various kinds of wood, on a stand of oak with four spirally turned legs and stretchers of the same. The outside doors veneered with pollard oak, the centre with hexagonal pieces of thorn acacia. Eleven drawers are enclosed within. The cornice is of pear-wood at the sides and walnut in front, the drawers at the top below the cornice are of burr walnut.
Two dressing-tables from engravings of the day are shown in Nos. 1 and 3, Plate [XXIII.] No. 1. is properly draped with the toilet, usually muslin, but often of richer material. On the same plate, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, are details both of simple and more ornate mirrors of this style. No. 5 is especially good with its carvings, gildings and inlaid leaf ornamentation. The glasses in the mirrors were gradually increasing in size as the manufacturers became more skillful. Nos. 2 and 3, Plate [XIX.], show two oval mirrors of different proportions. No. 3 is a specially fine example, as it shows so many of the contemporary decorative motives, including the mascaron, shell, chute, swag, scroll and wings.
The handles for cabinets, chests-of-drawers, etc., were of various shapes, but the brass drop-handle was the most usual. Its length for average drawers was two inches. The ordinary model is reproduced in No. 6, Plate [XXIII.]
The tables still retained the late Jacobean characteristics shown in No. 8, Plate [XXIII.] Far more common, however, were the so-called “thousand-legged” tables with round or square leaves and horse legs. The legs were becoming slimmer and still connected with the centre frame by stretchers close to the ground.
The display of china had developed a new piece of furniture. Dyche thus defines it in 1748: “Buffet, a handsome open cupboard or repository for plate, glasses, china, etc., which are put there either for ornament or convenience of serving the table,” and Chambers, 1751:
“Beaufait, Buffet, or Bufet, was anciently a little apartment separated from the rest of the room by slender wooden columns, for the disposing china and glassware, etc., also called a cabinet. It is now, properly, a large table in a dining-room, called also a sideboard, for the plate, glasses, bottles, basons, etc., to be placed, as well for the service of the table as for magnificence. The buffet, among the Italians, called credenza, within a balustrade, elbow-high.”
Sometimes the “beaufait” consisted of a tier of shelves built into a niche in the wall of the dining-room. Even in the Queen Anne period, however, the word was sometimes used to signify a table. Murray quotes (1718): “The plate was placed upon a table or buffett.” The word in the sense of sideboard as we know it to-day came from France. In 1710 D’Aviler says: “Bufet; in a vestibule or a dining-room, a large table with stages in the style of a credence upon which are displayed the vases, the basins, and the cristal as much for the service at the table as for magnificence. This Bufet, which the Italians calls credence, is with them usually placed in the great salon and closed in by a balustrade breast high. Those belonging to princes and cardinals stand under a daïs of cloth.”
THE EARLY GEORGIAN PERIOD
