THE
PLEASURES
OF
COLLECTING

THE
PLEASURES
OF
COLLECTING

BY
GARDNER TEALL

Being sundry delectable
excursions in the realm
of antiques and curios,
American, European,
and Oriental

New York
The Century Company
1920
Copyright, 1920, by
The Century Co.
TO
MY SISTER
FRANCES COTHEAL TEALL
IN LOVING MEMORY

DEAR READER

Your true collector does not apologize for his hobbies; he exalts their virtues. Necessity may occasionally compel him to resort to the camouflage of mid-interest, as when his family is not in sympathy with his pursuits; or, again, as when fate has placed him in arid communion with unsympathetic associates, individuals whose personalities have developed independently of their souls, leaving them pronounced in the directions they invariably select; directions, in consequence, invariably divergent from those paths which the true collector loves to tread.

While not secretive by nature, and by the same nature eager to share his joys with his fellow-beings, the true collector is endowed, more often than not, with a certain intuitive perception which enables him to appreciate the futility of hoping to convert the unequipped infidel to the solaces of his own faith in the delights of the lares and penates of another generation, an intuition which warns him to protect his peace of mind by harmlessly appearing to accept with good grace the commonplacenesses undoubtedly enjoyed by the many, but with no culpable renunciation of his own lively interest in the quaint and curious mementos of the world of yesterdays, a world into which our own to-days slip, one by one, silently, but as surely followed by our to-morrows.

Was it not Charles Lamb who exclaimed: “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity,—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we forever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! The past is everything, being nothing!”

Your true collector may often maintain reticence in order that he may enjoy a normal place in the community, undisturbed by the merely idle curious, the undeft rummaging of the clumsy, the curt depreciation of the supercilious, the gushing of the undiscriminating susceptible, or the skepticism of those who measure the sanity of their fellows by the canons of their own irrevocable and undeviating limitations, those to whom no music but the echoes of caverns can appeal. Such are beyond the pale of any errand in missionary spirit.

The true collector is born, not made. Yet one cannot discover the mirror without knowledge of the reflection. The contentment to be found in the acquisition and in the contemplation of the things that are dear to the heart of the antiquarian and the art-lover is a contentment that is the gift of the gods, always awarded the intelligent, though not always disclosed to them.

A friend, then, will be he who discovers to one a treasure like that which the joy of collecting uncovers. What we read and what we see pictured for us is precious, indeed, if it holds up to us the image of that which we immediately know to be congenial to our natural tastes. And so it is that this little book is not devised for savages, but tenderly has been nurtured in sympathy with the interesting and the beautiful things of yesterday. May it find friends among those who love them as well as among those who love the things of to-day which have prospered in their heritage from the days of long ago!

The author wishes to express his grateful acknowledgments to those who have made possible the preparation of this volume—to Messrs. Condé Nast & Company, Inc., publishers of “House & Garden,” Messrs. Munn & Company, Inc., formerly publishers of “American Homes and Gardens,” the publishers of “The Cosmopolitan,” the publishers of “The House Beautiful,” and the publishers of “The Sun,” New York, for permission to include in this volume portions of the material contributed by him to those periodicals; to Dr. George Frederick Kunz, Mr. Richardson Wright, Mr. Charles Allen Munn, Mr. Robert H. Van Court, Mrs. Elizabeth C. Lounsbery, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, Mr. Robert Lemmon, Mr. H. E. Bauer, Miss Mary H. Northend, Mr. André M. Rueff, Mr. T. C. Turner, Mr. William A. Cooper, Mr. William Francis Phillips, Miss Elizabeth Robinson, Mr. William C. Clifford, Mr. G. H. Buek, Mr. Frederick H. Howell, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose photographs have been drawn upon for illustration, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the New York Public Library, and to those authors whose works are noted in the Bibliography.

Gardner Teall

New York
June 4, 1920

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PLEASURES OF
COLLECTING

CHAPTER I
THE PLEASURES OF COLLECTING

BLESSED is the man who has a hobby! declared Lord Brougham; and of all the hobbies it is doubtful if any are more blessed than those of the collector of antiques and curios, old prints, coins and medals, rare books and bindings, and the like. “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation,” good old Isaac Walton said of angling. But that is true, too, of collecting, which, figuratively speaking, is in itself a species of the art of angling, of dipping into the quiet pools of unfrequented places, there to angle for quaint curios and interesting mementos of bygone days, conscious that though the bait may be small, the catch may be large—besides, there is the fun of fishing!

In “Le Jardin d’Epicure,” Anatole France has written: “People laugh at collectors, who perhaps do lay themselves open to raillery, but that is also the case with all of us when in love with anything at all. We ought rather to envy collectors, for they brighten their days with a long and peaceable joy. Perhaps what they do a little resembles the task of the children who spade up heaps of sand at the edge of the sea, laboring in vain, for all they have built will soon be overthrown, and that, no doubt, is true of collections of books and pictures also. But we need not blame the collectors for it; the fault lies in the vicissitudes of existence and the brevity of life. The sea carries off the heaps of sand, and auctioneers disperse the collections; and yet there are no better pleasures than the building of heaps of sand at ten years old, of collections at sixty. Nothing of all we erect will remain, in the end; and a love for collecting is no more vain and useless than other passions are.” Anatole France might well have added Sir James Yoxall’s observation, that “good for health of mind and body it is to walk and wander in by-ways of town and country, searching out things beautiful and old and rare with which to adorn one’s home.” Indeed, collecting has aspects other than the one of discovery, of acquisition, of entertainment, or of furnishing a pastime: it has its utilitarian one as well.

There is an undeniable and oftentimes indefinable charm about a home in which well-chosen antiques and curios form part of the decorative scheme and become part of its furnishing and adornment. Many collectors have become such through an increasing interest in old furniture, rare china, early silver, and other classes of antiques and curios, inspired in the beginning by the acquisition of some object of the sort, personal contact with which has served as an example of the pleasure which collecting holds in store for one. The true collector is not merely “a gatherer of things,” indifferent to the guidance of a discriminating taste. Rather, when he finds an object at hand, he considers it from many points of view—its historical value, its significance in the development of the arts, its anecdotal interest, its worth as a work of art, and its workmanship.

The intuitive sense will carry the amateur a long way, but connoisseurship will depend upon knowledge. Those persons who are absolutely indifferent to the whys and wherefores of things, uninterested in any effort to discover the “story” of an object, bored by its history or unappreciative of its beauty, are hardly likely to become collectors, though accident and the chances of fortune may throw interesting things into their possession. Neither are they likely ever to become as Thackeray, who, in “Roundabout Papers,” said of a certain antique and curio shop: “I never can pass without delaying at the windows—indeed, if I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more at the delightful omnium gatherum.”

Now, it often happens that we find a collector-in-embryo—one who has a desire to start a collection, but fancies it an undertaking requiring very special qualifications—asking: “How could I hope to become a collector when I know so little about the subject I think I should be interested in? Then I fear good things cost too much, and that real bargains have long ago vanished from the mart.” To such a one the reply can truthfully be made that it is by no means difficult for the beginner to acquire definite and valuable knowledge on any subject in the collector’s field that may chance to interest him.

The way one learns to collect (and that means the way one learns about the things worth collecting) is by collecting. Contact with the objects themselves is necessary to connoisseurship, just as it is one of its pleasures. The collector learns more about Oriental porcelains, old English china, Dresden figurines, French enamels, Russian brass, Italian laces, or Bohemian glass by having a few representative pieces of them at hand for study than he could learn, so far as helpful knowledge fitting him to judge is concerned, from volumes on the subject. While this contact with actual objects is necessary in developing a connoisseurship (one may have it visually in museums or have access to private collections; the shops, too, will teach one much), all the accessible writings on the subject should be consulted, as comparative study increases the interest and confirms or corrects one’s personal deductions and opinions.

Supremely fine examples of old furniture, china, silverware, bronzes, miniatures, and the like, have not often been “picked up for a song.” The collector must remember that the pastime of collecting is not one of recent development. Indeed, the ancients were collectors of the rare, curious, and beautiful. The Medici were renowned for gathering in their places objets de virtu, and few collectors of note of to-day could outvie the enthusiasm of Horace Walpole, who turned Strawberry Hill into a veritable museum. All this goes to show how keenly sought for have been all art objects of unusual importance. Naturally, when rare occasion brings them to the mart they command high prices. However, it is not for one to despair because he cannot collect museum pieces, to cry for those things which have little to do with the pleasure of collecting beyond the interest their contemplation affords. That the by-paths which the collector may tread are literally bristling with bargains is true. Certainly the small collector need not become discouraged. For instance, the author continually finds within the boundaries of New York city alone numerous objects that any collector of limited means could acquire with rejoicing heart. One day it is a yellow Wedgwood mustard-pot for two dollars, another day a genuine Paduan medal for fifty cents; then a Persian lacquer mirror-frame for a dollar, and a Japanese sword-guard by Umetada, signed, for half as much! It adds to the interest of collecting that while the collector soon learns where to look for things, he constantly meets with them also where they are least expected, and the country holds as many treasures hidden away for the keen collector as does the metropolitan stronghold.

CHAPTER II
COLLECTORS OF YESTERDAY

THIS is an age in which Achilles gives way to Douglas Fairbanks, Helen of Troy to Mary Pickford. At least Homer in the original is unpopular and to confess to a liking for Virgil in the Latin is to be frowned upon by those who have persuaded certain of our universities to turn their backs on the very cultural presences that have given structure to civilization. As for myself, I shall continue to be old-fashioned. Only this morning I have been dipping into good old Pliny’s “Letters.” Now more than ever I am convinced that those who cried most loudly against the classics were those who knew nothing about them. Where, I ask, in all literature will there be found more things of human interest than in the writings of those old masters of antiquity?

It is Francesco Petrarca’s chief title to fame that he was an inveterate collector of classical writings, that he devoted himself with an unending enthusiasm to the recovery of the literature of the Ancients. And yet he knew naught of Greek, little enough of Latin from the point of view of scholarly attainment in the language. What he did realize, did sense, was the value to intellectual development of these bygone literary Titans, and at Padua he warred against the medievalism which was, after all, nothing more than a warring against the complacency of his own times, just as the attitude of those of to-day who fight against such of the finer things of life as are to be reached only through contact with the original writings of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Cæsar, Ovid, Plato, Pliny, and the rest is, in effect, smugly complacent in its acceptance of cultural things as they stand.

Renan called Petrarch the first modern man; if only we could be as modern! And what a debt the world owes to his collecting proclivities, an instinct connected with an intelligence!

Of course, there were hundreds, one may venture to say thousands, of collectors who were his contemporaries; for the love of beautiful and of interesting things is seldom separated in the normal person from the desire to own them, a desire that has produced more history and more romance than one would dream of.

There are those who dissolve pearls in wine, those who treasure them in necklaces; these two sorts are in the world. To Petrarch each scrap of writing was as precious as a pearl to be added to a necklace to adorn the fair throat of Learning, and his accomplishment, his devotion to this hobby, marks him as the very Prince of Collectors of Yesterday.

I suppose there have been collectors ever since things were discovered to be collectable. Every object of human creation seems eventually to fall within the collecting class, Father Time saying when. C. Plini Caecilii Secundi Epistularum sounds somewhat formidable to the ears of a foe to the classics, but it lately yielded this morsel from the eighth letter of Book VIII, a letter from Pliny to his good friend Rufinus:

You have now all the town gossip; nothing but talk about Tullus. We look forward to the Auction Sale of his effects. He was so great a collector that the very day he purchased a vast garden, he was able to adorn it completely with antique statues drawn from his stores of art treasures.

Ancient Domitius Tullus! would that we knew how your sale came out! Did you turn in your tomb that some Eros from Praxiteles’s own hand, some Amor chiseled by great Phidias himself, fetched but a hundredth of its value? Or did you rush off to Dis and to Proserpina with the gleeful tale of how friend Pliny, who thought to get something for nothing, was forced up to a prince’s ransom by Lucanus in the matter of that little sardonyx gem, engraved by Pyrgoteles, finer, the auctioneer declared, than the Perseus by Dioskourides? How human it is to wish to know!

Those old Romans were great collectors. Even when the creative spirit had degenerated they were appreciators of the fine things which the Greeks had produced. Petronius, that arbiter elegantiarum of Nero’s court, amassed thousands of remarkable art treasures that even the emperor longed to possess. Incurring Nero’s displeasure, and dying under the Emperor’s orders, he disdained to imitate the servility of those who, under like penalty, made Nero heir to their possessions and, as Suetonius tells us, filled their wills with encomiums of the tyrant and his favorites. Petronius broke to bits a precious goblet out of which he commonly drank, that Nero, who had coveted it, might not have the pleasure of using it. Incendiary, violinistic Nero, Nero who on shaving off his beard for the first time put it in a golden box studded with precious gems! What would not collectors of a lock of hair of this great one, and of that, give to discover the beard of Nero!

I dare say, in no time was human nature more perfectly understood than in Roman days. Even Augustus Cæsar was wont to amuse himself by a device explained by gossipy Suetonius as follows: “He used to sell by lot amongst his guests articles of very unequal value, and pictures with their fronts reversed; and so, by the unknown quality of the lot, disappoint or gratify the expectation of the purchasers. This sort of traffic went round the whole company, every one being obliged to buy something, and to run the chance of loss or gain with the rest.” How many of us who have frequented the art sales in American cities, from the old Clinton Hall auction days to the present, would have imagined that Pliny took such things as seriously, Augustus Cæsar such things in jest? How old the new world is, how new the old!

From the time of the ancient Athenian vase shops, and even from long before that, to our own day, when we may browse in the realms of antiquarians at home, the bazaars of the Far East and the quaint inglenooks of Europe when we are traveling, collecting has been a passion with the many as well as a mania of the few. But we, ourselves, are more prone to collect the things of yesterday than were the collectors of yesterday to collect the things of the centuries before their time.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, found time when steering through the perilous channels of endless family feuds to immortalize himself as a collector. To the efforts of Cosimo, his grandfather, are due those priceless classical and Oriental manuscripts which formed the nucleus of the Laurentian Library in Florence. The grandson was worthy of his forebear. Through Joannes Lascaris he procured from the monastery of Mount Athos two hundred manuscripts of greatest importance for the Laurentian, an incomparable collection, which, together with other works of art, disappeared at the sacking of Florence during the rule of Lorenzo’s wretchedly incompetent son, Piero. Lorenzo, notwithstanding his love for ancient works of art, was a ready patron of the art of his time. Lorenzo’s daughter, Catherine de’ Medici, had all the Medici love for art, and she, too, patronized living artists lavishly, as her husband’s father, Francis I, had done in France before her. She it was who took such constructively active thought for the planning of the Tuileries, and her interest in books, manuscripts, and other things led to enriching the collections of the Bibliothéque Nationale.

What a remarkable list of collectors France can write in her Golden Book of Art-Lovers—Jean Grolier, De Thou, Pierre Jean Mariette, Cardinal Mazarin, Comte de Caylus—to name but a few of literally thousands! Nor must we forget Madame de Pompadour, whose library and marvelous collection of works of art were sold after her death. There is no question that Madame de Pompadour took a constructive interest in art and literature, an interest which led Voltaire to assert that without her patronage the culture of her time would have found itself in sorry plight under the rule of a king whose thoughts had little or nothing to do with the finer things of life, that king who stood at the palace window looking forth as the cortège of the Pompadour passed by in a drizzling rain and remarked: “It is a wet day for the Marquise!”

Charles I of England was a king whose art-collecting proclivities produced rich spoils indeed for the Cromwellians. In the quaintly worded old catalogue recording his possessions we find noted among other things, “Item, a landscape piece of trees, and some moorish water, wherein are two ducks a swimming, and some troup of water flowers, being done in a new way, whereof they do make Turkey carpets, which was presented to the King by the French Ambassador, in an all over gilded frame 1 ft. 10 x 2 ft., 5 wide.”

Some of King Charles’s treasures in the century following passed into the hands of Horace Walpole, who housed them in his villa at Strawberry Hill, that “Gothic castle” which revived the English eighteenth-century taste for Gothic design. Austin Dobson’s “Horace Walpole” says of the master of Strawberry Hill:

As a virtuoso and amateur, his position is a mixed one. He was certainly widely different from that typical art connoisseur of his day,—the butt of Goldsmith and of Reynolds,—who traveled the Grand Tour to litter a gallery at home with broken-nose busts and the rubbish of the Roman picture factories. As the preface to the Ædes Walpolianæ showed, he really knew something about painting; in fact, was a capable draughtsman himself; and besides, through Mann and others, had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for procuring genuine antiques. But his collection was not so rich in this way as might have been anticipated, and his portraits, his china, and his miniatures were probably his best possessions.

We must not judge Walpole’s virtuosity by all that accumulated in his house—Wolsey’s hat, Van Tromp’s pipe-case, King William’s spurs, and, I dare say, some chips of stone from the Parthenon and a vial of water from the Jordan! But let it be remembered that these things were gifts to Walpole, and as such were necessarily within reach, just as the cut-glass wedding-present pickle-dishes of our own time must be given shelter against the sudden appearance of their donors. Perhaps there is merit in the discipline of such tender-heartedness.

Well, gone is Master Horatio, gone the wits and beaux and belles of his day, but he remains in our thoughts as the Georgian master of Chelsea china pseudo-shepherds and shepherdesses, the most elegant of collectors, the most brilliant of subjects in the sovereign realm of precious bric-à-brac. We are glad that he lent his presence to our ranks.

So, you see, collecting is not merely a fad of recent generations. In that which has gone before there is ever a peculiar fascination. The field is unbounded, its possibilities limitless; things which to us of to-day are commonplace, by reason of their niches in our every-day life, will be treasures to posterity a hundred years hence. Thus will the love of collecting go on from generation to generation, with new converts always ahead.

CHAPTER III
AMERICAN TABLES

AMONG collectors in America there is an ever-increasing interest in “things American.” One of the most attractive fields in which one’s hobby may browse is that of old furniture. Nearly every one appreciates the early furniture of good design and cares to know something of its history. America, both in colonial times and in the period following the Declaration of Independence, produced pieces of many sorts. Some of it was excellent, most of it was good, and a little of it was wholly of an indifferent quality. As table-makers the early American craftsmen exhibited much skill, and such examples of their work as are to be met with cannot fail to attract the attention of the alert collector who, having a house of his own, knows that by some mysterious providence, no matter how small that house may be, there will always seem to be room in it and need in it for “just one more table,” if the table is a “find” and of interest as an American antique of genuine authenticity.

With tables, as well as with other pieces of furniture, the early American craftsmen who produced the finer examples did not allow themselves any decided departure from European models that were sufficiently numerous with the American furniture-makers by the close of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. Naturally, much furniture from England came into the colonies throughout the period of settlement and development, followed by many pieces of French design and manufacture.

If we turn now to English reflections in American work we shall find comparisons of decided interest. There is often little or nothing to distinguish early American pieces from their English prototypes. However, there was no “slacking,” in quality of material, workmanship, of finish in American furniture. The colonial cabinet-makers were thorough and conscientious, although not always “artistic,” perhaps. Certainly these craftsmen had at their command the finest woods—maple, pine, walnut, birch, chestnut, and the ships brought in quantities of mahogany. Extant examples of this early craftsmanship show at once the intrinsic merit of stanch construction and virile line that makes them so much sought by collectors. Their sincerity of design, while not always accompanied by the refinements of striking grace, compels our attention and respect.

Previous to 1776 we must expect American native furniture to run parallel in style (with natural lagging tendencies, of course) to the English periods with which they were contemporary. In earliest colonial times, times when voyages were few and far between, large shipments of furniture were not to be considered. As the wealth of the individual colonists increased, luxuries came to hold a place in trade which they could not have held at an earlier day in the New World. With the advent, too, of colonial officials, fat of purse, sent over by the mother country, came articles to enhance as well as to continue their comfort. One could be more contented with an easy-chair than without, and little by little the rude bench furniture of the Pilgrims was locally developed (reverting to English patterns) into a more attractive and acceptable sort of furniture, or was augmented by importations. At the same time this increased demand for cabinet-making invited English craftsmen to seek their fortunes in the New World, and before long a very respectable home industry, both in the North and in the South, was making its influence felt.

Fortunately New England thrift (or perhaps it was conservatism) has preserved to us many pieces of this early American furniture, some of it dating back to the time of King James II. These New England Jacobean pieces follow simple lines in general, with here and there a piece of ornate type. In the reign of William and Mary and that of Anne a rapidly increasing number of English craftsmen migrated to the American Colonies, where they helped to perpetuate the styles of this period. It is not at all uncommon to meet with very fine examples of the Queen Anne period which were contemporaneously produced by American craftsmen; in fact, some of the New England cabinet-makers became so proficient that the products of their shops rivaled the output of British makers both in staunchness of construction and accuracy of contour. The well-proportioned cabriole legs of many pieces of this description extant—the generic term for furniture with a “knee,” derived from the French cabriole (goat-leap)—are as well designed as any of the examples then being produced in the mother country by the skilled English cabinet-makers. Naturally, the local colonial production of Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton styles was supported by the affluence to which the colonies attained. During the troubles of the Revolution the importation of mahogany by the colonies was diverted by Great Britain. Substitutes, for the time—and this began to mark a decline, with fluctuations in the materials used—had to be found, such as that of the sweetgum tree, Liquidambar Styraciflua, which in appearance and general character is very similar to mahogany, its distinguishing features being a slightly lighter color and grain.

The Dutch influence seems less to have entered the traditions of American furniture than that of England or of France. A fair amount of furniture was imported by the Dutch of New Amsterdam from Holland, and numerous authentic pieces of this Dutch furniture have come down to us; such, for instance, as the gate-leg table which is preserved in the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson. But local cabinet-makers soon came to blend features of the English styles with those of the Dutch designers and finally purely English styles superseded the others.

Still another local division of colonial furniture was that introduced by those settlers known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. This type of “Dutch” must not be confounded with the Dutch of New Amsterdam. Coming to Pennsylvania, these immigrants brought with them their gaily painted peasant furniture, and in the early days of the colony they produced much of that sort for their own use. Hence their furniture cannot be said to have been a product designed for the market. Examples of it did not stray far from the locality of their production, save in those instances where the settlers emigrated to other parts of the country. Even then it appears to have exerted little or no influence outside Pennsylvania territory. Stiff, conventional flowers and fruits, birds, and decorative bands characterize the decorations. Pieces of this sort are still to be found in central and southeastern Pennsylvania, although the majority of such decorated wood antiques extant consist of bridal chests and small boxes.

In the North much of the early furniture, especially tables, was made of maple, pine and birch. Walnut, of course, was a great favorite, particularly with the earlier cabinet-makers of Pennsylvania, where superb slabs of beautiful black walnut were milled from the wonderful old trees, that so soon disappeared through this demand.

We must not be surprised to find so little early furniture of the South, for, despite the wealth and culture of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Maryland in colonial times, these Southern colonists were equally fashionable, and discarded the old for the new before the dawn of the nineteenth century, earlier than did the Northerners. A search of the southern states will scarcely yield one piece of Jacobean design. A hunt for original William-and-Mary will be equally fruitless. But in the style of Queen Anne, many excellent pieces will be found.

No story of American furniture, no matter how brief, can be written without mentioning the name of Duncan Phyfe, the New York cabinet-maker whose artistic products justly won him the sobriquet of “The American Sheraton.”

The period between 1795 and 1830 was marked by a persistent disinterest in all “things English,” and an ardent admiration for all “things French,” and this prejudice showed itself in the furniture. American cabinet-makers adapted these French designs according to their lights, and the result was not always unsuccessful. At the very end of its influence the work sank to a low level of artistic merit. Before that time it had known the apex of artistic line in the works of Phyfe, and if we are to judge American Empire, it were better to use the high standards set by his famous productions.

The tables of this period were usually made with square ends, the dining-tables being of the extension type having drop leaves and other leaves which could

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

be inserted on pedestal tables. At this time centre-tables came into vogue. These were ordinarily circular in shape and usually rested on ornate pedestals rising from a plinth supported by winged claw feet. Some of these tables were rectangular and some had double tops that folded out or could be turned up against the wall. The “sofa tables” of Phyfe’s design were oblong and had narrow drop leaves at both sides, the ends supported by the Lyre motif.

CHAPTER IV
TEA AND ANTIQUITY

ONE afternoon of a day late in autumn we were having tea in Camberwell. The home of our English friends was a house redolent with memories. The Brownings, Carlyle, and many others had in days gone by gathered beneath the hospitable roof. It was one of those houses whose exterior gave hint of an interesting history. Not all interesting houses do that. This one particularly did, so much so that it lent much of its fascination (or appeared to lend it) to its neighbors.

Perhaps we were in the mood for thinking so, for had we not dropped in to a tea at another wonderful house a few steps away but the day before? And what a house that had been! What a host!

I think all the treasures of the earth must have been gathered there to commemorate the yesterdays of beautiful things, of interesting personalities. There was the actual chair in which George Eliot sat when writing “Romola”; I had sat in it drinking tea! A plate of delectable biscuits was at my right—on Carlyle’s table! If I had been ill-mannered enough to devour all the biscuits, I am sure that plate would have revealed itself as equally delectable Sèvres; I guess as much from its edge. What an afternoon that had been! Charles Lamb’s bookcase! The Persian lacquered mirror that had belonged to Rossetti!

“And did you know,” said my companion, “that our host is the original of Walter Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean,’ his best friend?” It was then that I gasped forth something about a Mahomet in Mecca. “You must remember,” said the other indulgently, “that you are in London.”

And here we stood, this other afternoon, on the threshold of another happy adventure!

“Tea and antiquity seem to go amazingly well together,” said our host of this second day, “but our friend Marius has probably shown you that. Still, his hobbies are many. Ours are few. If we have not ridden in every nook and corner of the world, we have ridden furiously in one direction—tea.”

With curiosity piqued we followed to the library. “Arthur!” warned our hostess, as the master of the house paused before the glass-encased shelves to the right of a tapestry-hung doorway.

“No,” he laughed, “I’m not going to—yet! You see, every book on those shelves has to do with tea, old tea, new tea, good tea, poor tea. Everything any one has ever known and printed about tea is there. You will find the first edition of Pepys’s Diary, in which that indefatigable chronicler remarks ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a Chinese drink), of which I never had drunk before.’ Then there is the rare first edition of Philippe Sylvestre Dufour’s ‘Manner of Making Coffee, Tea and Chocolate,’ a quaint little volume printed in 1685, and just there”—our host pointed through the glass—“is Simon Paulli’s ‘Commentarius’ of 1665.”

“Arthur,” laughed our hostess, “remember the fate of Carleton and Lord North in forcing tea down the throat of America, while Britannia wept!”

“I meant to go straight ahead!” our host replied with affected meekness, holding back the tapestry to admit us into the very sanctum of this entertaining collector’s worshiping.

The large room, despite its generous dimensions, was cozy. Although filled almost to overflowing with rare bits of china, prints, brasses, pewter—in fact, with a wealth of objects that would delight the heart of any collector—there was order in it all. One did not tumble over a Turkey-red tea-cozy or mistake it for a hassock. Nor did one have to compress elbow to side to keep from precipitating precious tea-cups to the floor underfoot. In this instance a remarkable collection of antiques and curios furnished a whole room.

“I cannot vie with Marius in offering you the throne of George Eliot,” said our host, “but here is a very comfortable arrangement once occupied by Queen Anne.”

“Yes,” commented our hostess; “Arthur went threadbare to have it, because Alexander Pope happened to have written:

Here, thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take,—and sometimes tea.

In fact, I once arrived just in time to prevent him from buying Leigh Hunt’s spectacles just because—what was it Leigh Hunt said of tea, Arthur? I never can remember.”

“‘Oh, heavens! to sip that most exquisite cup of delight was bliss almost too great for earth; a thousand years of rapture all concentrated into the space of a minute, as if the joy of all the world had been skimmed for my peculiar drinking, I should rather say imbibing, for to have swallowed that legend like an ordinary beverage without tasting every drop would have been a sacrilege.’”

“No wonder you were keen for the spectacles!” I cried.

“But I’ve never heard of Leigh Hunt’s spectacles! I don’t believe he ever wore them. You have to make allowance for the attitude my better half holds toward tea!”

“No, my dear,” our hostess replied sweetly, “you know I love these things as much as you do.” It was true.

Now, while we did not talk tea throughout all our little visit, we did eagerly examine the old tea-furniture. There was Delft, pottery, and porcelain of all sorts, marvelous tea-caddies, a collection of prints and caricatures of the Boston Tea Party.

“There were other tea-parties over there in America,” our host explained; “you neglect them terribly! There was the ‘Tea-party’ of Philadelphia in 1773, the ‘Tea-party’ of Edenton in 1774 and the same year the ‘Tea-parties’ of Cumberland County and of Greenwich, New Jersey. I have them all in the library!”

We saw the books before coming away. Not the least interesting was Chippendale’s “The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers’ Director,” issued in London in 1762, with its designs for tea-tables and tea-chests, and the Hepplewhite book of 1787. Dr. Samuel Johnson was rated a prodigious tea-drinker in his day, “beyond all precedent.” We did not compete with his record, nor yet with that of Bishop Burnet, who thought nothing of sixteen cups of a morning, but we did not find our tea taste stinted, that delightful afternoon at Camberwell.

Venus her myrtle, Phœbus has her Bays
Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise.

We found Waller’s lines coming to mind many times afterward, when we had come to discover them in a dusty tome of 1662 which we found for a penny in a book-stall and added it to tea-ana! And what response to the memory of Camberwell adventures was evoked when, home again in our own country, we chanced upon Thomas’s “Massachusetts Spy” and read therein that touching farewell to tea!

Farewell, the teaboard with its equipage
Of cups and saucers, cream bucket and sugar tongs,
The pretty tea-chest also lately stored
With Hyson, Congo and best Double Fine.

We began then with enthusiasm to read up on tea. It behooved us to begin with the “tea-party” episodes our host in Camberwell had hinted at as neglected by our histories. For one thing, there were the autographs to be sought of many of the revolutionary participants. We found a book on the subject, long since out of print, and many a hint was contained therein. This was “Tea Leaves” by Francis S. Drake, “Being a collection of letters and documents relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year 1773, by the East India Tea Company.” There we found many portraits, facsimile signatures, etc. It is a book worth looking for. Our copy cost us but two dollars. On a fly-leaf some one—not the poet himself, alas!—had copied these lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party”:

No! never such a draught was poured
Since Hebe served with nectar
The bright Olympians and their lord
Her over-kind protector;
Since Father Noah squeezed the grape
And took to such behaving,
As would have shamed our grandsire ape,
Before the days of shaving;
No, ne’er was mingled such a draught,
In palace, hall or arbor
As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed
That night in Boston Harbor!

And how completely the old rancor of it is gone in these days when our hearts beat in unison with the hearts of our British cousins! How different are our tea-parties to-day, American and Britisher, brother and brother!

When we began collecting tea things, we did not get everything we wanted! One of the tantalizing treasures beyond our reach was the poetical effusion of Mr. Nahum Tate, who lived from 1652 to 1715 and celebrated the beginning of the eighteenth century with “Panacea, a poem upon tea, with a discourse on its Sov’rain virtues; and directions in the use of it for health.” A greedy Mæcenas outbid us at the book auction where we thought only ourselves had discovered or could possibly wish to acquire it! With Dr. John Coakley Lettson’s “The Natural History of the Tea-Tree,” printed in London in 1799, we were more fortunate. Likewise Mr. T. Short’s “A Dissertation upon Tea, Explaining Its Nature and Properties, Showing from Philosophical Principles, the Various Effects It Has on Different Constitutions; Also a Discourse on Sage and Water,” produced in 1730, was ours for the expenditure of ten shillings, a rare piece of fortune coming to our door through the good graces of a Birmingham book-seller’s catalogue. I fancy good Queen Anne set the pace to second place for sage and water! We are still on the lookout for the “Treatise on the Inherent Qualities of the Tea-Herb,” by “A Gentleman of Cambridge,” whose scholarly effusion came from a London press in 1750.

In the course of our adventures at home we found that tea-collectors were more numerous than we should have dreamed them to be, perhaps because the subject embraced collecting in almost every field—furniture, old silver, china and pottery, pewter, brasses, books, prints, and what not; to say nothing of collectors of Oriental tea things, as, for instance, the lady who has seven hundred and thirty-two interesting Japanese tea-pots, the equally interesting lady who has a collection consisting of as fine as possible a tea-cup of every sort of porcelain and ware of which tea-cups have been fabricated since the memorable days following the presentation of two pounds of tea to King Charles II by the East India Company. Another collector has gotten together a great number of fine Japanese color-prints, the subjects of which have to do with the tea ceremony, and yet another gentleman “goes in” for the Cha-no-yu (tea ceremony) pottery of Japan. Probably the most interesting collection of tea-caddies in America is that owned by Mr. Frederick H. Howell of New York. Tea-caddies offer to the collector an entertaining hobby, for although they are by no means common, they are still to be “discovered” in many of those nooks that long since have, perhaps, given up other collectable things. I remember once dwelling with enthusiasm on the pleasures of collecting tea things.

“I have a little hobby along that line myself,” remarked one of the group, “teaspoons.”

“Don’t you have to be careful?” was the question the man next to him could not refrain from putting.

But perhaps our friends are not always as sympathetic with the collector’s pursuits or as courteously attentive, and there is always a time to stop before one becomes a bore!

CHAPTER V
CUP-PLATES

IT is surprising how rare the cup-plates of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century have become, considering their universal use during that period when they were regarded as necessary and fashionable accessories to the tea-set. In the days of our great-grandmothers the etiquette of tea-drinking was markedly different from that which maintains in our own day. Then the tea-cup occupied much the position that the tea-bowl still holds with the Chinese, and the saucer that of the tiny Chinese cup. In other words—we blush to confess it!—our tea-drinking ancestors used the saucers of their tea-cups to cool their tea in, and while the saucers were so utilized, tiny plates (like the plates of a doll’s tea-set) were employed as holders for the cups, thus to protect the polished top of the tea-table or, perhaps, the trays of satinwood from being stained by the moist cup rims.

Just why, when so many of these little cup-plates were in use, so few have survived seems a mystery. While tea-cups, cream-pitchers and sugar-bowls abound, cup-plates still remain elusive. This is because these tiny objects, being truly plates in miniature, were, when they fell into disuse (and before collectors of old china and old earthenware began to take an interest in them), given to children to play with, thus meeting the general destruction to which nearly all dolls’ dishes of all periods succumb. This seems the plausible theory for accounting for the scarcity of the cup-plate. Nevertheless, despite its rarity, the collector need not be discouraged. In all parts of the country where settlement has been early the collector of old china still stands a good chance of picking up cup-plates of all sorts. Even the glass ones are yet to be found.

True it is that any exceptionally fine cup-plates offered in the antique shops generally bring high prices. For instance, a four-inch cup-plate brought twenty-three dollars at auction a year ago, and another fetched thirty-six dollars at private sale. Certain other cup-plates which have come to the author’s attention have been held for prices running from fourteen to forty-five dollars apiece. Although the collector of moderate means may not expect to indulge in many purchases, he is apt to run across fine pieces at bargain prices that will send his spirits to the level of true elation. First of all, however, he must study the subject and learn to know a cup-plate when he sees one, for the successful collector is never a hunter of Snarks!

Only two hundred and fifty years ago the East India Company considered the gift of a couple of pounds of tea a princely one to make the King of England! Pepys gives us an inkling as to how uncommon a thing tea-drinking was in his time. However, the use of cup-plates is a much later one than Pepys’s day; they were not the fashion until tea-drinking had become an almost universal custom.

The illustrations will give the reader an idea of the variety to be found in cup-plates. While the pieces put to this use are nearly of a size, their diameters vary by a fraction of an inch to an inch or more.

One of the best known cup-plate series is Hall’s “Hampshire Scenery,” with borders of primroses, hepatica, and other flowers resembling many of the Clews borders. Their color is rich blue. John Hall & Sons were Staffordshire potters (1810-1820), whose marks on wares Chaffers places in the “uncertain” list. Then there is a “Quadrupeds Series.” The mark on this resembles an extended bell, on which appears the name “I. HALL” in capital letters, with the word “QUADRUPEDS” in crude capital letters below, on a curtain-like extension with inverted flutings. But far more beautiful than either of these sets, and more interesting to the American collector, are those of a series in rich blue, one of which shows the Park Square Theatre, Boston, and bears the characteristic oak-leaf and acorn border of R. Stevenson and Williams. All the designs of Ralph Stevenson are eagerly sought by collectors of old china. The Stevenson works were in Cobridge, Staffordshire, but all record of both potter and pottery seems to have disappeared. Another cup-plate series contains a view of the first United States Mint, Philadelphia, and has the characteristic border—of scrolls, eagles, and flowers—of Joseph Stubbs. This potter made comparatively few pieces for the American market. From 1790 to 1830 he was owner of the Dale Hall Works at Burslem. His cup-plates are among the most desired objects of the sort.

Many cup-plates bore mottoes and verses such as those of the Liverpool type, a Romance Series, for instance, containing one known as “Returning Hopes,” with the ardent verse appearing thereon as follows:

When seamen to their homes return,
And meet their wives or sweethearts dear,
Each loving lass with rapture burns,
To find her long-lost lover near.

These Liverpool cup-plates, by reason of their pictorial nature, have always been popular with collectors, hence the scarcity of them in antique and curio shops. Private collectors, too, seem loath to part with specimens of such printed wares. The glass cup-plates in native American manufacture are in no sense comparable esthetically with the cup-plates of porcelain and pottery of foreign fabrique. Still they are interesting historically. The majority of the glass cup-plates were crystalline glass, though some were colored—blue, green, yellow, brown, amber, rose, purple, etc. There were many glass factories in America in colonial days as well as in the nineteenth century, and American households were well supplied by them with cup-plates, although in design these were, more often than not, of comparatively little beauty.

Among the patterned cup-plate wares the collector will find, many varieties of the hundreds of varieties of the “Willow” pattern may with reasonable certainty be traced to their various potters; but this is a special study in itself, and one entailing the

surmounting of many difficulties. The amateur need not concern himself with the matter completely in order to enjoy the few examples that may chance to discover themselves to him.

The lovely dark-blue Davenport ware, with designs in the Chinese style, are worth looking for. Ware such as this is familiar to every collector and is coming to be appreciated more generally than formerly. From even a small collection of cup-plates much pleasure may be derived, and the collector need not feel that it is hopeless to start getting together examples of worth. If things are being picked up here and there on the one hand, it is true that, on the other, examples of cup-plates fully worth while are coming to the market as well as leaving it.

CHAPTER VI
CHINTZ

CHINTZ has been called the tapisserie d’Aubusson of the cottage home. Its place in the affections of the collector of antiques and curios has long been secure. For fully fifty years and more lovers of household ancientry have gathered to their appreciation bits of old printed fabrics. Originally the word “chintz” was applied to the printed cotton fabric from India, each piece being called in early days a chint, a name which was derived from the Hindu cint, Bengal cit, and Sanscrit chitra, meaning spotted or variegated. Afterward it came to be applied to the glazed printed calicoes of European and American manufacture, gaily patterned with flowers and birds and figures in diverse colors on a white ground. Its calendered dust-shedding surface made the material a great favorite with careful housewives. Cretonne, the French substitute for chintz, a heavier material, was not introduced until somewhere around the year 1860.

The old-time chintzes are not so easily picked up nowadays. However, there are still excellent chances of occasional “finds,” even in antique-combed America, where, happily, collecting has come to be one of our chief pastimes. I know one collector who has been so fortunate as to obtain many quaint specimens of old printed fabrics at small cost, from an upholsterer in his own town. From time to time chairs and sofas were brought to the upholsterer to be re-covered. Often these had several layers of material under the outer one, and below those of later days he would find, now and then, coverings of old printed cotton fabrics. Among these were a lovely spray-pattern chintz of the Queen Anne period and a hand-print of pastoral design by one R. Jones, manufacturer of Old Ford, London, who produced patterned chintzes about the year 1760. Many of the new printed cotton fabrics have borrowed their patterns from these interesting textile ancestors, though nowadays, in the case of monochrome and duochrome prints, the color effects are somewhat richer than those that obtained in the printed fabrics of the eighteenth century, with their cold chocolate browns, bottle-greens, and ox-blood reds. For the collector there will naturally be an inimitable charm about the original pieces, not to mention their historic interest, while old multicolored chintzes cannot be surpassed in loveliness.

Chintz attained a beauty and a distinction of its own when it attracted the fancy of the fashionables of the eighteenth century. To maintain its favor, it did not rest content with being imitative but developed its own resources with a consequent richness that marks its place among decorative fabrics of the early days.

A sixteenth-century Portuguese writer, by name Odoardo Barbosa, gives us an interesting early reference to printed fabrics: “Great quantities of cotton cloths, admirably painted, are held in highest estimation.” But even some two hundred years before his time the narrators of the romance of commerce were celebrating the chintzes of the Coromandel India coast. Doubtless these printed fabrics of the earlier centuries attained an intricacy and beauty that were long denied the European printed textiles which they inspired. Early examples of the latter are in no way comparable, artistically or technically, with contemporary India prints. Even to-day it would be difficult to improve esthetically on the beautiful printed stuffs that come to us from the countries of the Orient.

We do not know with certainty the circumstances attending the introduction into Europe of the manufacture of printed fabrics. Long before English weavers had undertaken the industry, the printing of fabrics flourished on the Continent. The sixteenth century references to printed cottons in England are so few and so vague that we are virtually without knowledge of the earliest manufactories of these fabrics. We do know, however, that veritable legions of skilled craftsmen in the textile arts settled in the British Isles during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It is to them, probably, that the art owes its introduction there.

The Print Room of the British Museum exhibits a quaint old trade card—itself the impression of a wood-block such as the cloth-printers used—which bears the representation of a cotton-printer at work. In the costume of his time—the reign of James II—he stands before a long, broad Jacobean table, lengthwise of which lies a piece of cloth, one third showing the pattern which the printer has impressed on it. Behind the left end of the table is set a Jacobean stool on which rests a circular basin containing the color, which a boy is waiting to apply to the wood-block for printing. The master printer is in the act of impressing a section of the pattern on the white cloth by means of the wood-block, which he is hammering with a wooden mallet. The text (in script of the period) reads, “Jacob Stamps living at ye sighn of the Callicoes Lineings Silkes Stuffs New or Ould at Reasonable Rates.” This old mode of block-printing obtained for fully two hundred years until the inventive genius of the nineteenth century joined hands with commerce, to the craft’s almost complete discouragement. However, a revival of interest in the old arts was inspired by such enthusiasts as William Morris. The hand-printed fabrics have been restored to favor, and to-day they again play an important part in the decoration of the modern home.

Richmond, Bow, and Old Ford, London, became the earliest centers for printed chintzes in England. The few extant specimens of seventeenth-century chintz show us that the early printed cottons were crude enough. At first more than one color was not attempted. The next step appears to have been to add to the monochrome effect by applying washes of dye, either freehand or stencil application, to the outline pattern. This was done by brushing the color on as required, a process slow, laborious, and fraught with uncertainties. An examination of these early pieces, treasures though they are from an antiquarian point of view, reveals a smudgy appearance resulting from the thickness of the dye-inks with which the patterns were printed. The early materials were very coarse canvas-like cloths.

With the advent of the eighteenth century the cloth for receiving the printed patterns was much improved, and it was not long before finely woven textures supplanted the cruder ones. This greatly facilitated the development of textile color-prints, and the Queen Anne chintzes were in consequence infinitely superior to those of the Charles II, James II, or William and Mary reigns. So popular did these improved patterned fabrics become that the chintz industry not only rivaled that of the silk-weavers but for a time threatened to drive the latter out of business. Indeed, so bitter became the feeling on the subject, between the two crafts, that riots resulted and an appeal was made to Parliament, by the silk-manufacturers of Spitalfields, for protection. History records that the silk-workers were so enraged because Westminster did not immediately forbid the wearing of chintz that the delegation which had carried the petition to London, gave vent to its wrath by tearing off all chintz gowns whose wearers were encountered on the homeward journey. Finally, in 1736, Parliament passed an act prohibiting printed cottons and linens, an act which was soon repealed and followed by an increased vogue in chintz. In France as well it was at one time considered expedient to forbid the manufacture of printed textiles; the restriction extended until 1759.

Authorities seem to be agreed in considering the middle of the eighteenth century as the golden age of old-time printed chintzes. Collectors eagerly seek specimens of this period, though they are all too rare to encourage hope in this direction except for occasional finds. It was during the years around 1760 that multicolored patterns were so beautifully and satisfactorily wrought with superimposed woodblock impressions. Chippendale furniture of the time naturally led to the popularity of Chinese motifs in design, and lovely indeed these were. The intertwining flower sprays that marked the printed fabrics of Queen Anne’s day now gave way to motifs in separated positions. The famille verte, famille rose, and famille noire porcelains of China furnished many a motif for the chintz designers of the seventeenth century. In the Chippendale period buff grounds were introduced, whereas in the earlier chintzes the grounds had been white or untinted.

The third quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed an innovation in the manufacture of printed fabrics. Various mechanical devices were perfected and led to an enormous increase in chintz manufacture. Cotton-printing was taken up in the northern counties and soon the trade center shifted thence from London, its old cradle-town. Engraved copperplates and roller-printing came into use. Still, as has already been said, hand-printing was destined to survive.

The collector of these various printed cottons will find the historical group especially interesting. Take for instance, the “Apotheosis of Washington” or the “Allegory of Washington and Franklin” subjects. In both, the figures of Washington were taken from the famous Trumbull portrait. In the “Apotheosis” chintz the medallions containing portraits of thirteen famous personages of early American history are after engravings by Du Simitière. “William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” forms the subject of another patterned chintz of especial interest to American collectors. Then there are the later political subjects which the nineteenth century’s early history inspired. The printed kerchiefs also came within the province of the collector of printed cottons. Many of these kerchiefs are especially well adapted for framing. Such as the “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” kerchief and the one bearing the title of “The Token or Sailor’s Pledge of Love.” Some of these old kerchiefs and also many examples of printed chintzes of historic interest have found their way into American public collections.

CHAPTER VII
PEWTER

THERE are many persons—some of them collectors of other antiques and curios—who ask what the fascination of old pewter can be, frankly declaring that to them it has no attraction. Perhaps to some the mention of pewter suggests battered up, dingy, leaden-hued objects of metal, more suitable for bullets than suited to buffets. Again, there are those who, unacquainted with pewter lore, do not guess the wealth of historical interest that invests the subject.

Relics of any age that are so damaged as no longer to command respectful attention have no real excuse for perpetuation unless some highly important historic association attaches to them, for surely mere age or antiquity is not a raison d’être with the sensible. Pewter in a state of dilapidation is no exception to the rule governing the forming of any collection of quality, and no matter what its antecedents, it should present good form to be worthy a place in the worth-while collection, if it is to be regarded with other than the sentiment bestowed upon a chipping from the Great Pyramid or a bottle of dust from Pompeii.

But truly fine pewter has attributes to justify its collecting. In the first place, its decorative quality commends it to notice. Here, however, one must remember that an esthetic taste will recognize this, where one to which the artistic does not appeal will overlook it. Secondly, the story of old pewter, as recorded by Welch Massé and other authorities on the subject, authorities to whom the collector-student is bound to be indebted for much information, is one that lends entertainment to the pursuit of the hobby.

A few years ago a rage for old pewter swept over England and America, following a notable exhibition—the first of its sort—held at Clifford’s Inn, London. This was in 1904. To be truthful one must record the “slump” that followed a few years later. But the true collector who had taken up with pewter remained loyal and enthusiastic, and with the appearance of a number of exhaustive and authoritative works on the history of pewter in America and in Great Britain, there has been a revival of interest in the subject which is bound to be permanent.

English pewter was much simpler than the pewter made in other parts of Europe. This latter often attained to an ornateness from which, fortunately, the pewter of England of the best period is free. The manufacture of pewter in England was governed by the strict rules of the Pewterers’ Company, which, as early as 1503, made it compulsory for the pewterers of England to mark their wares, just as the French pewterers of Limoges had been compelled to do a century earlier. Some of the early English pewter was marked with the heraldic Tudor rose with crown above, although the rose-and-crown is to be found on Scottish and on some Flemish pieces also.

As for the individual marks of the pewterers, these marks were called touches. Each pewterer was compelled to have his separate touch, which was recorded at the Pewterers’ Company halls by impressions struck on sheets of lead. Nearly all the plates of touches in London so formed prior to 1666 were destroyed in the Great Fire, which also consumed nearly all the records, although some of the audit books of the company, dating from 1415, were saved. However, on the lead plates that have survived we find some eleven hundred pewterers’ touches impressed. The earlier touches were somewhat smaller than those of later date; some of them, in fact were tiny. The mark X on old English pewter was permitted on metal of extra quality, as one may learn from one of the company’s rules of 1697, which gives notice that “none may strike the letter X except upon extraordinary ware, commonly called hard metal ware.” The various instances of misdeeds on the part of pewterers who tried to evade the regulations kept the company busy for several centuries. The very last regulation of the Pewterers’ Company concerning touches directs that “all wares capable of a large touch shall be touched with a large touch with the Christian name and surname either of the maker or of the vendor, at full length in plain Roman letters; and the wares shall be touched with the small touch.” A penalty of one penny per pound was exacted from those pewterers who neglected to observe this rule.

While all the facts concerning the marking of old pewter should be diligently studied by the collector, as he gathers them from this source and from that, and will prove of great help, be of interest, and lend zest to collecting, one must not forget that much imitation old pewter has been fabricated with intent to defraud. However, such “fakes” (many of them are very attractive!) usually unblushingly bear upon them the ear-marks of their spurious nature, and the collector soon comes to have command of the knowledge necessary to detect such reproductions.

The material of old pewter is variously compounded. Old fine pewter consisted of 112 pounds of tin to 26 pounds of copper, or—in place of the cooper—of brass. Again, a fine, hard resonant metal was made of 100 parts of tin to 17 of antimony. Distinguished from the fine pewter was common pewter—or “trifle” pewter, as it was called. This was made of 83 parts of tin to 17 parts of antimony, or, with slight variations, of 82 parts of tin to 18 parts of antimony. These various alloys are susceptible of a high polish and of retaining it well in ordinary circumstances some time. This pewter, too, has a good measure of hardness and possesses durability.

Britannia metal must not be confused, as often it is, with the real pewter. It was a late eighteenth-century invention of tin, antimony, copper, and zinc, which lent itself to fashioning on the lathe (a process called “spinning”), having in this respect a decided advantage over the less easily worked pewter. Naturally it did not take long for the new Britannia metal to supersede pewter when it was discovered that Britannia metal could be electroplated.

However, the general use to which pottery and porcelain, tinware and enamel attained had come to have much, too, to do with banishing pewter from general use, though it remained longer in favor in Scotland than in England. “A whole garnish of peutre,” such as a lady of 1487 bequeathed to one of her heirs, no longer came to be deemed fashionable. The master pewterers suffered and, as time went on, found themselves forced out of their trade.

With the waning of the popularity of pewter, vast quantities of it were melted up for solder and for other purposes, which accounts for the scarcity of really fine old pieces. Indeed, such articles as pewter spoons are exceptionally rare; not, as some suppose, because they were so small, but because they were especially serviceable to the traveling tinkers, who could convert them into solder. The English pewter spoon was seldom a small affair, if it ever descended in scale to the size of a dessert spoon. In passing it is well to call the collector’s attention to the fact that pewter spoons are imitated and often placed before buyers as antiques. One needs especially to familiarize himself with the shapes of the bowls and of the handles of the English ones, and with other minutiæ, in order to determine intelligently the authenticity of a piece of pewter of this sort. Other objects are much more common, and ten genuine English pewter spoons would form a goodly collection, considering their exceptional rarity.

The London pewterers guarded their trade secrets jealously. They permitted no outsiders to loiter and watch them at work. As the various molds for pewter objects were made at great expense, it was the custom for the guilds of the Pewterers’ Company to own these and to let them out. This accounts for the various standard shapes of articles, made by quite different pewterers. Lists of such molds, dating as far back as 1425, have survived the vicissitudes of time and throw much interesting light on the subject. Let the pewter-collector remember that pewter objects appear to have come into vogue as a substitute for silver, and that pieces of old pewter usually follow in form the shapes of the contemporary silver objects of like use. Indeed, a study of old English silver will prove of great help to the pewter-collector in solving problems of chronology. One may not attempt to collect a whole garnish of pewter of a single period—a complete garnish consisting of twelve platters, twelve dishes, and twelve saucers—but it is quite possible, without an appalling outlay. On the other hand, unless it is a “find,” one may have to pay forty or fifty dollars for a fine and authentic early English pewter spoon.

Whatever one collects in the way of old pewter of any period and of any country, it should be displayed by itself and not mixed with silver, glass, and other objects. As to what dealers sometimes call “silver pewter,” let not the unwary collector suppose that it is more than pewter of a fine quality (if the object proves to be that!). Silver cannot enter into the composition of true pewter, as it takes 950° C. to melt it, while the tin, melting at 230° C., would volatilize too greatly to combine with the precious metal before the silver even reached the melting-point. Perhaps because the finest pewter takes a silver-like polish it was originally called “silver pewter,” without intent to mislead.

Another point worth remembering is that, although all sorts of objects have been fashioned of pewter—even a copy of the Portland Vase has been fashioned in this metal—the collector will find very few old English pewter tea-pots. Fully eighty-five per cent. of the tea-pots passing as pewter are, I should say, either Britannia or Ashberry metal. Very early ecclesiastical pieces of English make are rare, too. The Council of Westminster forbade the fashioning of church vessels of pewter, as it was thought not sufficiently precious to be dedicated to such use. But in poorer communities exceptions must have been made, as we know of its use in churches in 1194. The Council of Nîmes (1252) and the Council of Albi (1254) in France had later to take up a like matter, then permitting pewter in the manufacture of objects for church use under certain restrictions.

Not only in early times (by the year 1290 Edward I had accumulated three hundred pieces of pewter of fine quality) but as late at 1820, when George IV had pewter placed upon the table at the coronation feast, pewter has enjoyed the protection of royalty, which fact adds not a little to its historic interest. But let the collector beware of certain pewter plates with arms, portraits, etc., stamped in high relief, which are now and then to be met with, marked with a crowned rose and N. D. in the upper part of the crown, as well as a pellet in the center of each petal (except in the center of the upper one, where there is a six-pointed mullet). And let him beware of the marked pieces distinguished by a St. George or by a St. Michael and a dragon in a beaded circle and the letters A. I. C., as these are not old pieces but appear to have been fabricated as “ornamental” antiques.

Of course there are many other tricks resorted to by the unscrupulous, but the real collector, generally speaking, happily possesses that instinct which enables him to learn his lessons quickly and inexpensively; and there are plenty of reputable antique shops wherein genuine things are to be found. As a matter of fact, the writer has found that even where certain dealers have offered spurious objects as genuine, they have done so through ignorance rather than through cupidity. A dealer will usually be only too glad to have a collector who knows point to him mistakes in attribution. Most of the small shops are run by men who have little time for study, and who are far more likely to be imposed upon themselves than to attempt to impose upon their customers. After all, the dealer could not live without customers, and the only safe way to hold any customer is to treat him honestly.

Early in the eighteenth century the lathe began to be developed, so any specimens of pewter disclosing lathe marks would suggest a date subsequent to that period. The pewter formed by the “spinning” process is the most modern of all. The pewter collector should be careful how he polishes his pewter, as this ware should never be subjected to rubbing with brick-dust and like vigorous usage.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

CHAPTER VIII
SAMPLERS

BEFORE the age of machine-made things, and of attire much more conventional than in many of the earlier periods, there was, of course, great need of skilled needlewomen, not only professionally but at home as well, for it was in the home that most of the “finery” of our forefathers originated. Stubbes’s “Anatomy of Abuses,” which appeared in 1583, tells of the raiment of the men of the author’s time who were “decked out in the fineries even to their shirts, which are wrought with needlework of silks,” etc. The good Stubbes also complains that it was difficult to tell who were gentlefolk, because all men of that time affected silks, velvets, “taffeties,” and the like, regardless of station. Thus we may see how important it was that the little misses of the days of long ago should be taught stitchery at the early age of nine or ten years.

Samplers are among the most intimate of collectable old things.

... Bookless and pictureless
Save the inevitable sampler hung
Over the fireplace.

How patiently the little fingers toiled over these records of their wonderful (even if enforced) application! Truly, samplers are the needle-craft primers of yesterday. We have only to recall an old English play, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” probably the very first of the earlier English folk comedies, to understand the great importance attached to the needle. This play, written about 1560 (and attributed to John Still, Bishop of Wells, and formerly Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where it was first produced) shows how, during the period of its conception, a steel needle was treasured as few family treasures of to-day, and so when Gammer Gurton lost hers—the only one she possessed—the misfortune took on the importance of genuine calamity. As collectors of samplers and writers on the subject of samplers have been baffled in trying to discover why no samplers dated or positively known to have been worked before the middle of the eighteenth century are extant, this clue to the probable reason which we find in “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” is of interest; the fact is that as needles were so uncommon and such treasured possessions they were not to be entrusted to tiny fingers. Later, when invention turned its attention to needle-making, needles became common enough. I imagine many a little girl of the eighteenth century wished that needles had never been “born”!

Very fine samplers containing both names and dates prior to 1800 are not to be found at every turn. Notwithstanding this, the sampler-collector need anticipate no discouraging difficulty in getting together examples for a fairly representative collection. It is only in comparatively recent years that we have discovered the value of old samplers as excellent decorative accessories on the walls of a room in which old pieces of furniture are placed. Samplers may be mounted and framed for hanging on a wall as a picture might be, and I know of few objects in the line of antiques that seem so appropriate for use in this manner for adorning the walls of a bedchamber.

While it is not always an easy matter to assign undated samplers to their exact periods, approximate dates may without great trouble be determined. Naturally, the earliest examples were more utilitarian than ornamental in conception, more like a mere example of stitchery of various sorts—a leaf from the scrap-book of needlework, as it were. Later, pattern and design and pictorial composition were evolved. Likewise, the earlier samplers seem to have been longer and narrower in proportion than later ones. Threads of gold and silver are to be found in needle-work of the Elizabethan and the Jacobean period, where we should not look for them in the Georgian. Again, there are characteristics of pattern that clearly denote the embroiderer’s time. The design of the letters of the alphabet embroidered on a sampler also forms a clue, inasmuch as it shares in common with contemporary dated, printed, and engraved lettering the more distinctive period characteristics of the latter. The earliest date of an alphabet sampler is, I believe, 1643; of a sampler with a motto, 1651; of a sampler having a border, 1726; of a representation of a house, 1763; of numerals, 1655; of a verse, 1696; 1728 has been suggested as the approximate date of the introduction of mustard-colored canvases on which the samplers were worked.

“Sad sewers made bad samplers,” said Lord de Tabley in “The Soldier of Fortune,” but the wonder is that the little fingers of yesterday should have acquired skill not only in one sort of embroidery but in the varied stitches often seen in a single sampler remarkable for its perfect and exquisite handiwork. One is almost aghast, for instance, at the task suggested by John Taylor’s “The Needles Excellency,” where one reads:

Tent-worke, Raised-worke, Laid-worke, Frost-worke, Net-worke,
Most curious purles or rare Italian Cut-worke,
Fine Ferne-stitch, Finny-stitch, Hew-stitch and China-stitch,
Brave Bred-stitch, Fisher-stitch, Irish-stitch and Queen-stitch,
The Spanish-stitch, Rosemary-stitch and Morose-stitch,
The Smarting Whip-stitch, Back-stitch and the Cross-stitch.
All these are good and these we must allow,
And these are everywhere in practice now.

With the infinitude of stitches it is not necessary here to be concerned, although the enthusiast in sampler-collecting will find the study of stitches helpful just as the expert will find it highly necessary. As there is much confusion in the nomenclature, there will be many stumbling-blocks, but the pursuit will be worth while. The earliest seventeenth-century samplers of lace-like appearance were worked in cut-and-drawn embroidery, with various additional lace stitches. Then there was the eyelet-stitch, damask-stitch, the backstitch (these three were used for alphabets), darning-stitches, tent-stitches, and tapestry-stitch (unusual) and so on.

The foundation of early samplers was the hand-woven linen, either unbleached or bleached. Sometimes this was almost as coarse as canvas and again of closely woven texture. Linen thread or silk (somewhat loosely twisted) was employed for the stitchery. The harsh yellow linen of early eighteenth-century samplers came into vogue toward the end of the first quarter of the century, but was soon discarded. Unfortunately, tannery cloth was much in vogue at the end of the eighteenth century. This unattractive material seemed especially devised to satiate the appetites of moths! Most of the tannery-cloth samplers are worked in silk. The muslin-like tiffany cloth was occasionally used before 1800 for small and fine samplers. Later the coarse linens came into fashion. The crudely dyed threads marked the decline of the sampler from about 1800. Then cotton canvas and Berlin wool completed the fall of this one of the gentlest arts.

The early American samplers had, of course, their ancestry and inspiration in English samplers, with which I think they vie in interest and attractiveness. Surely there could be no more delightful wall decoration for a colonial house than one of the early American samplers! These are less commonly found than English samplers and American collectors naturally give them preference.

That the little misses of olden times managed at so tender an age to produce such handiwork seems almost amazing. Little girls of five and six years achieved marvels in sampler stitchery as extant examples abundantly proves.

Poetry and samplers seem to have been good friends. In the second scene of the third act of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and in the fourth scene of the second act of “Titus Andronicus,” Shakspere alludes to samplers. So does Milton in “Comus,” and Sir Philip Sidney in “Arcadia.” If those blest bards could but scan the verse of some of the sampler-makers! Here is one which, in its way, is a gem typical of task and talent:

Sarah Bonney is
My Name, England is
My Nation; See How Good
My Parents is to Give
Me Education

There is rhyming for you! And may we not imagine that beneath those sentiments lurked a fine humor?

CHAPTER IX
WAX PORTRAITS

STRANGE it seems that so many fragile objects have come down to us from antiquity while cities of stone, statues of marble, and monuments of bronze too often have appeared lost forever. On beholding a perfect glass vase whose history dates back to Phœnician times, but which has survived centuries of vicissitudes, one cannot but reflect upon the extraordinary fortune of things apparently so perishable. In the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London, the museum of the Art Department of Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere one may find little wax models that have come down through hundreds of years, and one wonders that Time has lent so kind a hand to things which were constructed of materials that we have regarded as being so perishable.

Wax portraiture is one of the arts of the past so little known to many collectors that examples of it are not often met with in American collections. Ancient writers have given us a hint of the antiquity of wax portraiture, not only in round sculpture, but in relief. Moreover, we know that the Greek artists in Egypt were adepts in painting portraits by means of powdered colors applied with rush brushes to slabs of cedar-wood covered with wax, into which coating the color could easily be worked when the sun’s rays were permitted to soften the wax. Many of these ancient wax panels are extant, and they appear very much like paintings in oil colors upon wood.

We know that Lysistratus, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, executed small busts in colored wax, and this is the earliest use of the medium in color mentioned by history. Works of this sort were forerunners of the later colored wax portraits of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century, with the old custom, which Pliny mentions, of having ancestral portraits in the households of the Romans as connecting links in the progress of the art. Moreover, the Romans were wont to carry in funeral procession waxen portraits of the departed, as a curious custom clinging to civilization as late as the seventh century in England. Indeed, a visitor to Westminster Abbey may see the old wax form of Queen Elizabeth gorgeously attired, which was carried in the cortège at her burial!

More cheerful, on the other hand, are the remarkable wax portraits in relief—some white or monochrome and others colored—which were modeled (“painted” would perhaps be a better word) by the early artists of the cinquecento—Leone Leoni, Antonio Abondio in Italy, later by Guillaume Dupré and Antoine Benoit in France, and then by Isaac Gosset, Eley, George Mountstephen, Joachim Smith, S. Percy, and Peter Ruow and others in England.

How the ancients prepared their materials for working in wax is not recorded, but probably they anticipated all of the processes employed by the medieval artist in such portraiture, powdering the color, mixing in oil, and adding it to pure wax in the state of fusion. To Pastorino of Siena has been accredited the honor of having invented the particular wax paste used by himself and his successors in representing the hair and the skin.

In the sixteenth century the art of wax portraiture was practised in Nuremberg and reached a high state of development under Casper Hardy, prebendary of the Cologne cathedral.

Among the most interesting wax portraits by French artists are those from the hand of François Clouet, in the sixteenth century, which are among the treasures of the Cluny Museum, Paris. Under Louis XIV wax portraiture attained so important a place in France that we find Antoine Benoit given the royal appointment of “Unique sculpteur en cire colorée.”

No material is more responsive to the artist’s touch than wax, immortalizing as it does his individual handling in a manner peculiarly its own. Perhaps no English portraitist has given evidence of greater ability than did S. Percy, whose wax portraits, as well as those by Peter Ruow, are prized by collectors. Artists in wax portraiture were not unknown in America during colonial times. Among the names of early wax-portrait artists in America that of Patience Wright stands forth prominently. She was born in 1725, the daughter of Mr. Lowell, a Quaker of Bordentown, New Jersey. When twenty-three years of age she married Joseph Wright, and some years later was left a widow with three children. In 1772 she went to England. Already she had become noted for her excellent work in portraiture. A bust of Thomas Penn was one of her earliest works of the London period and the wax-portrait of Washington from her hand, modeled after an original from life by her son, Joseph Wright, is now in the possession of Dr. Richard H. Harte of Philadelphia. This is the work which she mentions in a letter to Washington preserved in the Library of Congress:

You may have my most grateful thanks for your kind attention to my son in taking him into your Family to encourage his genii and giving him the pleasing oppourtunity of taking a Likeness that has I sincerely hope gave his country and your friends, Sir, satisfaction. I am impatient to have a copy of what he has done that I may have the honour of making a model from it in wax work, as it has been for some time the wish and desire of my heart to model a likeness of General Washington.

To this Washington replied:

If the bust which your son has modelled of me should reach your hands and afford your genii any employment that can amuse Mrs. Wright it must be an honour done me.

Wax portraiture almost died out in the nineteenth century, but it is of interest to note its recent revival by Ethel Frances Mundy and other skilful artists.

Good old Giorgio Vasari, the gossipy chronicler of the Old Masters to whom we owe nearly all of our knowledge of the lives of the early Italian painters, wrote an interesting treatise on the technique of art from which the following is quoted, as being of further interest to the collector of wax portraits:

In order to show how wax is modeled let us first speak of the working of wax and not of clay. To render it softer a little animal fat and turpentine and black pitch are put into the wax, and of these ingredients it is the fat that makes it more supple, the turpentine adds tenacity, and the pitch gives it the black color and consistency, so that after it has been worked and left to stand it will become hard.

This was the wax probably used for the backgrounds. Vasari continues:

And he who would wish to make wax of another color may easily do so by putting into it red earth or vermilion or red lead; he will thus make it yellowish red or some shade; if he add verdigris, green, and so on with the other colors. But well it is to observe that the colors should be powdered and sifted, and in this condition mixed with the wax afterward and made as soft as possible. The wax is also made white for small things—medals, portraits, minute scenes, and other objects in bas-relief. All this is accomplished by mixing white lead that has already been powdered with the white wax as already explained. I must not neglect to mention that modern artists have discovered the method of working all sorts of colors into the wax so that in taking portraits from life in half-relief they make the flesh tints, the hair, the clothes and all so lifelike that these presentments appear to lack only the power to speak.

CHAPTER X
HAND-WOVEN COVERLETS

THE collector who has been fortunate enough to make a pilgrimage through the villages of New England, visiting the antique shops in search of adornments to the shrines of their hobbies, will recall the occasional hand-woven coverlet that chanced to be displayed as the background to the ensemble of odds and ends. But one finds fewer and fewer of these old-time examples of handicraft. There have been eager but quiet collectors industriously seeking them out. Nevertheless the collector has always a chance of coming upon an early woven coverlet, particularly in those remote quarters where local auctions (occasioned by momentous events and not merely foregone conclusions) still disclose the hidden treasures of yesterday and bring them within reach of the moderate purse.

From colonial times the art of weaving coverlet by hand was practised wherever wool and industry suggested. The overseas traditions were faithfully carried out by the housewives of New England, and then southward. There came to be modifications in the old weaving patterns as the ingenuity of those skilled in this handicraft developed. Indeed, an enormous variety of patterns was evolved. Proportionately few of the very old hand-woven coverlets have survived—precious they are to the collector of household antiques!—but even these show remarkable pattern variations. Of course, the time came when machine-weaving supplanted hand-work, and before long coverlets hand-woven were of the discarded arts, so far as the New England states were concerned. A few years ago, however, the industry of making hand-woven coverlets was revived, for the art had in a measure, fortunately, continued in the Southern mountains of the country. Many of the old-time coverlets were carefully copied and hundreds of new patterns also were devised. These later hand-woven coverlets are, many of them, of great beauty and intrinsically worth having, even when one can also acquire the earlier specimens, for the modern hand-woven coverlet is more often than not indicative of the same artistic spirit with which the colonial housewife endowed her work.

Blue-and-white is the usual combination in the old coverlets, though many of them introduced other colors, brown being the most commonly used after blue. This blue was home-dyed—with indigo—and time has lent to many of the old coverlets a coloring comparable to that of the blues of Chinese porcelains.

With the aptitude for determining the details of the fabrics, of which every woman seems intuitively to be possessed, the woman collector will in all probability be able to distinguish a truly old coverlet from one of modern fabrication. In a few instances some unscrupulous antique-dealer may claim antiqueness for an obviously modern coverlet, but the discriminating collector will be comparatively safe.

The collector will find old coverlets interesting as hangings, lounge-covers, and portières, as well as when put to their original uses. Fortunate indeed is one who chances to acquire a signed and dated example. Such a discovery leads the happy collector to haunt genealogical libraries until he has unearthed the mystery of its owner’s place in history; for in the good old days the weaver was probably the owner as well.

CHAPTER XI
CHAIRS

THE old-fashioned idea that a collector must arrange his treasures grouped in one spot no longer obtains. I recall asking one who had returned from a visit to a very interesting house if the host and hostess were collectors of antiques, curios, or rare objets d’art. “Oh, no,” was the reply, “I don’t think so. They showed me many beautiful things, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a collection.” Later I learned that this home contained one of the most notable collections of early furniture in America! All these pieces, of course, had been considered as articles entering into the adornment of this home and not merely as objects gathered clutter-wise into the semblance of an old curiosity shop. Even our museums are now often exhibiting their furniture collections arranged in such a manner as to carry out a complete idea of the original intention of the various pieces, displaying them in reconstructed rooms or in the counterpart of a portion of a room.

Probably no piece of furniture holds greater interest for the specialized or even the general collector than the chair. Its ancestry is venerable, but its remote antiquity need not be dwelt upon at length here. It is true that in a magnificent Louis Quatorze drawing-room, perfectly appointed and historically correct, the introduction of a cottage chair of the Windsor type would be as displeasing an anachronism as putting a wild thrush to neighbor with all the parrots of an avairy. On the other hand, the drawing-room of the average typical home in good taste the world over might contain a Chippendale chair, a Carolean settee, a Sheraton card-table, a Louis XIII stool, and an Italian Renaissance table, and yet be agreeably pleasing and pleasantly inviting if skill, good taste, and common sense had entered into the character of arrangements.

The collector who wishes to devote some attention to old furniture would do well to begin with old chairs. All the old chairs (the good ones and the fine ones) have not been “collected up” in the sense that they are permanently retired from business. When once they get into the museums, of course, they stay there, but even museums are not omnivorous. The acquiring of supremely rare or unique objects is by no means the only pleasure to be derived from collecting. In fact, it is one of its least thrilling forms, being measured more by dollars and cents and the commerce of things than it is by the mere joy of acquisition.

Some one has estimated that every collection which does not go into a museum changes hands every twenty years on an average. It is a fact that collecting in America to-day is infinitely more easy of accomplishment than it was a century ago. In New York, for instance, the auction sales of a single recent season presented to the collector more opportunities than could have come his way in six seasons years ago. It is a mistake to suppose that all good “chances” have passed; they are, as a matter of fact, just about beginning in America. We are told that collectors have ransacked farmhouses and old houses in the East for interesting pieces of antique furniture. That is true, but the process means only a change of location and not an elimination of possibilities.

The collector of old chairs can easily become familiar with the various forms of peculiarities of design which mark the different styles and periods, as may be seen by even a passing glance at the accompanying illustrations. Indeed, the ear-marks that distinguish certain pieces of furniture of the historic periods and distinct styles from others are, happily, so numerous that the art of identification becomes comparatively an easy one. Beginners will, to be sure, often come across modern reproductions of genuine old chairs. Not all of these—in fact, comparatively few of them—were made with intent to defraud. Occasionally some unscrupulous or ignorant person will offer a modern piece as genuine, but your true collector need hardly be deceived, except in rare instances, by attempted impositions. The form of the master furniture designers of yesterday has never been surpassed. There is nothing in modern design more beautiful or so beautiful as many of the old chairs of Chippendale, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite, and likewise of the early English and the French periods. Realizing this, the furniture-makers of to-day at home and abroad have sought to reproduce the best of these antique pieces for the service and the benefit of the modern home-maker, obviously as undisguised reproductions.

The collector who studies old chairs will glean many a helpful hint from these modern reproductions. The fine ones faithfully carried out are really worth collecting in themselves, as accessory to a collection of other pieces which the collector has been fortunate in obtaining in the originals. If you

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

chance to come across an old chair fine in the lines of its design, do not give it up as hopeless should you notice that it is disfigured with paint, dowdy, broken-down upholstery, and the like. A good restorer of old furniture will be able to work wonders with a piece of the sort. I remember discovering an old chair so hidden under the disguise of paint, putty, and car-plush as to have discouraged any but a discriminating enthusiasm. When this chair was turned over to a restorer he delivered it from its bondage of humiliation and it came forth an excellent and treasured genuine example of the finest Hepplewhite style. The “stuffing” had completely hidden a splendid ostrich-plume back.

To collect anything sensibly requires an interest in the available data concerning it. One might as well collect buttons manufactured in 1920 as to pay no attention to the study of things gathered together in pleasurable pursuit. So, too, it is with chairs. A chair-collector looks beyond the mere utilitarian fact that each chair can be sat upon with comfort, or can’t be.

First of all he must acquaint himself with the various periods: Italian Renaissance, French Renaissance, Flemish, Spanish, Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean (Tudor to Stuart), William and Mary, Queen Anne, the Early Georgian, the French periods of the Henris, the Louis, the Empire, the styles of Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton, and the early American forms.

The collector will find many excellent works in English by eminent authorities on furniture, all of which devote proper space to the subject of the chairs of the particular period of which they are treating. There the chair enthusiast will learn that walnut came to be widely used in English chairs after 1650; that Hepplewhite suggested haircloth for chair coverings; that the Carolean crown is a distinguishing feature of the Restoration period; that Queen Anne chairs are marked by simplicity, their beauty depending mainly on their fine lines, graceful curves, delicate veneering, and restraint where inlay is used; that mahogany came into use between 1720 and 1725, and not into general use before 1730; that Chippendale’s best pieces were made between 1730 and 1760; that in all real Chippendale ball-and-claw terminations the claw is carved to suggest vividly a gripping strength, and not as merely resting passively on the ball as in the imitations and in nearly all modern reproductions. These are but a few of the many interesting facts every old-furniture collector should know, points that enable one to collect chairs intelligently and with joy in the pursuit of a delectable hobby that is also a very practical one.

CHAPTER XII
ENGLISH DRINKING-GLASSES

THERE are few general collectors who have not, at some time, come under the enchantment of old glass. It is remarkable that objects so fragile in fabric should have survived the vicissitudes of centuries, as have specimens not only of European glass but of the ancient glass of Syrian, Phœnician, Greek, and Roman manufacture as well.

Glass-making in England had an early origin, derived, it would seem probable, from the Roman invaders. We know it to have flourished to some extent at Cheddingfold in the thirteenth century, continuing there for several hundred years, as we glean from a reference in Thomas Charnock’s “Breviary of Philosophy,” published in 1557, wherein is written: “You may send to Cheddingfold to the glassmaker and desire him to blow thee a glass after thy devise.” An entry in Evelyn’s Diary for February 10, 1685, refers to “his Majesty’s health being drunk in a flint glass of a yard long, by the Sheriff, Commander, Officers and Chiefe gentlemen.” This reminds us that flint glass was discovered and came into vogue prior to 1680; or in that year its fame had caused it to be so highly regarded elsewhere in Europe that manufactories to compete with English ones were established at Liège in that year. The early flint glass of England differed somewhat from the later product. Probably the flint glass as we know it now was not introduced before 1730, or perfected until over a century later.

Of all the English glass none is more beautiful or attractive than the drinking-glasses of this period. Particularly is this true of the engraved and inscribed drinking-glasses which collectors now eagerly seek. Rare, indeed, these glasses have become, and fortunate is the collector who comes across a “find” of the sort. English glass of the eighteenth century, though less ornamental than Venetian, was nevertheless more utilitarian. In respect to the spirit glasses and rummers, which succeeded ale-tankards of metal and of pottery, this is particularly true. No “glasse of Venice” could have withstood the table impact which the English eighteenth-century spirit glasses were designed to survive, a virtue which gave them the name of “firing-glasses,” as the setting down of them by a company surrounding the jovial board produced a noise like a miniature cannonade. Some of these “firing-glasses” in the Leckie Collection, now forming part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum, are engraved with grape-vine designs, and arms, and are inscribed. Of course such engraved and inscribed glasses are of greater interest and rarity than those which are without decoration or inscription.

The method of classification of English drinking-glasses takes into consideration the types of the feet, the types of the bowls, and the types of the stems. There is the plain-footed glass, the glass with the folded foot (so called because the outer circle of the foot is folded back beneath it to strengthen it), the domed foot (shaped as its name suggests), and the domed-and-folded foot glass (a combination of dome and fold). The folded foot is a type which indicates early origin, just as those glasses which have the foot broader than the bowl indicate their origin to have been prior to the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

As to types of bowls, there are the drawn bowl (bowl and stem drawn from a single piece of glass, as in the glasses of the seventeenth century); the bell-shaped bowl, the waist-formed bell bowl, the waisted bowl, the ovoid bowl, the straight-sided bowl, the straight-sided rectangular bowl, the ogee bowl, the lipped ogee bowl and the double ogee form. The waist-formed bell-shaped (waisted-bell) bowl is rarely met with—the early eighteenth century marks its decline—and the waisted bowl is uncommon also. The bell-shaped bowls seem longest to have maintained favor. The Bristol Glass Works originated the ogee bowl shapes, which date from the middle of the eighteenth century.

As to the types of stems, the earliest in design is the baluster stem, in use as early as 1680, and popular till 1730; the plain stem, most frequently met with in glasses from 1700 to 1750; the air-twist stem, in vogue from 1725 to 1775, and perhaps later; the opaque white twist stem, dating from 1745 till the end of the century; the air and opaque white twist stem, the color twist stem, and the cut stem, dating from about the middle of the eighteenth century. Air-bubbles imprisoned in the stems of glasses have given to this type of glass the name of “tear-glass.” Almost without exception the “tears” have their points downward, although glasses showing the reverse of this have in rare instances been met with.

The air-twist stems are an evolution of the tears. The glass containing air-bubbles came to be heated and drawn out and ingeniously manipulated in such a way as to produce the effect of twisted filaments which formed such patterns within the glass as one now and then chances to find. Before manipulation the bubbles were produced artificially by pricking into the glass, softened by heat and covered over, in turn, with a film of molten glass.

The opaque white twist stem, and also the color twist stem, were obtained after the Venetian fashion of making Millefiori glass, described in Chapter XXVII (page 221), as derived from the Roman glass of antiquity. Rare specimens of stems are found with delicate tints of blue and red among the filaments.

All these twist and tear stems are nowadays reproduced and are occasionally fraudulently offered the unwary as genuine. But such glass neither rings true nor is right in color, though the copyists are coming to display their skill in the matter of tint likewise, even though balked by specific gravity. A number of the cut-stem glasses were coaching-glasses—that is, glasses without feet, which stood inverted on the tray when brought to the coach traveler at a relay inn. After his hasty drink the traveler would replace the glass inverted, hence there was no need for a foot; and there was less likelihood of a tray of such glasses, hurriedly carried, coming to grief through carelessness. With the advent of railroads and the decline of coaching such glasses were retired from service. Many of these old-time coaching-glasses were engraved and inscribed, but few of them have survived and a specimen would, indeed, be a pièce de résistance in any collection of glass.

We see from these notes that there is less guesswork connected with the study and collecting of old glass than one uninitiated in the rudiments of its lore might suppose. Nothing is without a reason; the thing is to find the raison d’être—that is a true collector’s pleasure.

Of all the engraved or the inscribed English glass none is more interesting in its historical connection than the Jacobite drinking-glasses. Their story, briefly, is this: After the flight of James II left William of Orange firmly in possession of the government, an act of Parliament, in 1701, formally excluded the house of Stuart from the throne and settled the succession (after William and his sister-in-law Anne should have died) upon the house of Hanover. Prince Charles James Edward, Chevalier of St. George (the son of James II), was recognized by Louis XIV of France as rightful King of England. This led William to prepare to make war on France, when death overtook him, and Anne became Queen of England. Queen Anne, thanks to Marlborough, successfully carried out William’s policies, and every attempt of the Stuarts to regain the throne was frustrated. Anne died in 1714, but as early as 1710 the Cycle, a famous and factious Jacobite club, was formed. Other Jacobite clubs followed throughout England and Scotland. The Jacobites were, of course, those who sought to restore the house of Stuart to the throne, a dangerous treason from the Crown’s point of view, and those Jacobites who had any desire to keep their heads on their shoulders had to proceed with care and secrecy. Nevertheless, even after the rebellion of 1715 and the famous “disappointment” of 1745 the Jacobites, when toasting the king, would hold their drinking-glasses above a bowl of water to signify that they drank to “the king over the water,” the Old Pretender or, after his death, to the Young Pretender.

The bolder Jacobites had their drinking-glasses engraved with Stuart emblems: a heraldic rose and two buds were, for instance, emblematic of James II, his son, and his grandson, while the star, oak-leaves, and acorns, etc., were obvious in allusion. The very boldest Jacobites had glasses inscribed with mottoes—Fiat being the most general one, as this “Let it be done,” was the motto of the Cycle Club, ancestor of Jacobite activity. The more timid Jacobites contented themselves with symbols or inscriptions engraved upon the under side of the foot of the glass. One comes across specimens of the Fiat Jacobite drinking-glass with the two oak-leaves engraved on the foot. Others are engraved with the heraldic rose upon the bowl and a star upon the foot. A large glass—its owner must have been the very boldest Jacobite of all!—is inscribed Audentior Ibo and also bears the portrait of the Young Pretender, whose death in 1788 did not, strangely enough, put an end to Jacobite activities. Indeed, the “Stuart fascination” is one of history’s great mysteries. On the foot of Jacobite glasses one sometimes finds engraved the feathers of the crest of the Prince of Wales; the rose and two buds of the Stuarts on the bowl. Still other glasses are not heraldic, but have the heraldic Stuart rose engraved upon the foot.

It is truly remarkable that any of these Jacobite glasses should have survived, for many of them must, in their perilous time, have had to meet with destruction to escape serving as telltales when sudden and unexpected raids upon Jacobite strongholds were made by the officers of the Crown. Some of these engraved and inscribed Jacobite glasses were probably decorated upon the Continent, but most of them are of English workmanship in engraving as well as in manufacture. Probably many of the Jacobite glasses were made at the glass-works of Newcastle-on-Tyne, proximity to the border of Scotland making such a location convenient on occasion. I think but few should be attributed to the Bristol glass-workers. Probably the largest number of Jacobite glasses were made shortly before the “Forty-five.”

As the Jacobites had specially engraved and inscribed glasses, so, too, did the partisans of King William. Williamite glasses were to be found in Ireland as well, where a number of them—some are extant—were engraved with anti-Jacobite toasts. But when it was not likely that the Irish could forget James II. Authorities are not agreed as to which were first put forth, Williamite or Jacobite glasses, but I am inclined to think precedence in chronological order should be given to the engraved and inscribed Williamite ones. There were, of course, fewer Williamite glasses than Jacobite glasses, just as later there were fewer Hanoverian glasses, as the Williamites and the Hanoverians were in the ascendant, and public loyalty considered itself beyond the necessity of symbolizing its fealty in other than the simple toast.

One may also include mention here of the Hanoverian engraved and inscribed glasses, one of which, for instance, was made to commemorate the coronation of George IV. Finally we come to rummers engraved with Nelson subjects, commemorating England’s naval hero. These, of course, are early nineteenth century, as Nelson lived till 1805.

CHAPTER XIII
STUART EMBROIDERIES

THE Stuart period of embroideries is one of great interest to the collector. A few years ago comparatively little attention was paid to examples of English embroidered work of the seventeenth century. Specimens of the sort are now eagerly sought for, not only by private collectors but by public museums as well. True it is that the English embroideries of the seventeenth century are not comparable in artistic quality with those of earlier periods, although the technical skill displayed therein, particularly in the class known as stump-work, has not been surpassed in English needle-work of any period since that of the very early ecclesiastical embroideries. Certain of its characteristic patterns survived the Elizabethan reign, only to degenerate, during King James’s time, into what one must confess to be some of the most uninteresting work in the whole history of English embroidery. Some quilted work, inspired by Oriental design, and certain crewels for hangings, were exceptions.

This Oriental influence was due to the rapidly developing intercourse, through commerce, of England with India and China, which marked the reign of James I and that of the two Charleses; a proclamation of Charles I, in 1631, for instance, permitted the importation from the East Indies of “quilts of China embroidered with gold.” Obelisks and pyramids were favorite devices with the embroiderers of James I, just as they were with woodcarvers and silversmiths of the day, a fact interesting to note, as these devices often aid the collector in fixing the period of an object he may be studying. Toward the end of this reign it became fashionable to represent religious subjects in needlework. The manufacture of tapestry in England flourished side by side with embroidery throughout the reign of James I and those of Charles I and Charles II, and it was from tapestry subjects that the needlework pictures of the Stuart period derived their inspiration. So thoroughly established had their vogue become, that although the fabrication of tapestry rapidly declined toward the end of the reign of Charles II, embroidered pictures still held their own.

The petit point or tent-stitch was effectively employed in the tapestry embroideries of this period. In its earliest form this stitch was worked over a single thread and produced a massed effect of very fine lines. The tapestry embroideries of the Stuart period often mirrored with extraordinary fidelity the fashions in the dress of the time.

Among objects in Stuart embroidery I have seen a little jewel-cabinet carried out mainly in silk flosses and some wool worked on irregularly woven tawny-white canvas, the material generally in use for petit point work, though the stitch employed in carrying out the pictorial subjects which adorned the sections of this cabinet is known as long-stitch.

Almost as precious as some of the jewels which once may have been treasured in this cabinet are the embroidered sachets, jewel-boxes, needle-case, pincushion, and two bits of beadwork which were tucked away in its recesses. Next to the long-stitch work of the cabinet itself, the stump-work sachet was perhaps the most important of these pieces. Stump-work consisted of featherstitching (though all other stitches were also employed) under which a padding was placed to form raised surfaces, taking this suggestion perhaps from the ancient opus anglicanum. These elevations or “stumps,” as they were called, were of cloth, of hair, of wool, and sometimes of wood, paper, and parchment. In fact, their materials were various. These stumps were glued

or basted on a ground of (generally) white satin, and the stitching was then executed to cover the stumping.

Quaint in conceit, though often crude enough in design, are the stitched emblems in much of this stump-work. The twice-repeated caterpillar was an emblem of the Stuart dynasty often employed, nor are other emblems without intended significance. The eyes of the birds, animals, and insects are often marked by seed-pearls, a practice of even earlier date in England, as one finds from the inventory of St. James House, 1549, wherein is mentioned a picture “of needlework, partly garnished with seed pearl.”

Silver threads are also effectively introduced in Stuart embroideries and edgings of silver lace surround many of the objects such as the pincushion. Many Stuart embroidery patterns were copied from the designs of the richly brocaded silks of the period.

CHAPTER XIV
DELFT

WHEN Horace Walpole’s ceramic treasures at Strawberry Hill came by inheritance to Lord Waldegrave they were sent to the auction room. It took twenty-seven days of long sessions for the auctioneers to dispose of them, notwithstanding the fact that there were eager bidders for every lot in his extensive collection. Of Walpole it was said:

China ’s the passion of his soul.
A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl,
Can kindle wishes in his breast,
Inflame with joy or break his rest.

And how many others there are of us who succumb to this same passion! Pottery and porcelain have, I think, more devotées in the temples of antiques and curios than almost any other of the household gods. Clay feet we know them to have, but we display their shrines!

Dutch delft is one of the sorts of pottery that is especially dear to the gatherer of things ceramic. Its popularity has brought it to be uncommon, but if it is true that twenty years is, as statisticians say it is, the average time for a collection to rest before it comes upon the market again, we may take comfort in the fact that opportunities for picking up old delft are not vanishing. We have only to lie in wait for them, to be courageous in competition and alert in interest.

No faience has crept more winningly into literature than this to which the quaint, quiet little city that lies between The Hague and Rotterdam has lent its name. Here William the Silent dwelt and here he met his tragic death. Here in the little church is the tomb of Admiral van Tromp. Here, too, the Prince of Orange came to live. Knowles says:

With the advent of the Prince and the foreign missions, with their extensive retinue of servants, came increased wealth on the top of Delft’s own commercial and industrial prosperity. It did more; it brought the cultivation of artistic feeling and luxury, and a number of distinguished men of foreign culture and tastes—rich, sumptuous, money-spending, arrayed in costly brocades, moving in elegant carriages; notables and magistrates from neighbouring provinces and towns—all with a train of officialdom pertaining to their rank, with the strict precedence and etiquette, and the ceremonies of the times.

The requirements of the well-to-do households of Delft gave encouragement to the potter’s art. The Dutch were well acquainted with the enameled and glazed pottery of Italy and of Spain. Such maiolica ware undoubtedly inspired experiment. With the importation of the Chinese blue-and-white porcelain—probably all that came to Europe at that early period passed first to Holland—the distinctive faience we know as old Dutch delft came into making, but it assumed distinctive qualities immediately, differentiating it from either the porcelain of China or the white-ground wares of Italy and Spain.

Some one once said to me: “I wish I could begin to collect real old delft, but I am afraid it is so difficult to pass judgment on pieces that without an expert to turn to constantly I should find my cabinet full of spurious ware. Mr. Antiqueman tells me it is very difficult to tell a piece of genuine old delft, unless one has had the years of experience he has had with it.” Happening to have a slight acquaintance with this Mr. Antiqueman, I did not find it difficult to understand why he chose to throw such mystery around the subject. Personally I think too many antique men lose more than they gain by so zealously guarding those trade secrets that are no secrets at all.

Once to know old Dutch delft is never to forget it. The knowing of it is not a difficult matter, once it is explained and one has contact with a genuine piece as an object-lesson.

In the first place, old Dutch delft is a pottery, not a porcelain. Pottery is always opaque, while porcelain is always translucent. Break a pottery object and it will be seen that it was formed of a baked clay base glazed or enameled over with a substance that has given it a coating which does not seem to be incorporated in substance with the base. Break a porcelain object and you will discover that all the way through it appears of a translucent substance. Old Dutch delft of the earliest sort was composed of a soft, friable, reddish clay base. Dutch delft of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a body base of yellowish or pale-brown color.

These bases instead of being glazed were coated with an enamel-like slip. Tin entered into the composition of this coating and this tin-enamel gave it a surface which I should describe as densely opaque, with a metallic feel but without the metallic lustre, for instance, of the maiolica wares of Italy and of Spain. The surface of old delft is absolutely different from the glazed surface of porcelain, of modern pottery.

The modern delft of to-day is not to be confused with the old Dutch delft. The Dutch ware made to-day which passes with the old name is a glazed ware and not, like the old, an enameled ware. In modern so-called delft one can see through the glaze. As I have said, old Dutch delft presents a completely opaque surface.

Just here I should say that in some of the later sorts of old Dutch delft a glaze was added to the enameled surface, but as the enameled coating is there, one will readily recognize it beneath the glaze. As the clay base of old Dutch delft was so soft and friable, the surface of a piece was entirely coated with the tin-enamel. While it was not metallic in the sense of having a metallic lustre like the maiolica of Deruta or of Gubbio, light glinted across the surface of a piece of old delft reveals a tinny sheen. The surface will prove smooth to the touch, but it will not feel glassy as does that of a glazed ware.

So friable is old delft that it is prone to crip at the edges, there revealing the brown body base of the under clay. A drop of strong acid dropped on the body clay thus exposed will effervesce, since there is carbonate of lime in the understructure of old delft. This body clay is so soft that it is easily cut with a knife. This cannot be said of the English Lambeth delft, which English ware, though inspired by the old Dutch delft and contemporary with much of it, was of a much harder body base, denser and more glossy than the Dutch clay. The enamel lay much more closely and evenly to the body base in old Dutch delft than it did in the English delft.

Dutch delft rarely crazed in the kiln; English delft often did so and in consequence its enameled surface came to be glazed to prevent this.

Then one often finds the colors of the decoration of old Dutch delft to have run—neither under nor over the enamel surface but into the enamel. This is because the colors were put upon the Dutch delft while the enamel was still wet and fixed in it during the liquefaction and fixing of the surface coating in the firing of the piece in the kiln. In such pieces of English delft as show the colors of their decoration to have run, it will be seen distinctly that these colors have run upon the enamel of the surface and not into or with it.

Finally the color of the clay body of the Lambeth delft of England is buff.

While nature has given us a sense of blue skies, scientists will tell you that she has been overly sparing with blue in flowers and in bird life. The Chinese had long placed this color as the first of the five nominated in their popular traditions. To blue they gave a symbolism rich and varied. They associated it with the East, for instance, and again with wood. It is natural that it should have been a favorite color for the Chinese ceramicist. The palace china of some of the early Chinese emperors reserved the privilege of blue decoration, a blue, as an old Chinese writer tells us, as “seen through a rift in the clouds after rain.” It was not until the sixteenth century that the Chinese obtained cobalt. This bright and vivid blue made speedy headway as against the grayer blues that until then had alone been produced by the Chinese ceramic artist. Cobalt was introduced into China by either the Jesuits or the Mohammedans; the Chinese themselves named the color “Moslem Blue.”

The blue-and-white porcelain of China appears to have made a direct appeal to the Dutch potters. Blue was the earliest color used by them in their delft decoration. Purple followed, and after that the green, yellow, brown, and red of the polychrome delft pieces that we know.

We do know how popular the Dutch blue-and-white became. Every year quantities of it found their way to England. Much of it was sold there at the Dutch Fair held annually in Yarmouth. King Charles II soon came to fear the effect on local potteries of the extended importation of Dutch delft into England and in consequence issued a proclamation against this commerce, declaring the sale of Dutch delft in England to be “to the great discouragement of so useful a manufacture so late found out” at home, presumably by the potters of Lambeth, who naturally would not be slow in attempting to imitate the Dutch ware so flourishingly in vogue. Probably Dutch potters had come over to work in the English ateliers. In the British Museum are interesting examples of English delft, a particularly fine set of plates having a line of poetry on each, so that when the six are arranged in proper order they form a little five-line verse.

CHAPTER XV
EARLY DESK FURNITURE

THE appeal of old furniture which has the merit of form, design, and workmanship of high order is one that is not the reflection of a passing fad or fancy; it has come to be one of attachment and genuine sincerity. If it took the greater part of the nineteenth century to teach us the futility of fixing our affections on exaggerated novelties, such as those which dimmed the reign of Queen Victoria and boomed the Bunthornes of the ’eighties, the twentieth century finds us discriminatingly chastened. We are taking out of our houses, those of us who can, the pieces of furniture that ought not to have been made, putting into their places old-time things of beauty, or, when it is not possible for us to acquire veritable antique pieces, the high-grade reproductions of old furniture that now grace the market and show no abatement in popular esteem.

In classifying the hobbies of several thousand collectors who stated their preferences, I found that a greater number were interested in old furniture than in any one other subject. This fact is not strange, when one comes to consider the utilitarian phase. Generally, the collector of old furniture starts in with the chance possession of two or three antique bits which, by inspiring interest and appreciation, lead him to wish to bring the other house furnishings into harmony with the loveliness of the old pieces. Few collectors of antique furniture, of course, are without homes of their own, or the modern substitute—the long-lease apartment. The skill of the modern restorer of old furniture accomplishes wonders with the battered derelicts of the houses of yesterday by making the old pieces to shine forth in their glory anew; all of which lends encouragement to the collector and new zest to his traditional delight in the “hunt.”

Upon first thought, a collection of desks might seem like a mastodonian assemblage. So it would be if the collector placed them all in a row or all in a single room! But the house of to-day can accommodate—indeed, finds necessary—more than a single desk in its furnishings. And so the collector of old furniture has another impetus in his search, a utilitarian one. Under the term “desk” we may include the various escritoires, bureau-bookcases and the secrétaires. All of these, in common with our cabinets, tall-boys, and so on, had their origin in the chest or coffer of the Middle Ages. To the bottom of the chest came to be added a drawer. Next, side doors instead of a top lid came into fashion, and in this manner followed the many steps that led to the development of the piece of furniture we designate, for convenience, the desk.

It is not possible to tell just when the earliest desks were made. The desk is a composite affair, combining a cabinet, a bureau, drawers, and a writing-table. In Ghirlandaio’s painting “Saint Jerome in His Study”—a work of about 1480, found in the collection of the Ognissanti in Florence—we see depicted a portable desk of the “schoolmaster” type; and another painting of the same period and in the same collection, the “St. Augustine” by Sandro Botticelli, depicts a desk with drawers. In other paintings by the old masters, and in very early engravings, we see delineated the various pieces of furniture in contemporary use designed for writing purposes, as well as others for the account-keeper. All suggest to us the probable units which combined to produce the escritoire and the secrétaire of later centuries, and lend interest to the collector’s enthusiasm for searching out pieces of the sort.

When living was so much less complex in the matter of domestic doings than it is in our own time, there was far less need of such objects as desks. Whole families, even of the prosperous classes, could get along without them very well. Your Mona Lisa of the Renaissance could have carried her household accounts in her head, and probably did, while the housewife of the Northern countries had little use for a place to keep quires or reams of correspondence paper. Nor had they, in all probability, entered into the sphere of feminine prowess in home-banking matters that made necessary a writing-bureau sacred to personal command.

The finest examples of the craft of the old master cabinet-makers of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth were originally produced for wealthy patrons who paid well for the master’s skill. While such pieces must naturally be beyond the reach of the collector of moderate means—except in rare instances where complete ignorance of their value is combined with a desire to part with them—they are still always interesting to note, and many of them have been reproduced with wonderful skill by some of the leading masters of the craft of furniture-making to-day.

Of course, no reputable dealer will attempt to pass off a modern copy of anything as an original. At the same time, one may take great pleasure in acquiring a truly fine copy of a Queen Anne secrétaire or a Hepplewhite bureau, if it is knowingly purchased as a copy, whereas if deception is practised, the result must be a disappointment and discouragement to the owner, however fine the piece.

Unfortunately, all dealers are not reliable and occasionally fraud is perpetrated in connection with antique furniture. Even the metal trimmings—knobs, handles, etc.—are given the appearance of antiquity by all sorts of devices at the command of skilful craftsmen who produce worm-holes with buck-shot, antiquity with acids, and a worn appearance with friction.

The general furniture-collector is not likely to come across anything in the way of a find in a desk of the Renaissance, seventeenth-century, or even early eighteenth-century Italian periods; nor is he be likely to meet with the finer pieces of other early continental furniture, as nearly all of these, if not in public or great private collections already, would be justly held at a very high price by dealers into whose stock such pieces might come. However, there are frequent public sales of old foreign household furnishings, and great bargains may, indeed, be met with at these. In any event, the collector must cultivate alertness, decision, and intuition for opportunities to buy—and once in a while to sell, too!

To the European the name bureau, from its French derivation, is understood to be associated with writing. In America we connect the term with a piece of furniture designed to hold articles of clothing in its various drawers. It was somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century that the drawer was added to the lower part of the chest. Later in the century further drawer capacity was developed, and by the beginning of the next we find the complete chest of drawers in use. In view of this we shall not expect to find Jacobean desks, though we may find cabinets for writing-materials and documents and even occasional desk-like pieces.