EARLY DESK FURNITURE
The appeal of old furniture which has the merit of form, design, and
workmanship of high order is one that is not the reflection of a passing
fad or fancy; it has come to be one of attachment and genuine sincerity.
If it took the greater part of the nineteenth century to teach us the
futility of fixing our affections on exaggerated novelties, such as
those which dimmed the reign of Queen Victoria and boomed the Bunthornes
of the ’eighties, the twentieth century finds us discriminatingly
chastened. We are taking out of our houses, those of us who can, the
pieces of furniture that ought not to have been made, putting into their
places old-time things of beauty, or, when it is not possible for us to
acquire veritable antique pieces, the high-grade reproductions of old
furniture that now grace the market and show no abatement in popular
esteem.
In classifying the hobbies of several thousand collectors who stated
their preferences, I found that a greater number were interested in old
furniture than in any one other subject. This fact is not strange, when
one comes to consider the utilitarian phase. Generally, the collector of
old furniture starts in with the chance possession of two or three
antique bits which, by inspiring interest and appreciation, lead him to
wish to bring the other house furnishings into harmony with the
loveliness of the old pieces. Few collectors of antique furniture, of
course, are without homes of their own, or the modern substitute--the
long-lease apartment. The skill of the modern restorer of old furniture
accomplishes wonders with the battered derelicts of the houses of
yesterday by making the old pieces to shine forth in their glory anew;
all of which lends encouragement to the collector and new zest to his
traditional delight in the “hunt.”
Upon first thought, a collection of desks might seem like a mastodonian
assemblage. So it would be if the collector placed them all in a row or
all in a single room! But the house of to-day can accommodate--indeed,
finds necessary--more than a single desk in its furnishings. And so the
collector of old furniture has another impetus in his search, a
utilitarian one. Under the term “desk” we may include the various
escritoires, bureau-bookcases and the secrétaires. All of these, in
common with our cabinets, tall-boys, and so on, had their origin in the
chest or coffer of the Middle Ages. To the bottom of the chest came to
be added a drawer. Next, side doors instead of a top lid came into
fashion, and in this manner followed the many steps that led to the
development of the piece of furniture we designate, for convenience, the
desk.
It is not possible to tell just when the earliest desks were made. The
desk is a composite affair, combining a cabinet, a bureau, drawers, and
a writing-table. In Ghirlandaio’s painting “Saint Jerome in His
Study”--a work of about 1480, found in the collection of the Ognissanti
in Florence--we see depicted a portable desk of the “schoolmaster” type;
and another painting of the same period and in the same collection, the
“St. Augustine” by Sandro Botticelli, depicts a desk with drawers. In
other paintings by the old masters, and in very early engravings, we see
delineated the various pieces of furniture in contemporary use designed
for writing purposes, as well as others for the account-keeper. All
suggest to us the probable units which combined to produce the
escritoire and the secrétaire of later centuries, and lend interest to
the collector’s enthusiasm for searching out pieces of the sort.
When living was so much less complex in the matter of domestic doings
than it is in our own time, there was far less need of such objects as
desks. Whole families, even of the prosperous classes, could get along
without them very well. Your Mona Lisa of the Renaissance could have
carried her household accounts in her head, and probably did, while the
housewife of the Northern countries had little use for a place to keep
quires or reams of correspondence paper. Nor had they, in all
probability, entered into the sphere of feminine prowess in home-banking
matters that made necessary a writing-bureau sacred to personal command.
The finest examples of the craft of the old master cabinet-makers of the
seventeenth century and the eighteenth were originally produced for
wealthy patrons who paid well for the master’s skill. While such pieces
must naturally be beyond the reach of the collector of moderate
means--except in rare instances where complete ignorance of their value
is combined with a desire to part with them--they are still always
interesting to note, and many of them have been reproduced with
wonderful skill by some of the leading masters of the craft of
furniture-making to-day.
Of course, no reputable dealer will attempt to pass off a modern copy of
anything as an original. At the same time, one may take great pleasure
in acquiring a truly fine copy of a Queen Anne secrétaire or a
Hepplewhite bureau, if it is knowingly purchased as a copy, whereas if
deception is practised, the result must be a disappointment and
discouragement to the owner, however fine the piece.
Unfortunately, all dealers are not reliable and occasionally fraud is
perpetrated in connection with antique furniture. Even the metal
trimmings--knobs, handles, etc.--are given the appearance of antiquity
by all sorts of devices at the command of skilful craftsmen who produce
worm-holes with buck-shot, antiquity with acids, and a worn appearance
with friction.
The general furniture-collector is not likely to come across anything in
the way of a find in a desk of the Renaissance, seventeenth-century, or
even early eighteenth-century Italian periods; nor is he be likely to
meet with the finer pieces of other early continental furniture, as
nearly all of these, if not in public or great private collections
already, would be justly held at a very high price by dealers into whose
stock such pieces might come. However, there are frequent public sales
of old foreign household furnishings, and great bargains may, indeed, be
met with at these. In any event, the collector must cultivate
alertness, decision, and intuition for opportunities to buy--and once in
a while to sell, too!
To the European the name bureau, from its French derivation, is
understood to be associated with writing. In America we connect the term
with a piece of furniture designed to hold articles of clothing in its
various drawers. It was somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth
century that the drawer was added to the lower part of the chest. Later
in the century further drawer capacity was developed, and by the
beginning of the next we find the complete chest of drawers in use. In
view of this we shall not expect to find Jacobean desks, though we may
find cabinets for writing-materials and documents and even occasional
desk-like pieces.
In the William and Mary period (1688-1702) cabinets, secrétaires, and
bureaus came rapidly into use. Simplicity and an unobtrusive elegance
marked the designs of this period. The desks displayed distinct
characteristics which differentiate several groups. In the first
division may be placed the cabinet with bracket (straight) feet or bun
feet; a whole front flap, which when let down displayed the drawers and
the pigeonholes; a top either single-hooded or straight with ovolo
frieze. In the second division we have the bureau-desk with its
slant-top desk-plane. Here we find the taller desk styles, sometimes
with double-hooded tops, with or without vase-shaped finials. The third
division includes the narrow slant-top desks on cup-turned legs, flat
stretchers, and bun feet. The knee-hole desks (desks with the center
portion arranged to permit the knees of the writer to go below the
desk-plane) constitute the fourth division, while a fifth sort of desk
had gate-legs braced by serpentine flat stretchers. The two center legs
(there were six in all), pulled out as a support for the desk-flap when
its plane was let down.
In the William and Mary period and in the Queen Anne period succeeding,
the middle classes had come to a state of education undreamed of in the
time of Elizabeth. Letter-writing, pamphlet-writing, and diary entries
occupied many hours of the day and many candle-lit ones as well. This
scriptorial activity called for more accessories than had been needed
earlier. These newly devised bureau-desks combined solidity and dignity.
They were distinctly architectural in design, with their moldings,
cornices, and broken pediments. _Bombé_ fronts came in with the Dutch
influence. Walnut was the favorite wood employed, either solid or as a
veneer for the wood bases.
The furniture-makers of the time of George I were beginning to find a
demand, and to supply it, for writing-tables with tiers of drawers at
each side of the knee-hole. From about 1720 mahogany entered into
furniture-making extensively. Its use by the American furniture-makers
in the colonies was coincident with, and possibly antedated, lacquer,
which had been the rage and as a fashionable fad continued to hold the
popular favor.
Of course, no writing-furniture is more eagerly sought than that of
Chippendale. There were the writing-tables with bombé fronts, the
bureaus, standing on legs that supported low bases, the bureau-bookcase
style of desk (bureau-desk), the slant-top secrétaires, etc. In American
desks of the period we find the block-front to have been very popular.
The writing-furniture of the brothers Adam exhibited the originality and
excellence common to their other articles. They introduced the more
general use of satinwood and others of the lighter-colored woods, and a
contour of line in design that struck a new note. Painted ornament, too,
was used by them more extensively than ever before it had been used in
English furniture.
With the furniture of Hepplewhite we find the three section bookcase
desk in vogue, and the pull-over top (tambour) which was ancestor to
the modern roll-top. The Hepplewhite desks are in great variety and of
much beauty and practical utility as well. Sheraton included in his
desks all the forms brought into fashion by Hepplewhite or modified by
him. All these various periods were reflected in American desks, some of
them with local modifications and variations.