From plain Edwardian school clocks to cartel clocks mounted in elaborate ormolu, clocks to hang on the wall come in many shapes and sizes.

The ubiquitous wall dial of the Victorian and Edwardian periods is familiar from countless schools, kitchens and waiting rooms. In fact, wall clocks come in many forms, the fundamental distinction being between spring-driven clocks (which mostly run for eight days) and weight- driven clocks (mostly running for 3o hours). (more…)

From the time of their invention in the late 17th century, small tables for special purposes have been produced in considerable quantities, many of them extendible and many decorated with beautiful inlay, marquetry and veneer.

Small tables for use when sewing, playing board or card games, reading or writing were popular from the early 18th century. Some have a double top which folds over to increase the table’s size, while others have small drop flaps at the sides. Folding tea and card tables were generally made in a small rectangular or half-moon shape, the top opening out to reveal a polished wood or baize surface. Most were fitted with drawers or a storage well in the middle to hold games pieces, a lady’s sewing equipment or other small possessions. Easily movable tables such as these were found in almost all upper and middle-class Georgian and Victorian living rooms. As with all popular types of furniture made in large quantities, the value of a piece depends on the quality of the table’s design and construction, its rarity, and how original it has remained. (more…)

It is colour and size that generally count most in pricing a dining table, and these considerations are as important today as two hundred years ago.

Antique dinning table available to a buyer today vary enormously in style, quality and price. A 17th-century refectory table in original condition is very hard to come by, for example, and may cost many thousands of pounds, whereas a Victorian reproduction can be bought for a few hundred. Small, foldaway breakfast tables, which first appeared in the early 19th century as one answer to the space restrictions of small town houses, are still extremely popular, and for similar reasons.

Before buying any antique table, you should check it carefully for alterations, as marrying a table top to a different undercarriage is fairly common. (more…)

Early Sofas

During the late 18th century, both Thomas Chippendale and Robert Adam produced gilded sofas that were strongly influenced by the contemporary French Neoclassical-style canapé’. These masterpieces have a padded oval back, padded arms and seat in contemporary Aubusson tapestry, and can be worth tens of thousands of pounds. Good 19thC and 2oth-century copies themselves fetch £1500£2200, while lesser examples may change hands for £300-£500. The canapé proved an enduring design in Britain, and was produced throughout the 19th century. (more…)

Probably the oldest type of seat furniture, stools have existed for thousands of years. Elegant late Victorian examples were inspired by finds in ancient Egyptian tombs.

Most stools have no back or arms, and seat just one person. There arestools for more than one — usually called forms or benches — and so-called backstools in which a leg is extended as a backrest or a separate backrest is added. But in general stools are the simplest of seats, and three-legged examples have been used in Britain for at least a thousand years. Indeed, their construction is so basic and unchanging that they can be very difficult to date. (more…)

While Victorian householders were still revelling in the comforts and novelties that mass production offered, designers pined for the individual craftsmanship of earlier centuries. Oddly, their yearning for the past led to progressive styles that gave a foretaste of today.

Cosily cluttered rooms with red flock wallpaper, heavy curtains and ample deep-buttoned seats draped with anti‑macassars were still at the height of their popularity during the 1870s. The love of curtaining had found yet another outlet in the massive portieres that now hung at the large, open arch between two rooms. To the majority of Victorians, this was the kind of living room to aspire to. (more…)

Piety, propriety and domestic comfort were the aims of early Victorian households. They expected sober family life to ensure the first two and industry gave them goods and money enough for the third. Moral certainty was not equalled by aesthetic certainty, however, and buyers turned to the past to prove their own good taste. (more…)

Few basic changes have been made to the salt cellar since the eighteenth century, and even those produced today in sterling silver or electro-plate are usually exact, or very close, copies of their predecessors. From time to time, of course, designers have endeavoured to break away from

established forms, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has a superb Art Nouveau specimen in parcel-gilt by C. R. Ashbee which incorporates amber and a small figure, the latter being characteristic of Ashbee’s work, but this ‘salt‘ would be considered too ornate for general use. An interesting example of 1866 by Stephen Smith was of frosted silver with figures of sowers and men carrying baskets of seeds upon their backs. (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…)

After boxes and caskets, let’s look at bottles. Bottles for scent and smelling salts, pomades and creams, for snuff, medicine, wine, beer, spirits, acids—in other words for everything that needs a stopper rather than a lid. Like boxes, they come in every sort of material, from porcelain to silver, from gold to stoneware.

I believe that one of these days collectors will wake up to the fact that the last hundred years has been the making of more collectable bottles than at any other period of history. Glassmakers, metalworkers, potters, and now plastic manufacturers, have been designing and making bottles, not only as lovely works of art and craftsmanship, but as mass production items which nevertheless are examples of excellent and interesting design. The astute collector will therefore look not only at the exquisite things of the past with which we start our brief review of bottles, but also at what has been made in the last century by the factories. Much of this is now beginning to take on that interesting look of the once commonplace thing which no longer does its original job, and which has acquired a new strangeness, even beauty, in our eyes. (more…)