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Elizabethan furniture is the form which the Renaissance took in England in furniture and general ornament, and in furniture it is as distinctive a form as its French and Italian counterparts.

Crewe Hall dining room

Gradual emergence

For many years Gothic architecture had been forgetting its lofty flight and stooping toward the low lines of the Tudor style, somewhat impelled by the widespread effects of the Italian trecento. Yet the physical and mental insularity of England made absolute change a very slow process, and it was not entirely achieved during the reign of Elizabeth I. Thus instead of the exquisite lightness of the pointed and ogee arches, an arch from the time of Henry VIII barely lifts itself above the level of a straight lintel, under square spandrels.

The "Romayne work" which was inspired from ancient Rome and was perfected subsequently by Raphael and other masters of the High Renaissance, gave a new character to all artistic work. Its impulse affected distant buildings and furniture, spread by travelers' descriptions, direct importation, and later during the Italian cinquecento through publications for the use of designers and others. As early as the thirteenth century, indeed, England had begun to swarm with Italian placemen, who brought their habits with them and had some influence on new construction. Torrigiano, Mabuse, and a few other French and Italian artists were employed by Henry VII. Holbein brought the German rendition of the great change that had come over the spirit of things.

Long after that Shakespeare finds occasion to speak of

“ ...fashions of proud Italy, whose manners still our tardy apish nation limps after in base imitation. ”

King Hal himself having had a taste for novelty and splendor that leaned kindly to foreign fashions, and the pageantry of the era of James I, that "wisest fool in Europe," not having wrought immediate effect with the quips and conceits through which by-and-by the Elizabethan degenerated into the Jacobean.

And if the movement was tardy even then, it was still slower in the previous Tudor era — that three-quarters of a century just preceding the precise Elizabethan. In spite of a few articles of Renaissance furniture procured abroad for the royal family or some of the high nobility, a barbarous mixture of the old and new yet prevailed in England at the period when France enjoyed the accomplished Henry II style, and when Italy reveled in the perfect fantasies of the cinquecento.

The term Elizabethan has been used distinctively in relation to the Renaissance, rather than exactly in relation ot the English styles; for it really began some years before Elizabeth was born and extended over some years after she died, only then receiving its full development. It is not quite possible to fix the exact limits of the different variations of any main style, one shade overlapping and blending with another. Thus there are chairs with the exceedingly high and narrow backs and small square seats which are called Elizabethan, but which were in use with much the same ornament for an indefinite previous period, and there are palaces and country seats built in Elizabeth's last days, but decorated with the additional characteristics more particularly belonging to the Jacobean. In the Louvre and old armory the upper portion is pierced in all the Gothic foliations of the Flamboyant, while the lower portion is decorated with panels carved in all the richest caprices of the cinquecento.

Classic influence

A rude and ill-informed attempt at classicism is everywhere to be seen in the Elizabethan. Once in a while in some chimney-piece, with channeled columns, architrave, and frieze, the attempt is almost a success, and the result exceedingly stately and beautiful. But poorly executed work has a few pillars and pilasters with misunderstood details, a strap often clasped and buckled about them, some clumsy scrolls and rosettes, with masks and busts of the ancients, scattered ill-drawn human figures, and here and there huge terms, heads rising from flat vases, or pedestals narrowing at the base.

The Great Bed in Saracen's Head.

Grecian columns of singular disproportion form the main structure of bedsteads, tables, and cabinets. These columns are noted for their clumsy thickness, and they rise, in one of the first misapprehensions of the classic that mark the style, from huge spherical clusters of foliage, usually the acanthus. Frequently, at about half their length, these columns are broken by another huge spherical cluster; on this sometimes half the foliage growing downward, half growing upward, and divided in the middle by a careful strap and buckle; occasionally the upper half of this globe is absent. The lower part of the columns is often covered with arabesques, and the upper half merely fluted, or else covered with a fine imbricate carving. The tables thus upheld were mighty constructions, once in a while so made as to be pulled apart in an extension, but oftener bound by firm crossbars, and almost immovable through their weight. In some of the tables, instead of columns, a sort of caryatid — female half-figure, neither exactly sphinx nor monster, dressed out in straps and ending in rude scrolls — formed the support at each of the four corners. In the cabinets the lower part was usually a closed cupboard, paneled and ornamented, with terms between the different divisions, the figure issuing from the vase being now a head only, and now two-thirds of the whole; the top projected, and was upheld by the big columns; and all the surfaces were enriched with sculptures after the approved fashion. Of the bedsteads with heavy testers and cornices, the Great Bed of Ware follows the styles, although it is a caricature in size. Sir Toby Belch speaks of this piece of furniture when he advises Sir Andrew Aguecheek: "And as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the Bed of Ware in England, set 'em down; go about it." Still, it is to be remembered that its twelve foot square size was not at all unusual, and was matched by other beds on the Continent.

Although its curious translation of classic shapes is significant, the strap and buckle predominate over everything else.

Strap and buckle

Strapwork, together with shieldwork, was very prominent in the Henri II style. It was a method of ornament particularly applicable to jewelry and work in gold. Cellini used it entirely. "I therefore made four small figures of boys," says he, "with four little grotesques, which completed the ring; and I added to it a few fruits and ligatures in enamel, so that the jewel and the ring appeared admirably suited to each other." Both in the French and the Italian work the method was mingled with better classic detail, and with finer natural imitation, but hardly in the Saracenic itself was the tracery so prominent as in the Elizabethan. If the type was meager, its play of line was infinite: curve led to curve, intricacy to intricacy, and over all ornamented surfaces, the scrolls that supported other forms — panels or scutcheons or masks — the figures, the faceted jewel forms, opened into successions and sequences of interlacing and escaping straps and ribbons, and transformed into the representation of all the gay buckling and harnessing of chivalry.

These ribbons and straps and buckles were always flat in surface, however curved in shape and situation, and they rose from their background at right angles as actual straps would if laid on flatly, seeking hardly any of the contrasts of light and shade, but only the luxury of line chasing line. When the use of the cartouche became more general, one form of light and shade came to the assistance of this sort of ornament, for the supports of the shield were frequently pierced with countless openings, crescent-shaped, lozenged, circular, rectangular, apparently in a mere haphazard openwork, but in reality, as a view of the whole together showed, repeating the straps and ribbons again merely by the contours of their perforation. While this pierced shieldwork, with its innumerable flat and curved planes, came afterward to assume more importance in the Jacobean, there was nothing of the Elizabethan that was not ornamented with the strapwork in some form or other.

Chair made from Drake's ship

If sometimes the wainscots were set in the little square panels, or in the parchment panels of the preceding reigns, or in the round-arched panels peculiar to the Elizabethan itself — miniature and open representations of which are to be seen on the back of the chair made from the wood of Sir Francis Drake's ship — yet the vast screens between the sides of rooms, like walls themselves, where an entanglement of the flourishes of this carven tracery, as seen in Crewe Hall; and to its general idea the structure and ornament even of the ceilings conformed. There are few grander effects in interior decoration than the intersecting curves and angles of a lofty old Elizabethan ceiling. Of course, in the use of the strap and shield, heraldry and its escutcheons and crests entered largely into the ornament of the Elizabethan. The ensigns armorial, set in all shapes and surrounded by all the curious mantling to be devised, appeared everywhere in conjunction with the family motto and with the intertwined initials of husband and wife, over gateways, over doorways, on dead-wall, over the fireplace; and stairways were decorated with carved monsters sitting on the baluster-tops and holding before them the family arms, frequently looking as if they had just escaped from one of the quarterings.

Absorbing of Gothic

Nevertheless, in the Elizabethan the Gothic is never quite forgotten. Its vertical lines are always breaking through the horizontal of the invading classic; its reverend monsters look with special unkindness on the fantasticism of the new monsters that Cellini described as the promiscuous breed of animals and flowers; its ornaments insist upon their right before the Grecian; in architecture its gables still rise, although with a skyline gnawed out by the scrolls as worms gnaw out the sides of a leaf; and in furniture its cove surmounts the tops of those cabinets whose fronts are the facades of temples. The steadfast English mind clung to the old order of things, and relinquished with reluctance the last relics of a style that had been for centuries a part of its life. If it must have the egg and dart, it would keep the Tudor flower too. Thus all the Renaissance that came into England, after the bloody Wars of the Roses made it possible to think of art and luxury, paid toll to the Gothic on the way, and the result was a singular miscellany, for its Gothic had now forgotten, and its Renaissance had never known why it had existed. It is rather the talent with which the medley of material was handled, the broad masses, yet curious elaboration, and the scale of magnificence, that give the style its charm rather than anything in its original and bastard composition.

Something of this same charm is to be found in most of the literature of the era, in accordance with that subtle relationship existing between the literature and the art of any period. It is in the lawless mixture of Gothic and Grecian characterizing the Elizabethan that Shakespeare peoples his A Midsummer Night's Dream with Gothic fairies reveling in the Athenian forest, and poet Edmund Spenser fills his pages with a pageantry of medieval monsters and classic masks. Shakespeare is a peculiar product of the Renaissance. The machinery of The Tempest and the setting of The Merchant of Venice are direct results of its spirit.

Influence of the Low Countries

Flemish table.

The Renaissance of the Elizabethan came into England by way of the Low Countries, as shown in the Council Hall at Courtray's burly and plethoric shaped furniture. The importation of furniture into England from Flanders and Holland had long been carried to such an extent that a hundred years earlier a law was enacted forbidding the practice — a law that may have become inoperative, as carved woodwork was one of the important articles of commerce with the Low Countries, and the country homes of England of this period were filled with articles of Dutch and Flemish workmanship. Possibly the residence in England of numbers of exiles fleeing from Spanish oppression in the Netherlands may have influenced the public taste; possibly the occupancy of the Netherlands by English forces at a later day may have strengthened the fancy for forms already familiar; possibly the English sympathy with the struggle there affected the fashion. Whether from any of these causes or from purely commercial ones, it was the top-heavy and overloaded Dutch cabinet and the table with big columnar legs capable of upholding mighty serving dishes, and both covered with Flemish ornament, that became part of the Elizabethan furniture. Many forgeries in the style were made in Holland long afterward due to their high value.

It is this importation and custom that accounts for something of the character of the Elizabethan articles; for the Flemings, although fond of magnificence, and accustomed to all the splendor of the Burgundian court, never became absolute masters of the fully developed Italian style. Nor was the Fleming so thoroughly the master of his materials that his execution quite answered his ideas. Both German and Spanish workmanship came much nearer to the complete spirit of the Renaissance, the latter leaving little to be desired. The Flemish is, however, generally held to be the most dramatic carving of the North. Although the French handled the human figure lightly and fancifully their drawing was apt to be incorrect, such as in giving too much weight and size to the head. Yet after some years the Flemish work became less dignified and desirable. It was lumbered with turned work sawed in half and glued on, with panels overlaying and intersecting each other at odd angles, and with cumbrous pendants under the corners, all of which work was injurious, and much of which was ugly. In the later period of the Elizabethan, the Italians themselves may have supplied artists and workmen for the furniture, but they must have worked hampered by the tastes and prejudices existing around them. A certain rudeness of carving prevails throughout the earlier part of the style, and is considered to give breadth of effect. The old carvers hid none of the means by which they gained their ends, and left even the tool marks in full sight.

Scallop shell

In that portion of the Elizabethan which is often considered as the Jacobean, although it was but the completer development of the former, the globular excrescences of the columns elongated themselves into equally vast and far uglier acorn-shaped supports. A good deal of inlaid work was then used, and the carving did its best to reach and render the ideas of the cinquecento. It is, indeed, styled the cinquecento period of English art, every surface being rough with arabesques of griffins, vases, rosettas, dolphins, scrolls, foliages, Cupids, and mermaids with double tails curling round them on either side. Meantime the cartouche and its straps — ligatures they were called in Italy, cuirs in France and Flanders, were still often used. Scallop shells received a particular share of favor, having been recently brought home from foreign seas, and was immediately seized by the designers in need of other shapes. The Flemings made seats that enclosed the sitter in the valves of this scallop, carved just rudely enough to excuse their eccentricity. Settees were made at this time whose backs consisted of several just such immense scallops as those of these Holland House Gilt Chamber chairs; and the same idea of decoration peeps out in fan-like frills at every spare corner of the Neo-Jacobean revival of the style. These shell forms of furniture might befit an oceanside home, but they must have been singularly out of place on dry land and among the huge and heavy articles that surrounded them in the Jacobean mansions.

Jacobean court-cupboard

There was something, on the whole, in the early Elizabethan replete with dignity, a massy magnificence that agreed with that of the era and the monarch, that went well, too, with the mighty farthingales and ruffs of the ladies, the trunk-hose and puffed and banded doublets of the gallants, while the people who used it — Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon — still have a peculiar interest. Well as it suited doughy old Queen Bess herself, the forms which it took under her successor, with their assumption of foreign conceits and their display of profuse gilding, accorded no less characteristically with the arrogant, pedantic, and petty James. All of this furniture, however, is exceedingly attractive, and there are few who would not rejoice over any article of it which is not too unwieldy for modern quarters. A typical sideboard and dresser offer a medley of design, with not too well drawn fawns and satyrs, fruits and flowers, Cupids, birds, scrolls, shields and straps, cornucopias, mermaids, monsters and foliages. They belong to the beginning of the later period. It was no light matter to clear the floor for the dance of the Capulets when the servant cried "Away with the joint-stools, remove the court-cupboard, look to the plate!".

Porcelain and mirrors

By the close of the Jacobean era, the style held its own with slight variation and innovation, for some reigns. The execution of the carving was coarse and careless during the time of the first Stuarts, but afterward rose to be classed with the finest known; inlaid work, also, was more freely used and attained much excellence. There was increasing prevalent luxury in every thing. Fine pottery, for instance, became more frequent; for although glass had been made in London under Elizabeth's patronage, "porselyn" was rare, and even earthenware was not then very general, gold and silver plate making the vessels of the rich, and pewter mugs and platters and wooden trenchers being still those of the poor, while mention is made of "five dishes of earth painted, such as are brought from Venice," which were presented to the queen as something unusual; and it was thought a gift not unworthy of royalty when Lord Burleigh offered her a "porringer of white porselyn garnished with gold." The first use of the famous Dutch tiles is thought to belong to the reign of Charles I.

Elizabethan mirror.

Mirrors, which were very rare in Elizabeth's time, became more common in that of the Charleses, the Duke of Buckingham, during the reign of the second Charles, bringing a colony of Venetian glassmakers to Lambeth. One Elizabethan mirror is some three and a half by four and a half feet in size — five feet was the largest made till the latter part of the eighteenth century — the frame is carved in oak and partially gilt, and the glass is set flatly. In one mirror of the time of Charles II the glass is beveled, and in the glasses of the Merry Monarch's predecessor the frames were so made as to throw the glass forward and give it projection. Quicksilvered glass itself, unset, became a novelty, so that sometimes whole rooms, and even the ceilings, were lined with it. The mirrors made by the duke's colony were of superior excellence; they had an inch-wide bevel all along their outer extremity, whether they were rectangular or curved. "This," says Mr. Pollen, "gives preciousness and prismatic light to the whole glass. It is of great difficulty in execution, the plate being held by the workman over his head, and the edge cut by grinding. The feats of skill in this kind, in the form of interrupted curves and short lines and angles, are rarely accomplished by modern workmen, and the angle of the bevel itself is generally too acute, whereby the prismatic light produced by this portion of the mirror is in violent and too showy contrast to the remainder."

Wall hangings had been long in use — the leather, the damask, velvent, and arras or tapestry. The Flemish tapestries, from the time of their first manufacture, were in great favor. Elizabeth had a set wrought signalizing the dispersion and destruction of the Spanish Armada. So fine had they become that they were often preferred to other decoration, and in the Stuart time were stretched across the noble old carved panelwork itself. "Here I saw the new fabric of French tapestry," wrote Evelyn, in the last years of Charles II, concerning the Gobelins tapestry, established under the royal patronage in France: "for design, tenderness of work, and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond any thing I had ever beheld. Some pieces had Versailles, St. Germains, and other palaces of the French king, with huntings, figures, and landscapes, exotic fowls, and all to the life rarely done." Yet works in tapestry had been, long before this, under royal protection in England also, the Raphael cartoons having been purchased by Charles I for the use of the establishment at Mortlake, which, however, did not outlast that sovereign more than half a century; and the employment of draperies had become so profuse that they now largely took the place of the heavy paneled wooden tops which had so long encumbered the bedsteads.

Spiral appears

A good deal of furniture was imported into England during the reign of the second Charles from Venice and Spain; chairs were covered in black ox hide embossed and trimmed with brass nails, and others, very quaint and beautiful, with spiral carving that made the legs and the supports of the backs look like twisted colonnettes, and gave great light and shadow and luster to the wood. These spirally carved chairs had a low back in the early part of this king's reign. The spiral was probably borrowed from the Louis Treize style across the Channel; for although Louis Treize was dead and laid with his ancestors before Charles came to the throne, England usually kept behind the French fashions all of the time of an ordinary reign. Although much fine work, of course, still continued to be done, the simple spiral carving had taken the place to great extent of all the charming fooleries that had gone before.

Gibbons carvings

The most important feature of this era in furniture and decoration was the appearance of the carved work of Grinling Gibbons and his pupils, chiefly executed on the frames of mirrors, on panels and chimneypieces. There had been nothing exactly like it before, and there has been nothing comparable to it since. After its worth was recognized, it was used wherever it could be had, in church, palace, and cathedral It was carving of the naturalistic order, but with a symmetrical arrangement of the objects and a faultless finish. "The flowers and foliages of his groups or garlands sweep round in bold and harmonious curves, making an agreeable whole, though for architectural decorative carving no work was ever so free from conventional arrangements. His animals or his flowers appear to be so many separate creations, from nature, laid or tied together separately, though in reality formed out of a block, and remaining still portions of a group cut in the solid wood." This copying of natural forms, as executed with the marvelous technique of Gibbons — his grace, his dexterity, and his matchless truthfulness — has a value of its own entirely independent of its relation to other forms of art. "This day," writes Evelyn in his diary on January 18, 1671, "I first acquainted his Majesty with that incomparable young man Gibbons, whom I had lately met with in an obscure place by mere accident, as I was walking near a poor solitary thatched house in a field in our parish near Sayles Court. I found him shut in, but looking in at the window I perceived him copying that large cartoon or crucifix of Tintoretto, a copy of which I had myself brought from Venice, where the original painting remains. I asked if I might enter; he opened the door civilly to me, and I saw him about such a work as, from the curiosity of handling, drawing, and studious exactness, I had never before seen in all my travels. I question him why he worked in such an obscure and lonesome place; he told me it was that he might apply himself to his profession without interruption, and wondered not a little how I found him out. I asked if he was unwilling to be made known to some great man, for that I believed it might turn to his profit. He answered he was yet but a beginner, but would not be sorry to sell off that piece. On demanding the price, he said one hundred pounds. In good earnest, the very frame was worth the money, there being nothing in nature so tender and delicate as the flowers and festoons about it, and yet the work was very strong. In the piece was more than one hundred pieces of men." The carving of Gibbons that was first carried to the queen in order to secure her favor did not chance to please a certain old woman who had the royal ear, and it was not at once that the artist obtained the consideration which was his due; he has, however, enjoyed it ever since, and his work is still held among the treasures of English art. Some of the best and most interesting of it is at Hampton Court Palace and at Chatsworth House; and the school of carvers that followed him decorated all London with such masterly work that it is plain that if here had been any artist capable of designing, as there were carvers capable of executing, it would have been a mighty period of decorative art.

Asian arrivals

The poor young queen of Charles II brought with her from Portugal such Chinese cabinets as had never before been seen. Oriental rugs were already known, and some Japanese cabinets and screens had come into the country, perhaps by way of the Dutch commerce with the East. French furniture, also, was imported by the court at this time, although the magnificent Boulle work, and the meretricious French glitter in general, were more than half a century in finding their way freely across the Channel; but with the exception of the great mirror and toilet of beaten and massive gold given by the queen-mother to this same young Portuguese princess on her marriage, the most splendid furniture of the court was of solid silver, or of silver plates of very fine Repoussé work. Much of the furniture of the Duchess of Portsmouth was of this precious metal; Mary of Modena, the queen of James II, had a cabinet of silver filigree; there is still some of the sort at Windsor, as is some of the silver furniture in the King's Room at Knole House.

Changed by decoration and delicate china

But the decorative art of England had now become a mongrel affair, and it became still more so with the accession of William and Mary. These sovereigns brought with them certain Dutch fashions and predilections for bandy-legged chairs, articles of Japanese lacquer, and of carved ebony — the Dutch settlement of Ceylon having made ebony much more attainable — all of which, together with a pictorial marquetry, added new elements to the confusion. This marquetry, although but a prelude to the wonderful Boulle work that had not yet crossed from France, was much more elaborate than the old inlay. It was executed either in the natural woods or in ivory, ebony, or mother-of-pearl, and was to be found in some degree on almost everything. The use of it demanded an unprecedented extent of flat surface, and it thus wrought a vital change in the appearance of the larger objects, bringing into view broad smooth doors to upright pieces, tall clocks and wardrobes, curiously curved planes for the display of the marquetry, and doing away necessarily with a great deal of the carving and much of the architectural character of the construction, so that articles ceased to be miniature temples, became boxlike in comparison, and were covered with this flat and pictured decoration of tulips, birds, figures, and landscapes.

Some of the old ornament remained, and a certain sculpture of foliage after the idea of the scallop shell, or "when in length not unlike the frill of a shirt," may be observed on many of the chairs of the reign of William III, that were followed by the white and gilt chairs, with silken backs and cushions, peculiar to the time of Queen Anne. But this use of shapes adapted to the display of marquetry probably brought about a departure from the Jacobean of a nobler sort, which made use of the same simplicity of form, the vertical lines of which in upright articles were perfectly straight till at the top curving over frequently in the old cove, and the surfaces decorated again with carvings chiefly of ancient figures and conventionalized florage in low relief — a variation which, begun under William and Mary, perfected itself under Anne, and was subsequently deteriorated by the influence of Louis Quatorze. It was immediately succeeded by the work of Thomas Chippendale, who chose what he fancies in the existing style and added to it what he fancies in the French.

It was in the reign of William and Mary that old china came to the throne which has held sway ever since by the divine right of its own charm. The pleasant Queen Mary was a Stuart, in spite of her virtues, and loved to see pleasant things about her, and the fantastic forms and rich colors of the Oriental porcelain had touched her fancy. She had solaced the term of her absence from England with it accumulation, and she brought great quantity of it with her from the Hague, where the taste for it was already formed, as everyone knows that is familiar with the Dutch articles of the day, whose fronts are often mere plastrons of porcelain, the access of the Dutch to the ports of the Orient having filled Holland with strange wares and strange fashions. Holland not only imported, but in Delft also imitated the Chinese wares, sometimes carrying out the imitation exactly to all the curiosity of its quaint design, and sometimes decorating the objects with the pencils of her best artists. The queen procured other china also, wherever it was to be had, so that, as we are told, her collection was "wonderfully rich and plentiful." Persian and Damascus cups, and fine glasses, such as the storied "Luck of Eden Hall", were not unfamiliar by that time in England, and there were several potteries producing fine results in France. Later would come the beautiful Sèvres, with all its exquisite colors — its bleu do roi, rose du Barri, vert pre, and jonquille; its embedded jewels, and Antoine Watteau paintings — single plates of whose earlier and best manufacture were quite valuable. The Dresden was not yet in existence, nor the Capodimonte porcelain with its shells and corals and figures in such high relief as to cast distinct shadows, nor many other fine chinas. Nevertheless, the Henri II faience, decorated with masks and scutcheons and fine damascene work, with its rosy reliefs and dark yellow backgrounds, was all that could be wished; the Palissy ware had reached perfection in cups, platters, incense burners, and possibly statuettes, having unrivaled brilliancy of enamel colors, purity of tint and outline, in all its reptiles, shells, fruits, and foliages; and there was almost unlimited choice among Italian wares, the gorgeous Luca della Robbia, the delightfully decorated Venetian majolicas, and countless others on which Raphael and his contemporaries had lavished their designs. The queen filled her palace with china, jars, vases, idols, statuettes, pilgrim bottles, cups and plates and monsters, giving preference always to the Japanese and Chinese products — the eggshell, the sea-green, the imperial ruby, the blue and white Nankin, the crackle — perhaps by reason of the remoteness which gives factitious value, perhaps through the fascination of the hideousness of its gods and demons. "In a few years almost every great house in the kingdom," says the historian, who did not appreciate this sort of beauty, "contained a museum of these grotesque baubles; even statesmen and generals were not ashamed to be renowned as judges of teapots and dragons…". In the next reign the passion for this decoration had become a rage; there were piles and pyramids of plates and platters in every fashionable drawing room — "a chaos of Japan".

Hanging shelves

Of course this fashion of the use of china, carried to such lengths, required conveniences for its care and display even beyond the old cabinets, buffets, and court-cupboards, or the simple shelf of the village inn, and thus with William and Mary had come in all sorts of odd little racks and sets of shelves, hanging cabinets, and chimneypiece contrivances in woodwork, which produced almost a revolution in furnishing, and decked out with their precious burden, gave an amazingly different character to the walls that had been wont to the dark rich unrelieved paneling and the heavy tapestry, and on which now paper-hangings imported from the East through Holland first found place. The reign of these monarchs was, however, a very short one, and the fashions that they set were hardly well developed until the reign of Queen Anne, but the general shape of the furniture was more or less Dutch in character, with an aspiration after the severe but not yet perfectly understood classic, combined with strange leanings to the fascination of the Oriental. The Elizabethan peculiarities had largely disappeared, although some of the beauties were preserved; and the Renaissance that remained was still rather that of the Louis Treize period of France rather than any other. France was becoming that fountainhead of elegance and taste in the public appreciation that Holland had been. The Quatorze was unfortunately creeping over, but in no great quantity, save where new houses were built and furnished, as the great mansions were not too often emptied and refilled, and when it came at last it was frequently debased by the Rococo; Japanese work of every sort was in high favor, both the imported and that imitated at home by figures embossed in gold dust upon black lacquer and enriched with metal mounts, and whole suites were furnished in it. Sir William Chambers published an interesting book of Chinese interiors and designs; and Thomas Chippendale, who produced many simple and elegant forms, and also formed some of the surprising tours de force among the rolling lines and absurd caprices of the Rococo, printed a series of plates for furniture, in the introduction to which he says that he has been encouraged by persons of distinction, who signify regret that the art of ebenisterie is executed with so little propriety and excellence, remarks upon the novelty of his publication, and declares that his pencil has but faintly copied his fancy. There are, he says "nine chairs in the present Chinese manner, which, I hope, will improve that taste or manner of work, it having yet never arrived to any perfection; doubtless it might be lost without seeing its beauty." Innumerable carved wooden tea trays, tea tables with raised openwork rims for the security of the cups and saucers, somewhat like the old Roman abaci, and decorated tea caddies, did honor in their almost invariable Chinese ornament to the origin of the now general fashion of tea drinking. Many of the articles of this school were acquired by American colonial families. They are sometimes made in birch and in cherry wood, as well as oak, and the later ones in mahogany, with a delicate satin-wood inlay, and fitted with fine brasses.

Of Queen Anne

It has been the custom to refer to nearly everything in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century under the general title of Queen Anne, particularly in a late revival and modification of the furniture of that period; for the main characteristics of furniture and decoration in the reign of Anne extended over the time of the first two Georges, although steadily debased by the gradual infiltration of the spirit of the Quatorze, not only in shapes and outlines, but in manufacture and the shams of veneering.

Classics invade the Rococo

In spite of much effort, it was not till after the publication of Stuart's Athens, in 1761, and of Adam's Spalatro — a statistical description, with many plates, of the palace of Diocletian — in 1757, that the reign of pure and severe classicism began in England, although Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, and Sir John Vanbrugh had all done their best. Even then the classic struggled with the Chinese, Sir William Chambers's book of Chinese interiors having been published in the same year with Spalatro, while the best workers condescended to design and gild and carve, when required, in all the mesquinages of the Rococo. Excellent things were nevertheless produced not only by the Chippendales, but by George Hepplewhite, among others, Henry Copeland and Matthias Lock, by Thomas Sheraton, and particularly by the brothers Adam, who designed exterior and interior fittings and furnishings, who introduced polished steel grates, and who took the pains to visit Italy and procure at the source instructions for their columns and capitals and moldings and festoons. The Adams were the authors of numerous fine designs, none finer than their mantles and their looking-glass frames, which latter, exquisitely carved in airy grace and delicacy of broken garlands of fine blossoms falling about the great beveled sheet of glass, whether ebony or white or gilt, are of unrivaled beauty.

There was much mechanical arrangement at this time about the furniture, which, although to be regretted for its tendency toward instability, had some reason for its being, in the use of bedrooms for sitting rooms, writing rooms, and for the reception of favored guests; tables that opened if a portion were lifted; desks that transformed themselves; chairs, sofas, and wardrobes that answered two purposes. Lions' heads and feet and eagles' talons, although an old ornament, were now everywhere to be found again. There were claw-footed loo tables, and bedsteads and chairs resting on feet where the claws clutched a ball; certain tall secretaries, whose glass doors were sashed and latticed, were a nearly universal article; and there were charming light chairs of satin wood and marquetry — for satin wood had come in with the last as mahogany had with the first quarter of the century, and it would be difficult to imagine woods capable of producing more beauty than the creamy richness of the one or the wine-dark depths of the other, especially when ornamented, as frequently was the case, with medallions painted by Angelica Kauffmann and by Giovanni Cipriani.

With the more finished acquaintance with classic subjects that the latter portion of the century acquired, of course the confused and mongrel shapes and decorations in furniture grew more and more distasteful, and the efforts to reach the purity of the classic were correspondingly increased. Something of this was due to the way in which the buried beauty of Pompeii had been slowly rising from its ashes, and something to the splendor of the Louis Seize revival of that beauty — an effort rather helped than hindered, too, by the classical assumptions of the First Empire. The British fancy was carried captive; journeys were taken, explorations were set on foot, measurements were made and at last the Elgin Marbles came to England.

Just before this event, Mr. Hope, the brilliant author of Anastatius, a man of vast wealth and learning, and a discriminating collector, had published his folio volume of plates and text upon the subject of Furniture and Internal Decoration, which did a great deal to stimulate the popular taste. Mr. Hope described one of his own many and magnificent rooms, designed entirely with reference to the statuary which was its chief ornament: "The central object in this room is a fine marble group, executed by Mr. Flaxman, and representing Aurora visiting Cephalus on Mount Ida. The whole surrounding decoration has been rendered in some degree analogous to these personages, and to the face of nature at the moment when the first of the two, the goddess of the morn, is supposed to announce approaching day. Round the bottom of the room still reign the emblems of night. In the rail of a black marble table are introduced medallions of the god of sleep and of the goddess of night. The bird consecrated to the latter deity perches on the pillars of a black marble chimneypiece, whose broad frieze is studded with golden stars. The sides of the room display, in satin curtains draped in ample folds over panels of looking-glass and edged with black velvet, the fiery hue which fringes the clouds just before sunrise; and in a ceiling of cooler sky blue are sown, amidst a few unextinguished luminaries of the night, the roses which the harbinger of the day in her course spreads on every side around her. The pedestal of the group offers the torches, the garlands, the wreaths, and the other insignia belonging to the mistress of Cephalus, disposed around the fatal dart of which she made her lover a present. The broad band which girds the top of the room contains medallions of the ruddy goddess and of the Phrygian youth intermixed with the instruments and the emblems of the chase, his favorite amusement. Figures of the youthful Horae, adorned with wreaths of foliage, adorn part of the furniture, which is chiefly gilt in order to give more relief to the azure, the black, and the orange compartments of the hangings."

It was not often that the style could be treated on such a scale of splendor as this; yet it needed the most lavish expenditure and critical care in order to be seen at its best, and with any poverty of treatment it became hard and formal and almost unlovely. It maintained its supremacy briefly before other fashions came to the top in France. Horace Walpose had feebly initiated a return to the Gothic at home, and Pugin and Wyatt also had evoked its wondrous apparition again. Some furnishers favored the one, and some the other. During the 19th century the largest liberty of choice was allowed, and a complete eclecticism reigned over bald Classic, impoverished Renaissance, vulgarized Louis Quatorze, modernized Medieval, and imperfect Pompeian, used generally with ignorance of the origin, possibilities, and congruities of either. Consequently the very word Rococo came to signify anything especially quaint, and lost entirely in the popular knowledge its descriptive application to the rock and shell forms of the peculiar French style to which it belonged. The exception was in the revival of Gothic architecture, where Gothic furniture was done well. But except for that thoughtful selection ceased to be made, delicate and exact work to be demanded, one style has been decorated with the ornaments of another, and generally the Victorian era characterized itself in furniture only by its ugliness, it slovenliness, and its stupidity.

Italianate

In the end of the 19th century some English artists and men of taste, not quite satisfied with the modern Gothic, which alone is faithful to the law of its being, and have endeavored to bring something like a new creation out of chaos. Among others, Charles Eastlake directed his attention to the subject, and issued a valuable and timely volume that exerted a wide influence. Although the archeology of Mr. Eastlake's volume was always careful, most of the principles in it are beyond question, and can be generally stated in a few words. The Italianate style would have no carving or molding or other ornament glued on — such work must be done in the solid; no mitered joints, but joints made at the right angle, and secured by mortise, tenon, and pin; woods in their native color, and unvarnished, or else painted in flat color, with a contrasting line and a stenciled ornament at the angles; unconcealed construction everywhere, and purposes plainly proclaimed; and with veneering, round corners, and all curves weakening the grain of the wood being absolutely forbidden. The furniture that he thus proposed has straight, strong, squarely cut members equal to their intention. Its ornament is painted panels, porcelain plaques and tiles, metal trimmings, and conventionalized carvings in sunk relief, a part of the construction entering into the ornament, also in the shape of narrow striated strips of wood radiating in opposite lines, after a fashion not altogether unknown in the time of Henry III. It has the honesty and solidity, but not the attraction, of the Medieval; and if it is stiff and somewhat heavy, and fails entirely to please, it has yet a wholesome and healthy air.

Revival

As the 20th century approached, there was then a revival of old forms in furniture under the name of the Queen Anne, although frequently spoken of by dealers, with absurd anachronism, as the Early English. While the articles made according to Mr. Eastlake's instructions may be considered a reform, and the Neo-Jacobean a fashion, the revival of the Queen Anne seems to have sufficiently positive features to be regarded as a style. This revival is said to be the work of that knot of poets and artists and connoisseurs of bric-a-brac at whose head stand Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, and the traces of Italian fancy and English quaintness combined in it declare that it might have been their work if it is not.

Its introduction was associated with a revival of Queen Anne forms in architecture, such as the somewhat Dutch character of country house with red brick trimmings and curved gables, to be found in the latter years of William and Mary, qualified by new invention and modern taste. Of course it met with opposition and criticism; for it seemed to have sprung into notice full grown, not like a growth answering a need, but like a surprise. Animated discussions concerning its merits and demerits, displaying equal acrimony and ignorance, took place in the meetings of the architects and others interested in such things, various voices declaring that nobody would credit Queen Anne's epoch with any style at all, and that if the epoch had a style, it was not this; that this was a mongrel, violating classic rules while pretending to be a form of classic, and yet really not unsuited to Gothic surroundings; and that, being an attempt to unite the truthfulness, variety, and picturesqueness of the Gothic with the common sense of the Italian, it should be called the Free Classic, for it was in reality only a Renaissance, less strict and refined that the old Renaissance. A writer in The Builder said: "We are now offered in some quarters the revival of the furniture of the Queen Anne and Georgina Period, of which Chippendale and Sheraton were the leading makers. This type of furniture revels in curved lines and surfaces really unsuitable, as we have before said, to wood construction and which, in fact, seem designed to create difficulties of execution in order to overcome them." But it is not all this bombe furniture referred to, with its curved lines and surfaces, that was chosen for the archetype of the new Queen Anne. It is true that Chippendale and Sheraton produced such designs, but they also, as we have seen, produced others more characteristic of themselves and of the period. The first portion of Chippendale's One Hundred and Sixty Plates has examples of the rolling abominations of the Rococo, but the rest is a collection of simple and rather elegant shapes; and what resemblance there is between the Chippendale furniture and the Queen Anne is confined to the latter portion of his illustrations and the articles manufactured from those designs.

Queen Anne cabinet.

The revived Queen Anne and that which was purely home bred and national of the original style, revels in no curves whatever but is severely square and straight. Its lines are a rebound from the curves of two centuries. All of its articles stand well off the floor, upon strong supports, the construction perfectly apparent, the corners sharp, the panels many and small; it carries much plate glass, cut always with a deep bevel, and it has a great deal of carving in the face, that is, in such relief, of the conventional forms of fruit, flowers, foliage, birds, and animals, and their idealized suggestions; it uses but little metal in its heavy articles, but illuminates itself with numberless small and precious mirrors, with brass sconces and candelabra, and with rare china, and its chimney pieces overflow with sculptured beauty of column and capital and frieze. Some of the choicer traits of the Elizabethan occasionally appear in the carving of the cabinets; there is even a hint of the Louis Quinze in the long reedy legs that now and then uphold some light square object. Generally it was thoroughly eclectic, and if there was the least reminiscence of the Gothic in the tops of sideboards, buffets, and cabinets, there was also a general character of the Louis Quinze throughout the whole. But the style has struck the beauty loving eye wherever it has been seen. The Queen Anne was perhaps the most satisfactory American domestic furniture, being reasonable and sufficiently beautiful. It is quaint and picturesque, and has the simplicity and quietness of old work, without architectural pretension.