Heavy handed Decor

Cosy family life remained the aim of mid- Victorians. This still demanded comfortable furnishings such as deep-buttoned chairs, ottomans and chesterfield sofas, but now everything had a heavier look, showed more wood — along the top of seat backs, for example — and bore fancy carving or fretwork. The front legs of the graceful balloon-back chairs were elaborated into carved cabrioles. (more…)

Willing to accept the newly rich as well as new designs, the gentry in early Georgian Britain swelled in numbers and indulged their spending urge — often to excess. This led many to ruin, but it also allowed craftsmen, designers and artists to make great reputations for themselves.

Merit, good fortune, education and patronage, corruption and service to the nation were among the varied means of advancement in mid- 1 8th century Britain. (more…)

While their homeland was Oliver Crom well’s Commonwealth, Royalists who had taken refuge in France experienced the French style of life. One of its features, which they copied on returning home after 166o, was the arrangement of rooms. The public, formal core of a house was the hall or vestibule and the main reception room, often called the salon (saloon) or great parlour. The private suite of rooms had its own slightly less formal reception room — the withdrawing room — which was an antechamber to the bedrooms. (more…)

From approximately the earlier years of the 1770s separate parts of a vessel such as spouts or lids were stamped out using a drop-hammer. The piece of Sheffield plate would be placed upon a striking block which had a die sunk with a model of the required shape. Then the hammer, the face of which was raised with the same shape as the sunken die, was manipulated from above by a rope between two vertical rods and, as it struck the block, the Sheffield plate was stamped into shape. The parts would then be soldered to the vessel. The introduction of harder steels made possible more sharply-defined pieces and during the Regency period entire units were produced in this manner. Die-stamping was a very important technique, advances in it contributing greatly to mass-production methods in both silver and Sheffield plate. By the last decade of the eighteenth century larger, flat pieces such as trays were being produced in this manner, suitably ornamented as already described. (more…)

Comparatively few teapots were made in England before the eighteenth century and these are now exceedingly rare. As the fashion for drinking tea spread, the demand for the right kind of vessel in which to brew it brought about new types of containers for sugar, milk and tea. These tea accoutrements were made increasingly throughout the eighteenth century until, by the final decades, they had become an important branch of the silversmith’s work. Late seventeenth century teapots are unique and are mostly seen in museums. Outstanding among them is the historical conical-topped teapot (1670) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, with the spout quaintly set at right-angles to the handle, a practice which was short-lived. Another shape of this early period looks like a melon or similar fruit. (more…)

Chambersticks

Modest and practical, the silver chamberstick was in use during the seventeenth century, but examples are not generally found before the last quarter of the century. In the line of the old nursery rhyme, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed’, the words refer to a chamberstick which consisted of a saucer-shaped base for safety, with a short candle-socket in its centre, and a simple handle by which to carry it around the house. Larger homes might later have an assortment of such chambersticks set upon a table in the hall, a person taking one when it was needed and lighting it from a special master taper. Usually made of a lighter metal, the diameter of the saucer-shaped dish varied but generally measured about six inches, the short socket standing about three inches high. Most late seventeenth and eighteenth century examples would have a shapely scroll handle soldered beneath the base and curving upwards. (more…)

In Regency days the classical ideas shown in the work of Hepplewhite and Sheraton developed into more directcopying of Greek and Roman styles, and so gives us what we call Regency and the French Empire: following which we start off on the complicated story of Victorian styles, which copied anything and everything and threw in a generous measure of its own.

Chairs in all these styles, of course, can be found today, at prices from 5,000 euro for a Hepplewhite dining set to half a crown for a cane-bottomed bentwood. (more…)

Our ancestors must have suffered a good deal from both heat and cold, hence the vast numbers of screens they have left us which either ward off heatfrom a roaring fire or provide shelter from freezing draughts. Lately we have been bringing them down from the attics again for their purely decorative qualities.

Fire-screens of many kinds are there—small hand ones, hung on a hook by the fireplace, also table models used to protect the face. The larger ones, intended to cover the whole fireplace, and called cheval screens because they are hung on a frame across four legs, are sometimes in metal, for use when the fire was alight; in more fragile materials they would have been used in the summer to hide the gaping maw of the fireplace. (more…)