The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Furniture Finishing
William and Mary designs in modern furniture reached their greatest popularity in this country a few decades ago when it was extensively reproduced for every purpose. Except for the bedroom its simplicity renders unnecessary the adaptations required for so many of the older periods and makes it suitable for almost any type of interior. Today it is seen occasionally in radio and phonograph cabinets, carried out chiefly in walnut or mahogany, and in decorated oriental lacquered effects on secretary desks.
Original pieces were either waxed directly on the wood or rubbed with hot linseed oil; later, on fine veneered work, shellac was applied in thin coats, then wax-polished to a high lustre. Modern finishes call for water stain on mahogany of a shade somewhat deeper and browner than Adam, an oil stain of Jacobean shade on oak, and on walnut either oil or water stain of the shade known as antique. The filler should be of a color appropriate to the wood and the final finish duller in lustre for walnut and oak than for mahogany. The panels of walnut cabinet work may be lacquered in the oriental manner.
Queen Anne (The dutch influence at its height, 1702-1750)
The reign of Queen Anne was one of the shortest of any sovereign in English history—only twelve years—but the furniture style which bears her name was not only marked by a radical change from previous periods, but kept its popularity through the reigns of two succeeding monarchs, George I and George II. Moreover it was contemporaneous with the advent of more settled conditions in the American colonies, and as a natural consequence, much furniture which we prize as "Colonial," to an Englishman, would be pure "Queen Anne."
The period offers an exceptionally fine illustration of the many centuries required to develop a truly distinctive furniture style; for while accepted as a thing of English creation. Queen Anne proportions and flowing lines were imported from Holland, along with the retinue of William of Orange. The Dutch artisans, however, in their turn had merely observed and adapted forms introduced by traders returning from China where the characteristic Queen Anne cabriole leg had originated in animal forms of an almost forgotten antiquity.
Furniture in England had by now become more and more diffused'among all classes of the population; no longer did the noble lord sit on the raised dais, while merchants sat on benches and the peasant stood because he was supposed not to sit at all except in his own home and then only on a rude stool. Cabinet makers in the early eighteenth century flourished because their orders came not just from the wealthy few but from the more affluent in every class. The time of the modern furniture factory was still far off, but public taste was demanding greater variety and comfort in home furnishing than ever before.
