Posts tagged "history"
Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on June 23, 2011
They say the Devil is in the details. I tend to disagree. In pieces like this, the details announce impeccable craftsmanship, fine mimesis of the natural world, and symbolic meaning:
This is what we've lost with the decline of the furniture industry.
At one time, craftsmen and their clients participated in a certain tradition of meaningful artistic expression, a cultural consciousness that demanded aesthetic significance even from everyday objects. Yes, on the one hand, Victorian bookcases of this quality would have been limited to a privileged few, but on the other hand, we can say that even today's fine contemporary furniture bears the irreducible mark of stylized, mass reproducibility. We have passed from imitating "nature" to imitating the industrial process itself—with all the sterile angles and slight curves that postmodern furniture allows.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a bookcase like this, and to know that it is par for the course and not some exceptional rarity crafted over a century ago? I would like to see a return to this kind of masterful craftsmanship, to the art of rendering space in unique and emotionally significant ways—and trust me, I'm not just nerding out about this furniture (although that's part of it). Look at this drawer front, for example:
On it you can clearly see wheat paired with grapes (carved quite beautifully, at that). As a student of English poetry, I instantly recognize at least some of the meanings, here: wheat, the traditional symbol of death, but also (paradoxically) life and fertility. This is the kind of sly irony that you can expect from Victorian poetry, and here we see it in Victorian furniture, as well. And of course the grapes themselves bring their own, contrasting meaning: the fruit of wine, drink of the gods (especially Bacchus/Dionysus, who has always been linked to poetry and creativity). The meanings are numerous: death paired with life (a famous Victorian cliché), but also the notion of the harvest and thus of agrarian life, a culture that was already giving way toward modern industrialization even before the Victorian period, when the land-based nobility became the capitalist class, when the old ways gave way to the new, etc. Likewise, shortly thereafter England's long tradition of fine, hand-crafted furniture bottlenecked into the handful of dedicated hold-outs that we see today.
I don't pretend to hold some kind of scholarly knowledge about furniture, although I've learned my fair share here at English Classics. However, it is obvious that this bookcase at least exemplifies the aesthetic mentality of the day, providing some answers to the questions: what is art? and what is beauty? and how will we adapt these notions to the spaces that we live in? In my view, these are the questions that we should ask of our furniture.
But we have seen today an increasing focus on cheap utility—regardless of socioeconomic context—and although this approach has its merits (namely affordability), it often suffers from a brand of minimalism that is aimed less at the efficient use of space and more at the least amount of effort. The same could be said of a great deal of postmodern architecture, which offers its own can of worms. So, antiques aren't just about nostalgia. They bring a certain level of history and humanity to the spaces that they occupy. They remind us that we are not alone on this long historical trajectory, and that at one point furniture was valued for its art as much as for its function. So, we can hope that this level of dedicated appreciation might return again—and in a lot of ways, it has, e.g. our line of reproduction furniture. However, there is still work to be done in the culture at large, and I guess that's why we're here.
Tags: victorian, bookcase, history
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Resources on May 24, 2011
The concept here is pretty simple: a visual timeline of English antique furniture periods. You might notice that we've excluded 1650, which coincides with the English Interregnum, a tumultuous time at best. As a result, a distinct, post-Jacobean furniture period didn't really emerge until the turn of the 18th century. Click on the image to view it in full size.
More information about English furniture period history can be found at the following links:
Medieval, Tudor and Elizabethan Furniture (pre-1485, 1485-1603)
Jacobean Furniture (1603-1625)
Queen Anne Furniture (1702-1714)
Georgian Furniture (1714-1820)
Regency Furniture (1800-1830)
Victorian Furniture (1837-1901)
Edwardian Furniture (1901-1910)
Tags: timeline, history
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Posted by under Furniture Commentary on August 28, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the last in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Victorian furniture.
The Edwardian period represents in many ways the last period of English furniture craftsmanship in which bench-made furniture pieces played a central role, with later styles of furniture more or less abandoning traditional precedents in favor of cheap materials and machine production. Today, only a handful of English furniture manufacturers continue the tradition preserved by Edwardian craftsmen, among them the third-generation cabinetmaker who supplies our own line of furniture.
So named for King Edward VII’s reign from 1901-1910, the Edwardian period continued the Victorian tradition of reviving and blending older styles. Georgian furniture inspirations occupied the forefront of Edwardian furniture-making, however, and thus the period produced a kind of neo-Georgian style, with key differences. Among these, for instance, was the revived prominence of Queen Anne style furniture, which tended to employ cabriole legs, serpentine curvatures in chests, and chair backs curved to fit the body, with walnut as a favourite wood type. The Art Nouveau style was also a contemporary of the Edwardian period.
Typically, Edwardian furniture makers used mahogany, often in butterfly or quarter-veneer styles. Square tapered legs and spade feet were common. Satinwood was the favoured wood type for inlays, usually in combination with ebony. Satinwood inlay patterns included fan, swag, festoon, and string inlays. In fact, very often Edwardian furniture would include a combination of all of these inlays, producing a richly ornamented appearance, even in the absence of heavily worked carvings, and in this respect Edwardian craftsmen favoured the simple yet elegant Georgian approach to ornamentation.
Tags: furniture, history, edwardian
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 06, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 6th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Regency furniture.
The same period that produced both an infamous Puritanical moralism as well as On the Origin of Species, the Victorian period is often seen as a time of contradictions, which any look at literature and art from the period can discern. The same can be said of Victorian furniture, where the stately propriety of the day clashed with a clamor of human passions to produce some of the finest, well-crafted furniture pieces of all time. Today, Victorian furniture is often considered the epitomized combination of orderliness and rich ornamentation. Indeed, furniture-makers at the time were so successful that succeeding styles took inspiration from the Victorian period, and even today many of the finest furniture styles (including our own collection) owe their design and construction techniques to the master craftsmen of Victorian period furniture.
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Tags: furniture, history, victorian
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 21, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 5th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Georgian furniture.
Regency furniture developed in the latter decades of the Georgian period, and represented the culmination of neoclassical design. While the years previous to the 19th century saw simpler furniture designs and less rich ornamentation, Regency furniture featured the development of embellished adornment and extravagance, thus anticipating the exoticism of Victorian furniture. Regency furniture grew so popular across the Atlantic that Americans adopted their own version, known as Federal style furniture, which lingered on a few decades after Regency styles fell out of favour in England.
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Tags: furniture, history, regency, george iv, georgian, empire
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 01, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 4th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Queen Anne furniture.
Such was the rich, compelling character of Georgian period art and design that most English reproduction office furniture today is modeled directly after Georgian style examples. In fact, our office furniture collection owes virtually all of its designs and many of its construction techniques to the efforts of the master craftsmen of the Georgian and Victorian periods.
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Tags: furniture, history, georgian
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on June 23, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 3rd in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Jacobean furniture.
Remembered most for its recurrence near the end of the 19th century in the Queen Anne Revival (c1870-c1900), Queen Anne period furniture marks an important turn in English furniture history. Like many other aspects of English culture, Queen Anne style furniture grew quite popular in America, particularly during the Revival period just after the American Federal style tapered off. Although usually characterized by stylistic developments, this time also saw the introduction of mahogany into English furniture-making, which would become quite popular later in the 18th century.
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Tags: furniture, history, queen anne
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on June 16, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 2nd in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Elizabethan furniture.
As a time that saw the emergence of King James I’s famous Bible as well as the Virginia colony of Jamestown and some of the finest English art ever (including Shakespeare and Milton), the Jacobean period also preceded the regicide of King Charles I and the bloody English Civil War that followed. Many of the tensions that exploded in those years mounted during King James I’s reign, and so this period represents a very important period in English history. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jacobean history has always been seen with a distinctness and clarity that other periods have seldom attained. As for Jacobean furniture style, it has survived mostly through the styles that succeeded it, particularly as a result of 19th century Eclectic Revivalism.
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Tags: furniture, history, jacobean
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Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on June 04, 2009
Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This will be the first in a series of seven posts, so stick around!
Named after the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the Elizabethan period marks the end of the Tudor style, itself named after the Tudor monarchs, beginning with the accession of Henry VII in 1485 and ending with Queen Elizabeth herself (read more about Tudor history). For the most part, the Tudor style featured a replacement of medieval designs (which followed Roman models) by those that developed out of the Renaissance. Elizabethan period furniture did see a return to some of the older medieval and Gothic styles, manifested partly in the Elizabethan tendency to use heavy furniture.
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Tags: furniture, history, elizabethan, tudor, medieval
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