The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Furniture Finishing

To the elaborate drop leaf table for the dining room were added the dished and pie-crust tilt top tripod varieties for the drawing room, and though bedsteads retained all four posts, the two rear ones were apt to be plain and the carved front ones were still more slender. Three-cornered cupboards came in, often circle-fronted in glass, the forerunner of our modern china cabinet. Highboys were further refined and the lowboy was employed as the counterpart of our own modern dressing table just as chests of drawers functioned as bureaus though still divided one half into cabinet and only the rest into drawers. Upholstery became more noticeable both in chairs and settees, but with the then novelty of wing sides to ward off drafts.

Hitherto English furniture had been marked by severe, geometrical lines and a general sturdiness that relied on color or carving1 to give it artistic interest. The Queen Anne period changed all of this by introducing a form of beauty based on graceful, flowing contours—curves in place of rectangles. Most notable is the cabriole leg and the claw and ball foot, the latter a Chinese motif presumed to represent the dragon grasping the mystic jewel..

Stretchers, formerly deemed a necessary element of sound construction, disappeared with advanced knowledge of joining and dovetailing. About all that remained of carving was the conventionalized scallop shell often mounted on the knee of the cabriole leg, and turning, too, went out of fashion. Cupboard tops remained architectural with broken curves and classic vase finials set in the breaches. Chair feet, in addition to the ball and claw, also included the club, Spanish, hoof, pointed and paw types.

Chair seats flared and were made wider than previously to accommodate the voluminous, spreading feminine costumes of the time. Chair backs were curved at the top and bent back to a more comfortable shape and generally became lower and less ornate, the simple-pierced splat and fiddle designs being favored. The scallop shell was not confined to chairs but appeared also on aprons of tables and drawer fronts. It is interesting to note that during the period there was invented by an obscure maker of wagon wheels, a chair which has never lost its popularity throughout all the vagaries of style—the Windsor.