Antique furniture - new fashions in tables

For dining furniture, the draw-table, whose two ends could be drawn out, gradually replaced the long, heavy oak table. Most draw-tables were of oak, but some were of walnut. The legs were bulbous, perhaps shaped as Ionic capitals, a decoration sometimes continued on the frieze.

Gate-leg tables, introduced in the 16th century, were popular throughout the 17th. They had a folding top, which would be opened out and supported on the “gate-leg”. By the 1660s walnut gate-leg tables with spiral, turned legs were replacing draw-tables for dining.

Chairs and couches

In the 17th century antique furniture armchairs were symbols of status: the great chair and its footstool were reserved for the head of the household, with perhaps one other for his wife or an important guest. By c. 1610 in any aristocratic household an upholstered chair would have replaced the earlier wooden one, and was usually made en suite with a footstool, armless chairs, and stools. Farthingale chairs were the most common upholstered chairs. They had a padded back and seat, with a gap between that enabled women wearing a farthingale (hoped whale-bone petticoat) to sit comfortably. The covering was of turkeywork (knotted pile fabric, creating an effect similar to a Turkish carpet), cloth or leather.

Caning for the backs and seats of chairs was introduced from the Netherlands in the 1660s. Early caning was of wide mesh. The front stretcher, the supports flanking the cane panel of the back and the cresting rail (joining the two supports) were all carved, and cushions covered the cane seat. By the 1670s the mesh had become finer and the height of the back had increased, reaching an extreme by the century’s end. The earlier straight stretcher and cresting rail were replaced by pierced and arched forms.

Armchairs were solidly upholstered and lost their farthingale gap; the most comfortable were wing chairs. Most late-17th-century armchairs were of walnut, but some were of beech-wood painted black, or “ebonised”, to resemble the expensive imported wood.

Sgabello chairs (carved wooden chairs with two solid supports in place of legs) usually made of walnut, often partly gilded, were made in England in the 1630s as well as imported.


Case antique furniture

In the 17th century, antique furniture chests – made by joiners and usually of oak – were the traditional form of storage for all sorts of objects, from books and papers to linen and clothes. Some were cased entirely in iron and had massive locks, for use as strong-boxes; others, only slightly less secure, were bound with iron; most were panelled, some had carved decoration. The style of chests was less affected by changing fashions than that of any other piece of furniture, and in the following century provincial chests still resembled those made a hundred years earlier. The coffer was a type of chest with a domed lid and wood encased in leather or fabric and was made by cofferers, who belonged to the Leathersellers’ Company. Large coffers were used as travelling trunks. They had leather covers held in place by brass studs arranged in decorative patterns, and their corners were strengthened by metal mounts. Small coffers, covered in velvet or embroidered silk, were decorative enough to sit on dressing tables and were used as jewel boxes.