In the William and Mary period (1688-1702) cabinets, secrétaires, and bureaus came rapidly into use. Simplicity and an unobtrusive elegance marked the designs of this period. The desks displayed distinct characteristics which differentiate several groups. In the first division may be placed the cabinet with bracket (straight) feet or bun feet; a whole front flap, which when let down displayed the drawers and the pigeonholes; a top either single-hooded or straight with ovolo frieze. In the second division we have the bureau-desk with its slant-top desk-plane. Here we find the taller desk styles, sometimes with double-hooded tops, with or without vase-shaped finials. The third division includes the narrow slant-top desks on cup-turned legs, flat stretchers, and bun feet. The knee-hole desks (desks with the center portion arranged to permit the knees of the writer to go below the desk-plane) constitute the fourth division, while a fifth sort of desk had gate-legs braced by serpentine flat stretchers. The two center legs (there were six in all), pulled out as a support for the desk-flap when its plane was let down.
In the William and Mary period and in the Queen Anne period succeeding, the middle classes had come to a state of education undreamed of in the time of Elizabeth. Letter-writing, pamphlet-writing, and diary entries occupied many hours of the day and many candle-lit ones as well. This scriptorial activity called for more accessories than had been needed earlier. These newly devised bureau-desks combined solidity and dignity. They were distinctly architectural in design, with their moldings, cornices, and broken pediments. Bombé fronts came in with the Dutch influence. Walnut was the favorite wood employed, either solid or as a veneer for the wood bases.
The furniture-makers of the time of George I were beginning to find a demand, and to supply it, for writing-tables with tiers of drawers at each side of the knee-hole. From about 1720 mahogany entered into furniture-making extensively. Its use by the American furniture-makers in the colonies was coincident with, and possibly antedated, lacquer, which had been the rage and as a fashionable fad continued to hold the popular favor.
Of course, no writing-furniture is more eagerly sought than that of Chippendale. There were the writing-tables with bombé fronts, the bureaus, standing on legs that supported low bases, the bureau-bookcase style of desk (bureau-desk), the slant-top secrétaires, etc. In American desks of the period we find the block-front to have been very popular.
The writing-furniture of the brothers Adam exhibited the originality and excellence common to their other articles. They introduced the more general use of satinwood and others of the lighter-colored woods, and a contour of line in design that struck a new note. Painted ornament, too, was used by them more extensively than ever before it had been used in English furniture.
With the furniture of Hepplewhite we find the three section bookcase desk in vogue, and the pull-over top (tambour) which was ancestor to the modern roll-top. The Hepplewhite desks are in great variety and of much beauty and practical utility as well. Sheraton included in his desks all the forms brought into fashion by Hepplewhite or modified by him. All these various periods were reflected in American desks, some of them with local modifications and variations.
CHAPTER XVI
CHELSEA
OLD Chelsea—with what associations is the name endowed! Hither came the wits—Smollett, Steele, Swift, Horace Walpole, and others of the monde. Those were the days when Chelsea was still a village of the eighteenth century, boasting of Ranelagh and its gaieties on the one hand, and Cremorne Gardens on the other. Here was the manor Henry VIII had given to Catherine Parr when Chelsea was completely rural; in Walpole’s time it was just beginning to be truly suburban, while now it is so integral a part of London that it might long ago have had its identity swallowed up but for the perpetuation of its literary, artistic, and historical atmosphere by Carlyle and his circle and by Whistler and his.
The fifteen years from 1750 to 1765 comprised the period of old Chelsea’s social heyday, though the aftermath was not without its distinctly brilliant though somewhat irascible flashes. These were years demanding fine things for the fashionables. Horace Walpole and others had stirred up the passion for chinaware and the English porcelain and pottery-manufacturers were kept busy not only to supply the demand but to meet the exacting quality of that demand, which called for perfection in fabrique. With this in mind it is not at all strange that some enterprising potter with a provident eye to business should have decided on establishing a porcelain factory at Chelsea. Just when this venture was established, history has neglected to disclose, but it must have been somewhere around 1740. We do know that the Chelsea porcelain-works were already celebrated for their wares in 1745. Some students of ceramics believe a very early date should be assigned to Chelsea productions. It is even possible that porcelain was being made in the village as early as 1682, the year in which was begun the old hospital for invalid soldiers, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Of course as Oriental porcelain had been introduced into England some fifty years before that—in 1631, to be exact—it is likely enough that works for the purpose of imitating it were established in Chelsea. Horace Walpole made note of very early “specimens of Chelsea blue-and-white.” Perhaps these were the sort of crude porcelain which Dr. Martin Lister referred to in an account of his visit to France, in 1695, wherein he mentions the superiority of the “Potterie of St. Clou” over the “gomroon ware” of England, although he observes that the English were “better masters of the art of painting than the Chineses,” a statement that might have applied to Chelsea porcelains of the gomroon, or imitation Oriental genre, productions perhaps antedating the native English development in decoration.
The French manufacturers of 1745 had become concerned over the strides taken by the English potters and they petitioned, accordingly, for the privilege of establishing a soft-porcelain factory at Vincennes, complaining of the competition of English wares of Chelsea. Such early porcelains as are extant and ascribed to a period coeval with that of the porcelain of St. Cloud exhibit clumsiness and lack of finish. Already the village of Chelsea had become well known in the industrial world through its glass manufactory established there by Venetian glass-workers under the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, in 1676. It may be that the Chelsea pottery was evolved as an outcome of this experiment, an experiment so successful that Elers joined it in 1720.