The Queen Anne Period and Early Georgian Furniture by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors [Authors, Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781528764704
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figs. 32 and 33. A Queen Anne gesso mirror with shell and rosette decoration below and plume and scrolls, with a bust of Queen Anne above, shown (above) before, and (below) after cleaning.

Fig. 34. A Queen Anne oyster shell veneered mirror.

Fig. 35. A fretted mirror frame (circ. 1730) with glass of the William and Mary period.

It is not suggested that simple Queen Anne mirrors are rarities, and the ardent collector can generally find room for another little hanging mirror when the house is replete with standing furniture. Hence their appreciating value in the old furniture market.

The narrow frame mirror and also that with the simple fretted top are the types usually found, suspended between two posts, surmounted, as dressing glasses, upon gracefully shaped miniature cabinet stands which are sometimes elaborately fitted as dressing cases. These mirror stands are much sought after by collectors as being gems of cabinet work in the walnut period and their prices are ever in the ascending scale.

The Geffrye Museum is no place for the man—furniture lover or otherwise—who, to quote the Victorian ballad, prides himself upon the fact that he “Never goes east of Temple Bar.” This delightful museum, under the care of the London County Council, is in Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, E., within ten minutes’ bus ride of the Bank of England. Its old garden, a veritable green oasis, is open to the tram route and is enclosed upon three sides by a long range of Georgian almshouses preserved from the housebreakers in 1910 by the L.C.C. and the Shoreditch Borough Council. The L.C.C. owns no great collection of furniture there, but has fitted up the Georgian rooms with variously dated panellings saved from London and provincial houses. The furniture lover can wander from room to room at will amongst an ever changing loan collection of furniture and fitments dating from Tudor to Georgian times.

One of these panelled rooms, of a date about 1740, is shown in Fig. 36. It was rescued from an old house near the Minories. The panelling of pine wood, originally painted, gives us a picture of a room in the dwelling-house of a prosperous merchant when City men of his kind lived near their businesses. The furniture shown in the illustration is mainly of the Queen Anne period, and therefore slightly antedates the panelling; but imagining the pieces, for the moment, as belonging to the room, we can think of the merchant as being quite proud of his new panelling of 1740 with his 1702-1714 furniture all around him.

Fig. 39 is a contemporary print published in 1710 and described as “The Tea Table.” A rhyme is added:

“Chief seat of slander! Ever there to see

Thick scandal circulate with right Bohea.”

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