Jacobean Furniture and English Styles in Oak and Walnut

by Helen Churchill Candee

Plate XV—OAK GATE-LEG DINING TABLE

With oval top and rarely proportioned spiral legs. A drawer distinguishes the piece

In large size these tables set a feast for the family, in smaller drawing they held the evening light; or, smaller yet, they assisted the house-mother at her sewing. The wonder is not that we of to-day find them invaluable, but that mankind ever let them go out of fashion. Collect them if you have the purse, but if you must buy a modern copy, remember that mahogany was not in use for furniture in England until the century after, for modern manufacturers flout chronology and produce gate-leg tables in the wood of which the originals were never made. They even lacquer them, in defiance of history.

Since the fashion is for old tables in the dining-room, these Jacobean gate-leg tables are found practical as well as beautiful. The large size, about four and a half feet wide by six feet long, accommodates a moderate family and presents none of the inconveniences that make certain antiques mere objects of art or curios. I must confess to a thrill of delight when sitting at such an old oak board set out with old lace and silver, not only for its obvious beauty, but by the thought of the groups who have gathered there through three hundred years, groups of varying customs, varying habits of thought, varying fashions in dress, yet human like ourselves, and prone to make of the dining-table a circle of joy.

The inlaid cabinet on Plate 11 is an aristocrat. Though it is dated 1653 it exhibits the split spindles of earlier years, and these are executed with such nice feeling that they accord well with the Italian look of the piece. In truth, its principal decoration is Italian, an elaborate use of inlay in mother of pearl, ivory and ebony. Its feet, too, are entirely un-English, yet it remains a Jacobean piece of English make. The influences always at work in England left their mark on the development of English styles. Always and always a monarch was marrying a foreign wife, or importing a court painter or architect, and these folk naturally brought with them the fashions of their own countries. It seemed as though the English knew that native art was not a flower of the first order of beauty and so were modest about it, and ever willing to adopt the art of other countries.

It is the custom of the inexact to include in Jacobean furniture all the styles of the seventeenth century up to the time of William and Mary, and this gives to such loose classification an extraordinary variety. Furniture does not die with a monarch, nor do new designs start up in a night; goods last after the master has gone, and the new master uses the old style until a later one has been evolved. James died and Charles I took his place in the year 1625, but the lightening and elaborating of furniture came not all at once, and depended as much on mechanical invention and the use of new woods as on the rise and fall of monarchs.

And yet, as the first man to be pleased was the king, and as the king in Charles' case had a lighter nature than his forerunners and had moreover a Continental encouraging of that lightness, we fancy we see an evidence of gaiety, of jocundity, in the furniture of his day. He was a king who intended to take all the privileges of his state, and one of these was to surround himself with beauty of the type that brought no reminders of hard living nor serious thinking, no hint of grim Puritan asceticism.

So the oak of England which had supplied austerity was now carved into shapes hitherto unknown. Typical of the results of elaborate oak carving are the chairs in Plate 17. The arm-chair is a typical example of a chair of the middle years of the century, and later. Here the square construction of the chair is not altered from Tudor days, but note how every part has been lightened, until an elegance and beauty have been attained which make it worthy of the finest rooms of any time. The carver when given free rein has left little of the chair untouched. Legs, stretchers and uprights, are all made with a well proportioned spiral, and at each square of joining a rosette is carved.

Here also is seen an innovation in the ornamental stretcher across the front which, instead of being near the ground, is raised to a height out of reach of a ruthless boot which might mar its elaboration. This stretcher shows the use of the long curving palm in place of the classic acanthus, and also introduces the fat little cherubs which French designers affected.