Antique Furniture

VICTORIAN (1830s – 1900)

Victoria's reign (1837 – 1901) offers endless confusion to the beginner. All earlier styles were copied, shamelessly ‘improved' and mingled until often the original purpose of a feature was lost. Even at the time the period's critics endlessly deplored the fact that designers, makers and users were out of touch with each other. With a rapidly expanding population there was more concern over comfort for the many than elegance for the few. Thomas Hope had complained of a alack of skilled craftsmen, but for ever-increasing numbers with money in their pockets and no inhibiting traditions of cultured taste, the price-cutting mass production methods meant that a middling family home could have more rooms paced with furnishings than ever before.

Those new to wealth, like those newly escaped from poverty, gladly accepted current tastes, which meant that the many small manufacturers could continue far into mid-Victorian days the same range of style-corruptions that quckly transformed furniture design after the Regency. This, indeed, was a wide range. There could be no greater contrast than typical ‘Gothic' furniture with church-window tracery, tall angular outlines, heavy, dark carving and the concurrent bright ‘Louis Quince' or ‘rococo' revival almost entirely lacking straight lines and sharp angles and informally decorated with flowers and arabesques. Between these extremes was the so-called ‘Renaissance' and ‘Elizabethan' work which, in fact, laboriously copied much Jacobean furnishing for the massive dining room it was most usually expected to serve, eventually producing original designs in the same mood.

In General having rejected the Regency's pedantic classicism, these heavy-handed attempts to give each stylistic notion a safe historical attribution reflect the same escapist romanticism that had brought fantastic success to Scot's novel; Morland's scenes of rural peace; narrative paintings and the celebrity figures of the mantelshelf.

Mid-Victorian furniture may be regarded as generally more assertive, shaking free of the all-enfolding upholstery in favour of the bold, angular lines of Louis Seize design and a wealth of surface ornament in marquetry, ormolu, china plaques and embossed leather. Furniture at the 1851 exhibition can hardly be accepted as a foretaste, but at least a set of doors shown by William Holland may illustrate what became a mid-Victorian mood. For dining room or library there was a painted imitation of oak inlaid with ebony and pearl/ fore the drawing room polished white enamel with gold moulding; for the more imposing saloon painted figures in Pompeiian style;' for the lady's boudoir a painted imitation of walnut inlaid with flowers to go with marquetry furniture; for either drawing room, saloon or boudoir a door with plate glass panels embossed with gold and silver. One is reminded of the Balmoral drawing room with tartans patterning the chairs and settee cover, table cloth, curtains and pelmets.

So-called at in furniture design consisted largely of extreme elaboration of ornament, defying cheap imitation. All this produced inevitable reactions in favour of simplicity in design and ragged craftsmanship. Among the pioneers was William Morris (1834-96) who founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and company in 1861, making, among their things, simple cupboard furniture as a basis for painting by Morris and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites. The Morris firm produced some attractively forthright furniture, including, from the 1860s, the familiar rush-seated chairs and settees derived from traditional Sussex country design; but Morris, personally, was not involved in furniture design. It may be mentioned that, even by 1862, this firm of ‘fine art workmen in painting, carving, furniture and the metals' had been awarded two gold medals by those striving to improve public taste.

In a similar mood of revolt against such ‘objectionable and pretentious deceit' as wood graining, machine carving and the parodies of old carving then being produced, ‘smeared thickly over with dark varnish to give an appearance of age', Charles Eastlake brought out his Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, etc, in 1868, sufficiently popular to reappear, revised in 1878. He illustrates massive joiner constructions of his own design with pegged shelving and showing every pin of the mortise-and-tenon joints. He stresses the need for simplicity of form and shows it in a library bookcase and a square-ended sofa, but deplores the Victorian uncritical conviction that every new fancy is the finest yet.

Late Victorian furniture includes more copying of earlier centuries, and especially of the 18^th century's graceful chairs and table. The drawing room, especially, was filled with fragile pieces, the spindly shapes attempting to reflect the 1870s' ‘discovery' of Japan led by Bruce Talbert and others. Even at the time, this period was mocked for its aestheticism, Bohemianism, its delight in ragged tapestries, antique furniture – ‘an incoherent style that the period dubbed Queen Anne although,' as Lady Marian Alford pointed out in 1886, ‘the style of her reign is looked upon with suspicion and never admitted for imitation. The 19^th century would be a better name for it as it has formed itself only within the last 30 years, in the very heart of the century … It combines simplicity, roominess and comfort, colour, light and shade'.

In the final decades of the century, numerous arts and crafts societies came into being. Their effect on commercial furniture-making was somewhat limited, but prompted the creation of furniture that is straight and simple in line, but richly and imaginatively ornamented in a wide range of materials. Important names towards the end of the century include C. R. Ashbee, who launched the Guild of Handicrafts in 1888, Ernest Gimson (1864-1920), C. F. A. Voysey (1857-1941) and C. R. Mackintosh (1868-1928). To modern eyes the prevailing lines sometimes appear over-elongated, the ornament pinched and thin. This country, however, never became so deeply involved as the Continent in the short-lived style dominated by light rosewood, inlaid and highly polished, in quaint spindly forms that originated in Belgium and was known as art nouveau.