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…)

Dinner consisted of a soup, fish, fricassee of chicken, cutlets, veal, hare, vegetables of all kinds, tart, melon, pineapple, grapes, peaches, nectarines with wine in proportion. Six servants wait upon us, a gentleman-inwaiting and a fat old housekeeper hovering round the door. Four hours later the door opens and in is pushed a supper of the same proportions.’ So the Countess of Granville recorded in 18 o a meal served just to her husband and herself. Food and drink were central to luxurious living and the wealthy offered guests dozens of dishes at dinner. (more…)

Adam, Wedgwood and Sheraton are names that conjure up the delicate Neoclassical style of the late 18th century. It was a style ideal for the factory methods that were starting to nudge at the craftsman’s pre-eminence.

A marked Change in decorative style coincided with the start of George III’s reign in 1760 — not that the devout, industrious 22-year-old king had much to do with the change. He became a cultured and devoted family man with an interest in science, but he was no society leader. (more…)

Silver, Ceramics and Glass

The Palladian, Rococo, Chinoiserie and Gothic styles inspired other craftsmen besides furniture-makers. The best silversmiths of the age, such as Paul de Lamerie, worked in all these styles. A salver might have restrained, Classical-style borders and a candlestick might represent a Classical column, while a basin and ewer might bear the shells and garlands of the Rococo. One dish might be engraved with Oriental figures and another be heavily chased with Gothic traceries. (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…)

Soft Touches

Carpets on the floor and curtains at the windows were rare through Elizabethan and Jacobean times — but carpeting and curtaining were profusely used for other purposes. Fine woollen fabrics, or silks and velvets from China and Italy were hung around the bed, while cushions and table coverings were often of harder-wearing turkeywork — wool knotted into a backing like Turkish rugs.

Many soft furnishings were made by the ladies of the house who worked pillowcases and bed coverlets, cushions and book covers, purses and bodices. Trellises set with flowers and animals wound across their fabrics. The needlewomen could use pattern books of motifs, pricking along the lines, then pressing powder through the holes onto the fabric. (more…)

Inkstands

Inkstands (standishes) were much favoured in both sterling silver and, from about 1760, Sheffield plate. Silver examples include the treasury inkstand: a rectangular box which contained an inkpot, pounce box and wafer box — a small adhesive disk for sealing letters — with a single- or double-hinged lid and perhaps a drawer below for quills. Another type, made in both silver and Sheffield plate, consisted of a rectangular tray, standing upon four small feet, which had three sockets. In the case of the silver version, the inkpot and pounce box would fit into the outer two sockets, while the middle one would contain a small hand bell, or taperstick for sealing. (more…)

DECANTERS

Whenever I see a row of decanters in an antique shop I wonder how long it will be before there is a rush to buy them up. I know that many of these are quite ordinary, very cheap affairs, turned out by the hundred thousand in the last fifty years; all the same there are many fineones among them, and not at all dear in comparison with other glass.

It would be an interesting thing indeed to make a collection of decanters which showed their development in colour and in shape through the years, the different sorts of processes they were made in, also the different kinds of decanters used for different purposes. For me the obvious way to arrange these would be on open shelves against the light—but before one makes up one’s mind about that it might be as well to look and see what sort of decanters one can find. (more…)

So much for the earlier styles of decorating. Now for the various types of glasses, according to their purpose. Georgian wine glasses come in many styles—our pictures show just a few of these. But the ale-glasses tended to be “flutes,” either tall or short, and if both sorts seem small by the standards of today’s beer drinkers it should be remembered that eighteenth-century ale was a far more virulent affair than most of those brews we know today. You could, I suppose, classify it as what we would call “stingo.”

Delightfully of their period are the cordial glasses, with their tiny bowls on long stems, also the “surfeit” glasses, to carry spirits and cordials designed to revive the over- gorged diner in those days of generous appetites. These have tiny flute-like stems, so that the precious spirit would not easily evaporate. (more…)

Probably we could not do better than go around a dining- room and see how it was used. There will be plenty of it, and probably most prominent of all, hanging in the centre of the room a great chandelier, with scintillating lustres or “brilliant drops.” Few of those seen in the shops today will have survived intact from the eighteenth century without repairs or replacements, but they are still magnificent things, and must have looked glorious in the light of a multitude of candles.

On the tables themselves will be candelabra, with slender branches carrying the candle-sockets, sometimes diamond- cut or scalloped, with heavy bases for stability. There will also be those near relatives which started as simple “vase candlesticks,” later to become girandoles with fringes of hanging lustres and finally to evolve into the coloured glass lustre vase of the Victorian mantelshelf. (more…)