Autumn 2014
skilled cabinet-making and marquetry skills, including veneering, gilding, and a taste for baroque elaboration. Added to developing skills in japanning, lacquer, and lathe-turning barley-twist legs, the scene was set for an explosion of fashionable variation. Charles Mackinnon, of Mackinnon Fine Furniture in St James’s, has the mag- nificent William and Mary marquetry wall mirror I men- tioned above, but his real love is early 18th century. “I like the materials - I like lacquer, I like gilding.” He also shows me a delightful tea-table from 1760, unshowy, restrained, ornamented with carving, chamferred legs, and pretty beading, but which relies above all for its charm on the beautiful mahogany flame veneer on the top. For the next phase in English furniture began in
1721 when reduced tariffs on exotic woods imported from the Americas initiated the great boom in ma- hogany furniture. As dealer Patrick Sandberg puts it to me, “There is no such thing as brown furniture.” The sides maybe brown, but the veneers on the finest pieces of furniture glow from deep chocolate to flame red, and later from the pale cream of satinwood to the pink of tulipwood. With such materials to play with it is no wonder that English furniture had little truck with paint and gilt. Sandberg comments, “You look at these things and realise that it is not function that mat- ters but what these craftsmen could do with this new wood.” Whether it is Thomas Chippendale, Robert Gillow, Robert Adam, George Hepplewhite or Thomas Sheraton, we are now into the age of the great design- ers who stretched their craftsmen to ever greater ac- complishment. Sandberg comments that what you are looking for is always the first trial of a new style - “that is where you see real innovation and craftsmanship.” He shows me a late 18th Century Hepplewhite period mahogany sideboard that is a showcase of virtuosic de- tails - a double serpentine bow front, boxwood and eb- ony strung throughout, with a tulipwood and mahoga- ny crossbanded top, unusually veneered from back to front, and a central flame half round panel. There are crossbanded drawers, a fan inlaid shaped apron and satinwood fluted canted corners, all supported on leaf carved turned legs ending on ‘acorn’ feet. For many, this period of exceptional craftsmanship came to an end in the 1830s. Melvin Haughey, a dealer based in Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, in the business for 45 years, says that the advent of industrial scale ma- chine processes made the difference. “It’s a question of workmanship. With hand craftsmanship, there’s varia- tion of technique.” Moreover, where hand cut veneer is 1/8th inch thick, machine cut veneers are 1/16th inch thick: “That’s really important,” Haughey comments. Haughey can tell the difference between pieces from the north of England and from London, because of the fineness of the London work, but also he seeks out pieces made by Gillows, a company first established in Lancaster in 1730, close to the port, where Robert Gil- low could choose the choicest timbers on their arrival from the West Indies. The company lasted nearly two hundred years, making furniture for all levels of soci-
English Furniture
ety, and employing skilled cabinet-makers, wood carv- ers and glaziers. When pushed to choose a favourite piece, however, Haughey plumps for a George I c.1720 burr walnut bureau bookcase he bought forty years ago, which cost the then price of a terraced house in Kirkby. “It was its colour. I could see the quality.” But if for many years the cut-off of respectable an-
tiques was 1830, now attitudes are changing. London dealer Ian Butchoff specialises in fine 19th century furniture. He argues, “The craftsmanship didn’t stop in 1830. Quite the contrary. There were more wealthy people in the world and also better technology to im- prove manufacture.” Butchoff is especially assiduous in tracking down items of furniture made speculatively, often in very small numbers, by leading manufactur- ers for the many international exhibitions that punc- tuated the late 19th century. One such piece currently on display is an ingenious expanding round table, con- structed of Cuban mahogany, put together with a metal winding mechanism, with two sets of supplementary wooden leaves, exhibited by Samuel Hawkins of Lon- don at The Great Exhibition of 1851. The ingenuity of the device and the fineness of the finish, only possible with machines, are equally impressive. And while some other pieces might be rather overburdened with brass and gilt, ebony or marquetry, there is no denying their technical expertise. Whether your taste is for these late flourishes of a long tradition or the earliest trials, each piece of antique furniture made by a craftsman is not just a thing of use or beauty, but a window on a world.
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Left An ingenious expanding table in Cuban mahogany by Samuel Hawkins of London, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Butchoff Antiques.
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