The Pleasures of Collecting

by Gardner C. Teall

THE appeal of old furniture which has the merit of form, design, and workmanship of high order is one that is not the reflection of a passing fad or fancy; it has come to be one of attachment and genuine sincerity. If it took the greater part of the nineteenth century to teach us the futility of fixing our affections on exaggerated novelties, such as those which dimmed the reign of Queen Victoria and boomed the Bunthornes of the ’eighties, the twentieth century finds us discriminatingly chastened. We are taking out of our houses, those of us who can, the pieces of furniture that ought not to have been made, putting into their places old-time things of beauty, or, when it is not possible for us to acquire veritable antique pieces, the high-grade reproductions of old furniture that now grace the market and show no abatement in popular esteem.

In classifying the hobbies of several thousand collectors who stated their preferences, I found that a greater number were interested in old furniture than in any one other subject. This fact is not strange, when one comes to consider the utilitarian phase. Generally, the collector of old furniture starts in with the chance possession of two or three antique bits which, by inspiring interest and appreciation, lead him to wish to bring the other house furnishings into harmony with the loveliness of the old pieces. Few collectors of antique furniture, of course, are without homes of their own, or the modern substitute—the long-lease apartment. The skill of the modern restorer of old furniture accomplishes wonders with the battered derelicts of the houses of yesterday by making the old pieces to shine forth in their glory anew; all of which lends encouragement to the collector and new zest to his traditional delight in the “hunt.”

Upon first thought, a collection of desks might seem like a mastodonian assemblage. So it would be if the collector placed them all in a row or all in a single room! But the house of to-day can accommodate—indeed, finds necessary—more than a single desk in its furnishings. And so the collector of old furniture has another impetus in his search, a utilitarian one. Under the term “desk” we may include the various escritoires, bureau-bookcases and the secrétaires. All of these, in common with our cabinets, tall-boys, and so on, had their origin in the chest or coffer of the Middle Ages. To the bottom of the chest came to be added a drawer. Next, side doors instead of a top lid came into fashion, and in this manner followed the many steps that led to the development of the piece of furniture we designate, for convenience, the desk.

It is not possible to tell just when the earliest desks were made. The desk is a composite affair, combining a cabinet, a bureau, drawers, and a writing-table. In Ghirlandaio’s painting “Saint Jerome in His Study”—a work of about 1480, found in the collection of the Ognissanti in Florence—we see depicted a portable desk of the “schoolmaster” type; and another painting of the same period and in the same collection, the “St. Augustine” by Sandro Botticelli, depicts a desk with drawers. In other paintings by the old masters, and in very early engravings, we see delineated the various pieces of furniture in contemporary use designed for writing purposes, as well as others for the account-keeper. All suggest to us the probable units which combined to produce the escritoire and the secrétaire of later centuries, and lend interest to the collector’s enthusiasm for searching out pieces of the sort.

When living was so much less complex in the matter of domestic doings than it is in our own time, there was far less need of such objects as desks. Whole families, even of the prosperous classes, could get along without them very well. Your Mona Lisa of the Renaissance could have carried her household accounts in her head, and probably did, while the housewife of the Northern countries had little use for a place to keep quires or reams of correspondence paper. Nor had they, in all probability, entered into the sphere of feminine prowess in home-banking matters that made necessary a writing-bureau sacred to personal command.

The finest examples of the craft of the old master cabinet-makers of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth were originally produced for wealthy patrons who paid well for the master’s skill. While such pieces must naturally be beyond the reach of the collector of moderate means—except in rare instances where complete ignorance of their value is combined with a desire to part with them—they are still always interesting to note, and many of them have been reproduced with wonderful skill by some of the leading masters of the craft of furniture-making to-day.

Of course, no reputable dealer will attempt to pass off a modern copy of anything as an original. At the same time, one may take great pleasure in acquiring a truly fine copy of a Queen Anne secrétaire or a Hepplewhite bureau, if it is knowingly purchased as a copy, whereas if deception is practised, the result must be a disappointment and discouragement to the owner, however fine the piece.

Unfortunately, all dealers are not reliable and occasionally fraud is perpetrated in connection with antique furniture. Even the metal trimmings—knobs, handles, etc.—are given the appearance of antiquity by all sorts of devices at the command of skilful craftsmen who produce worm-holes with buck-shot, antiquity with acids, and a worn appearance with friction.

The general furniture-collector is not likely to come across anything in the way of a find in a desk of the Renaissance, seventeenth-century, or even early eighteenth-century Italian periods; nor is he be likely to meet with the finer pieces of other early continental furniture, as nearly all of these, if not in public or great private collections already, would be justly held at a very high price by dealers into whose stock such pieces might come. However, there are frequent public sales of old foreign household furnishings, and great bargains may, indeed, be met with at these. In any event, the collector must cultivate alertness, decision, and intuition for opportunities to buy—and once in a while to sell, too!

To the European the name bureau, from its French derivation, is understood to be associated with writing. In America we connect the term with a piece of furniture designed to hold articles of clothing in its various drawers. It was somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century that the drawer was added to the lower part of the chest. Later in the century further drawer capacity was developed, and by the beginning of the next we find the complete chest of drawers in use. In view of this we shall not expect to find Jacobean desks, though we may find cabinets for writing-materials and documents and even occasional desk-like pieces.