Antique Furniture - Tables, cupboards, mirrors

Dining tables were crude trestle tables consisting of a long, narrow softwood board resting on easily movable square-cut V- or A-shaped supports. Fixed tables seem to have been rare.

Early antique furniture cupboards were simply shelves attached to the wall, to hold cups. By the 15th century small chests with doors and long legs were being made, and also livery (food) cupboards with doors pierced for ventilation, often in Gothic patterns. To keep out vermin, small hanging livery cupboards were also made. Some larger antique furniture dressers for linen storage also appeared in the 15th century. A few survive in churches.

Antique furniture Cabinet-making was as prized in the Low Countries as elsewhere in Europe, and in the early 17th century both Antwerp and Amsterdam emerged as major centres of the craft. There was an increasing use of exotic woods in furniture, particularly ebony, which was mainly used as a veneer or as decorative mouldings, especially on mirror and picture frames. Tortoiseshell, coloured on the back, was also used as a veneer. Inside, cabinets often had painted panels and stacks of small drawers.

In the early 17th century both X-framed and rectangular chairs were made more comfortable in the Low Countries by fixed padding and upholstery. Furniture chairs were often covered with velvet or with tooled and gilt leather fixed with large decorative brass-headed nails. The traditional carved-lion finial continued to be used on chair backs. Stretchers (horizontal struts connecting legs) were in double rows to give strength and the legs were turned to resemble balusters.

Spanish territorial acquisitions in the New World were rich in precious metals, and the most grand was inlaid with silver. Exotic woods, such as ebony and mahogany, were also used. The common 16th-century chair known in England as a backstool may have originated in Spain, where its name is sillón de fraileros (monk’s chair). Early Spanish types were strongly constructed, with square-cut legs and hefty stretchers. Covers were of velvet, damask or the tooled and painted leather (another Moorish craft) associated particularly with the city of Cordoba. In the 17th century this type of chair took on the French-inspired characteristics of elaborate spiral-turned uprights and stretchers, but the distinctive Spanish use of leather continued.

The rise of the cabinet as a display piece was as marked in Spain as elsewhere in Europe. The vargueño (a 19th-century term) was a cabinet whose distinctive characteristic was a drop front resting on slides drawn out from a decorative stand, often of arcaded form. Exteriors were often relatively plain but interiors could be highly ornamented with mudéjar motifs, silverwork-style reliefs or inlay. In the 17th century vargueños continued to be popular as luxury objects, but were superseded as high fashion in mid-century by the papeleira, a type of cabinet lacking the characteristic Spanish drop front and closer in style to Dutch and French pieces. Spanish cabinets on stands at this time are remarkable for their rich veneers, usually of ebony and tortoiseshell and sometimes of carved ivory.