Antique Furniture

A view of the various kinds of souces of turning will reveal several phrases of international trade relations, but none of the decorative processes will reveal such varied and engaging aspects as laquer.

Brought in small quantities from the Orient, even as early as Tudor times, it elicited admiration and arrived from year to year.

Somewhat before the closing years of the seventeenth century it had come to be imitated with varying success by English craftsmen and the enthusiasm for laquered furniture became on of the dominating mobiliary influences of the area.

Not only did laquered furniture retain its vogue undiminished during a large part of the eighteenth century, but it seems also to have created a widespread taste for Oriental wares and Oriental designs that cropped up persistently from time to time under one form or another with periodic recrudescence.

The contour and style of the Jacobean period, as of every other period for that matter, more or less faithfully reflected the social, intellectual and religious temprament and manners of the times. It is as unimaginable to think of Dean Hook or one of Cromwell's lieutenants seated in an Adam settee or a dainty Sheraton char as it is to imagine Julius Caesar driving a Model-T Ford.

Jacobean furniture was stout and staunch, even to clumsiness and severe in form and line even though bedizened with a superfluity of ornament.

It matched the coarse manners, abrupt morals and vigorous theology of the day with all their intense earnestness and redundancy of polemics, brimstone anathema and persecution.

In the cabinet work of the later Cromwellian era the contours remained much the same except that cupboards, while still squatly, were often of greater length and, with teh growing strength of Dutch influence, bun or ball feet on chests and cupboards became more common.

In the truly Jacobean or early Stuart period we find a predominance of straight lines, simplicity of structure and craftsmanship of downright British vigor and energy. All the different cupboards and dressesr were squat, and even beadsteads with their large testers carved and panelled, supported on heavy posts, were low. Much lower than one would imagine from looking at pictures of them. The squat proportions of the furniture were due to consistent with the unusually low ceilings prominent in the period.