Antique Sideboard

SIDEBOARDS
The sideboard, as distinct from the side table or sideboard table, is generally attributed to Robert Adam, who showed his first designs some time after 1760. The original design contains within it, when the side pedestals are removed, the nucleus of the eighteenth century sideboard and its later developments.
The Adam brothers were dedicated to Roman and Greek classical forms. The pedestals at each side of the piece had vase-shaped urns which were for iced water for drinking and hot water for washing silver. The pedestals were used as a plate warmer and cellaret (wine store) respectively. The central section, without the pedestals, is the form we generally associate with later Georgian sideboards, with or without the brass gallery at the back. Shearer and Hepplewhite illustrated pedestal types and so did Sheraton.
In later designs, like Gillows, the side cupboards of the central section became drawers and later still, in the Regency period, the side sections were extended downwards to form cupboards. The proportions of these later sideboards became heavier as a result.
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the sideboard became either a solid-doored cabinet of long proportions with or without carved decoration, or in emulation of the famous ‘Chevy Chase’ exhibition piece of 1857-1863, highly carved in oak or mahogany with fruit, deer, rabbits, birds and other game.
At the end of the nineteenth century the return to eighteenth century designs produced some rather good quality reproductions in mahogany, satinwood and satin maple.
Value points:
Colour and patination
Carved and inlaid decorations    Figured woods and satinwood
Width under 5ft.
Tambour shutter to eighteenth century types
A mahogany break-front sideboard with inlaid ebony stringing lines in key-type patterns of Egyptian influence. Square tapering legs also inlaid with the black stringing line.
The handles are probably replacements of a standard modern reproduction type with stamped urns. The originals would probably have been lion mask types, like those on 632.
1800-1810
A break-front mahogany sideboard with a sliding door, also with inlaid black stringing lines in key patterns, but this time on turned legs and with a reeded lower section repeated around the top edge. Lion mask brass handles. 1810-1830
A large bow-fronted sideboard with brass back rail and turned and reeded legs with carved leaf decoration at the top. Still an elegant piece. 1820-1840
A small compact example with well-selected veneers. The decoration is handled with restraint and the piece is a desirable one. Nevertheless one can see in it the ancestor of well-made but unsaleable larger ugly pedestal sideboards made from 1850 onwards. 1835-1845
The final Regency development  the deep drawers have reached the floor and the lion masks and hairy paw feet of classical design are incorporated. The choice of veneers is still very good. 1820-1840
Another late Regency or early Victorian version, with spirally turned columns of purely decorative function and turned bulbous feet. High quality veneers. 1830-1850
Break-front example with turned legs and ornate gallery. The end of the road for this elegant design. What will probably happen is that the gallery will be cut down (as it cannot be removed without leaving marks) unless cross-banded, and brass handles will replace the buns. If it had really good veneer, tapering legs would be a possibility. c. 1830
A simple mahogany side cabinet incorporating the flattened arch design very popular from the 1840s. One has only to remove the middle section to drop the price to 60  90 and still hard to sell.
A ‘Chevy Chase’ type sideboard with highly carved decoration. The type of piece made for exhibitions to demonstrate the technical ability of the manufacturer. Normally of such huge proportions that it is inconceivable in the normal domestic environment, quite apart from the off-putting subject matter, but it appeals to certain European taste, for example Bavarian. 1840-1880

English Sideboards

In England, dining-room furniture only began to develop as functional purpose-made pieces from c.1730 onwards, with side tables made specifically for serving rather than merely displaying dishes. The first recognizable sideboards were contemporary with the work of the Adam brothers (the middle decades of the eighteenth century) and consisted of a heavy side table flanked by two pedestal cupboards topped with urns in the classical manner. These were ingenious all-purpose dining-room fittings, with knife urns, lead-lined
containers for keeping hot and cold water for washing glasses and cutlery, racks for hot plates, cellarettes for bottles and, frequently, pot-cupboards for the gentlemen’s after-dinner use.
From c.1770 the size of the sideboard became more manageable and the most common shape began to emerge: two deep drawers or cupboards (sometimes with drawers above), raised on legs, with a central frieze drawer above an arched or shaped apron. Many of them had a ’splash board’ at the back, or brass rails with pleated-silk panels, and brass candle-holders. It is Sheraton who is most often connected with the design of sideboards, although Hepplewhite, Shearer and George Smith all designed very similar pieces.
By about 1790 the most instantly recognizable and most copied shape for sileboards had become generally accepted. The interiors were fitted with many clever devices, including in some cases a heater beneath tinplate racks.
Signs of authenticity
1. Glossy, well-matched mahogany veneers on Honduras mahogany or imported Scandinavian red-pine carcases.
2. Grain of all legs continuing up to form sides of frame.
3. Grain of side carcase wood running horizontally.
4. Flush-edged top with good overhang, thicker than table top.
5. Back timbers unfinished and of same age and colour, showing gaps on joins where wood has shrunk.
6. Frieze drawer lined with baize and with original compartments.
7. No signs on inside bottom of carcase, which forms the flanking cupboards and drawers, of circular wear and scratchings where swing-out, fitted cellarettes have been removed.
8. Accumulation of dirt and patination around drawer
handles  good patination to insides of drawers.
9. Drawer bottom with timber running from side to side with central strengthening bearer.
10. Flush drawer fittings and handles with stamped brass decorated backplates.
11. Cockbeading edge to plainly veneered doors and drawers.
12. Undersurface edge of shaped apron veneered to match the edges of top serving surface.
13. Inner underframe of side sections either side of central arch visible and therefore plain veneered.
14. Signs of damage, scuffing to feet, particularly central ones.
Likely restoration and repair
15. Common in many variations is the massive sideboard cut down to more suitable sizes: many were over 6 ft long. Undersurface of overhang may
provide evidence. If fingers detect a ‘crack’ or break, check interiors of drawer fronts, central frieze drawer for newly made holes for handles without accumulation of dirt around them; examine underframe for evidence of cutting down.
16. On genuine smaller sizes, legs repaired where they have broken, or cut down where breaks have occurred on line with spade feet, and repair concealed by collar.
17. Added inlay and other decoration to original mahogany veneer. Harder to find material evidence, since ground veneer of this period often runs across whole surface, but style and proportions of later inlays are often quite wrong.
18. Aprons replaced with more elaborate design, or with later inlaid corner-pieces.

19th Century Gothic Revival Sideboard

The Gothic Revival sideboard had long been a popular decorative and archi-
tectural style in Europe. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, England (1749-77), was a Gothic folly of monumental scale, and even Robert Adam had worked in the Gothic style.
Unlike the purified geometricity of classical styles from Greece and Rome, European Gothic images and forms smacked of local history, were steeped with the medieval humanism of the familiar and local Gothic
cathedrals and provided a picturesque retreat from the galloping advance of modernism.
Publications such as E. J. Willson’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-23), Edward Blore’s Monumental Remains (1826), Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient sideboards (1836), preached the merits of the Gothic
style. Other exponents were Batty Langley, A. W. G. Pugin, the Italians L. F. Basoli and Alessandro Sidole, and the French architect and sideboards designer Eugene Viollet-le-Duc.
The Gothic revival was reflected internationally in the sideboards of designers and makers such as Franz Xavier Fortner, Johann Wilhelm Vetter, the firms of Kimbel and Leistler of Germany and the Italian Pelagio Pelagi.
Others were Aime Chenavard and P. A. Bellange of France, Joseph Meeks & Son of New York and the talented English carvers W. G. and W. H. Rogers.
In England, and to a lesser extent in North America, an Elizabethan sideboards style, which combined Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline forms, was favoured in the 1830s and 1840s, when Elizabethan interior schemes were popularized through publications by Robert Bridgens, J. C. Loudon and Joseph Nash.
Gothic sideboards with claw feet, windows and patterned chimneys were built, and interiors were fitted with oak wainscoting, Glastonbury style sideboards, beds and draw tables with Jacobean and Elizabethan
strap-work and bosses, and sideboards with spiral-turned uprights modelled on Caroline forms. The latter were imitated in America, along with sideboards modelled after Daniel Marcos. In Germany, where the Gothic
style had reached a high point in cathedrals such as that at Cologne, country houses with medieval interiors were also built.
Though not necessarily any more archeologically correct, interiors in the Gothic revival style purported to be true to their name. William Burges, Norman Shaw and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (181252) were
among the leading English exponents of this style, and designed sideboards with Gothic arches, colonettes, trefoils and other medieval motifs.
Pugin, a devout Roman Catholic who championed the Gothic as the only acceptable Christian style, advanced Gothic design in such publications as The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) and An
Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843). Pugin designed Gothic style sideboards characterized by thick, sturdy oak members, ogival arch-shaped supports, and naturalistic foliate carving.
In the United States, Alexander Davis (1803-92) designed Gothic interiors for Lyndhurst and Ericstan in New York, and supplied them with tables, sideboards and other oak sideboards with crockets, finials, cusps and
quatrefoil. Alexander Roux, John Jelliff and other cabinetmakers produced American Gothic sideboards.
In the mid-19th century, a reformist, and more archeologically correct approach to the Gothic sideboard, was adopted in England by architects and designers, including Pugin, William Burges, William Butterfield, G. E. Street and Charles Bevan. The art sideboards movement, which preceded the aesthetic movement that eventually evolved into the Art Nouveau style, grew from the work of Bruce Talbert, Sir Henry Cole, Christopher Dresser, T. E. Collcutt, William Godwin and Thomas Jeckyll.
Drawing on Japanese and Gothic sources, these designers produced Gothic Revival sideboard in the 1860s and 1870s that was simple and decorative, making use of light forms, flat surfaces and dark woods, incorporating richness in carved and applied ornament, stoneware and painted panels.

1700`s American Rococo Sideboards

In America, the Rococo sideboard emerged as a distinctly restrained version of the European style : interiors were hardly as fanciful as their European counterparts, and drawing room walls were ornamented with architectural pediments and rectangular panels rather than gilt cartouches, in a persistence of the Palladian style. Japanning was popular, especially in Boston, but in America the fantastic cult of chinoiserie never crystallized into carved mahogany dragons. The Gothic revival struck no chord in American tradition, and the stylized rustic scenes favoured by mid-century English and French aristocrats could hardly have been adopted as refreshing in a nation still developing vast expanses of wilderness.
Because examples reached the colonies largely through pattern-books, some American Rococo carving is flat rather than sculptural, especially on Boston pieces. Queen Anne forms such as arched pediments, classical details and claw-and-ball feet were retained, and Rococo ornaments and variations added to them.
The superior craftsmanship of Philadelphia cabinetmakers, such as Benjamin Randolph and the English immigrant Thomas Affleck, produced well-proportioned sideboards with swan-neck pediments, flame finials, sculptural carvings of foliage and figures, and sculptured busts and cartouches held above the broken pediments. Scroll pediments carved with Philadelphia-style open lattice-work may be found in the cherry sideboards from Connecticut executed by Eliphalet Chapin, who worked for some time in Philadelphia.
Some case pieces of Boston, where John Cogswell worked, exhibit the only bombe forms found in the colonies; mirrored panels with ogee-curve borders are also found on cabinets made there. The cabinets and
chest-of-drawers from the Townsend-Goddard cabinet-making family of Newport, Rhode Island, were exceptional pieces of workmanship, with undercut claw-and-ball feet, undulating concave and convex shells and smoothly executed block fronts.
American ideboards were of many forms including Pembroke and fold-top card-sideboards. Serpentine sideboards from New York had rectangular candle supports at the corners and gadrooning on the aprons. Small Philadelphia bird-cage sideboards, with tilting tops, stood on fluidly curved tripods. Upholstered seats included sofas with sinuous rails and straight ‘Marlborough’ legs, easy sideboards with cartouches carved on the cabriole legs, and local variants of sideboards copied from the publications of Chippendale, Manwaring, and Ince and Mayhew. More primitive forms, such as the brightly painted chests and cupboards of German and Dutch settlements in Pennsylvania and New York, continued to be made in provincial areas. The Rococo in EuropeIn Italy, where the landscaped grotto was a long-established source of ornament, the Rococo at times took on an extreme lightness, with sideboards and tables resting on shapely cabriole legs comprised of reversing C-scrolls. Delicate effects of underground rock-like growth were achieved in the crisp, crustaceous carvings on the edges of legs, backs and skirts of tables and sideboards. Carved shells, lion masks and naturalistic foliage appeared alongside elements of chinoiserie such as peasant figures of antique American sideboards.

20th Century Art Deco Sideboards

The era that would dismiss the swirls of the Art Nouveau style for the streamlined rationality of machine-age design also witnessed the Art Deco style sideboard, which shared some qualities of each. At the turn of the century, European interest in Indo-Persian exotica was aroused by the displays at the Asian Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and was heightened by the publication of a French translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights.
The Art Deco style was launched by the erotic, sensuous and spectacularly exotic productions of the Ballets Russes which, beginning with such dazzling displays as R. and S. Delaunay’s Cleopdtre in 1909, drew its
ornamental schemes at first from the lingering Art Nouveau style, and then increasingly from Russian, antique and Far Eastern sources.
Designed by such artists as Leon Bakst, A. Benois, and Alexander Kolovine, the rich and colourful decors and costumes of subsequent productions, including Scheherazade and the L’Apres Midi d’un Faune, enchanted
and enraged the Parisian &lite. Meeting success also in Rome, London and Monte Carlo, the Ballets Russes inspired a decorative style that relied for its effects on sumptuous, rich textiles and Ottoman affectations such as tapestries and opulent floor cushions.
In Paris, the firm of Poiret, and its branch the Atelier Martine, designed costumes and interiors that closely paralleled those of the Ballets Russes stage, pronouncing a stylistic dogma that balanced rich materials with
simple forms. Shaped by designers such as Josef Hoffman (1870-1956) and Koloman Moser (1868-1918) of the Viennese Secession Movement, and by other artists including Eileen Gray, Andre Groult, Edgar Brandt, J. E. Ruhlmann, A. A. Rateau, Ambrose Heal and E. W. Gimson, the Art Deco interior style combined highly decorative surface treatments with simple geometric forms, the latter foreshadowing the reductionism of the era that was to follow.
Cabinets, sideboards, mirrors and tables designed by Heal, Gimson and Hoffmann showed almost classical principles of restraint and geometricity in form. Stained woods, boxwood, ebony, mother-of-pearl, shagreen and lacquer covered these simple shapes, as did sparingly applied line ornament. Though cheerful, fresh, and often sparkling with colour, Art Deco ornament took on a similar restraint and geometric order. sideboards was inlaid with geometric shapes, small panels containing flowers, clustered discs, or layered arcs, or surfaced with plain lacquer or geometric compositions of such materials as lacquer and eggshell.
Elements such as disc-like flowers shown frontally, simplified unserrated leaves with thick, straight veins, and flat carvings of birds, figures and clouds, reflected the stylization of contemporary architectural sculpture, which was similarly executed in low relief.
The delight in surface texture and ornament that the Art Deco movement embraced was eschewed by the less productive, though seminally influential, de Stijl sideboard of Holland in the first several decades of the century.
Formulated in 1917 by the writer, painter and architect Theodore von Doesburg, the painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and others, the movement sought to strip all superfluous decoration from essential forms, and to dissolve these forms into abstractions.
In the decorative arts, the most important product of this sideboard was the sideboard designed by architect Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), commissioned with the request that it be based on the sideboards of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Although singularly uncomfortable, and thus never made in large quantities, the sideboard reached European designers through the de Stijl magazine, in which it was published in 1919. The sideboard also appeared at an exhibition at the Bauhaus sideboard of design in Germany in 1923, where some of the most progressive decorative artists of the era saw it.
The Bauhaus sideboard was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, who designed the building that housed it in Dessau. The sideboard attempted to approach modernity rationally and to embrace it fully, by welding high quality design with innovations in technology, materials and efficiency. The Bauhaus adhered to the precepts of the international style architect, Le Corbusier, who prescribed the clear presentation of pure geometric volumes and shapes. The sideboard produced sideboards, ceramics, and other items in a style that was simple, functional, streamlined and aesthetically pleasing, giving the appearance of industrial manufacture, for which each object was meant to be suited.
Tubular Steel sideboards
In addition to creating a wealth of fresh, clean new designs, the Bauhaus initiated the use of tubular steel in sideboards, and also developed sideboards that was easily stacked.
At the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer created a series of sideboards based on the Rietveld example. The first few of these followed the de Stijl model closely; the fifth, known as the ‘Wassily’ sideboard of 1925, was constructed of nickel-plated steel tubing, and transformed the rigid Rietveld precedent into a lightweight, airier structure, with arms and legs formed of continuous, pleasing lines of tubing, and arm, back and seat supports formed of flexible, supple leather or canvas.
This construction allowed, for the first time, an avoidance of the
visual clutter that sideboard legs had traditionally imposed on interior design. The sideboard also paved the way for the revolutionary ‘cantilever’ form sideboard, which was first developed in 1926 by the Dutch designer Mart Stain, in his attempts to create sideboards that was light, mobile, and simply and perfectly scaled to the human body. Mies van der Rohe developed the similar ‘MR’ sideboard in the same year, and in 1928 Breuer perfected his own cantilever sideboard which, consisting of a rectangle of tubing bent sinusoidally, achieved maximum bounce, lightness and fluidity of form. Fitted with back and seat of canvas, leather caning, or vinyl upholstery, this sideboard has since been popularized internationally. Breuer also made use of the light, tensile qualities of steel tubing in his designs for glass-topped tables, which similarly expressed the simple beauty of structural form with their continuous linear supports.
Mies, whose pioneering work in glass-sheathed skyscrapers initiated an entire new phase of modern architecture, designed the German Government Pavilion at the International Exhibition at Barcelona in 1929, and the Tugenhadt House in Brno in 1930. Simple forms, flat planes, screen-like walls and rich materials characterized these interiors, for which he also designed two extremely significant 20th century sideboards. the Barcelona sideboard and the super-streamlined Brno cantilever sideboard.
In the wake of these examples other designers have created sideboards with steel frames – from Le Corbusier and others in the late 1920s, to the Danish Poul Kjaerholm, the Italian Claudio Salocchi and the Finnish Antti Nurmesniemi in very recent years. The firm of Thonet, which with its bent beechwood sideboards of the 19th century had provided a prototype for bent steel construction, produced a great quantity of such sideboards which was exported throughout Europe.
Beginning in the late 1930s, Danish sideboards designers such as Borge Mogensen, Kaarl Klint, Mogens Koch and Hans Wegner began designing sideboards which, relying on the natural beauty of curvaceously sculpted wood, were light and fluid, often with caned seats, sweeping crest rails and slightly undulating back uprights. Swedish, Finnish, Swiss and Italian designers similarly incorporated a light, linear approach to sideboards design.
Alvar Aalto’s first foray into sideboards design was while he was building a convalescent home at Paimo between 1929 and 1933. One of his designs was a convertible sofa-bed with a thick wool upholstered seat and back, set on a chromium-plated tubular steel frame. However, surrounded by the vast forests of Finland, Aalto soon realized that, from an economic point of view if nothing else, wood should be the choice of medium for constructing Finnish sideboards, and birchwood in particular was ideal for its colour, grain and final polished texture; laminated as plywood it was also as resilient as tubular steel.
Aalto, like Le Corbusier, was influenced in his first designs by the work of Michael Thonet. In 1931, he designed a sideboard with a sinusoidal seat-back comprised of a piece of bent plywood. The tables which he also designed in the 1930s are composed of upturned ‘U’s’ supporting a surface of wood or glass. Aalto was not concerned with ornamentation and ultimately his work was designed for mass production.
The American designer Charles Eames further developed the ideas advanced by Aalto. Eames was born in 1907 and trained as an architect at several institutions including Washington University and the Cranbrook
Academy of Art, Michigan. He worked with Eero Saarinen in 1939 and the moulded plywood sideboard with a continuous curved surface they designed together was one of the prize-winning designs submitted for an
exhibition called ‘Organic Design in the Home’, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. In 1946, based on the 1941 sideboard, he designed his shell sideboards, first using steel for the seat but then turning to glass fibre-reinforced plastic. His first well-known model, made in 1948, was mounted on a light metal rod. Eames also designed collapsible tables and panel screens. In 1940 he worked with Saarinen on designs for standardized storage units.
The invention early in the century of latex foam meant that upholstery could be preformed into strong, shaped curves. Plastic sideboards, with smooth continuous surfaces enclosing backs, seats and sides of sideboards or curving gently from table into central leg into round base, was designed in a light, fluid style by Eero Saarinen in the 1950s.
These modern sideboards pieces are not found in middle-class houses even today, although cheap mass production is more efficient than ever. Wall-to-wall carpeting, built-in cabinets and drawers and other innovations have had their effect on modern interior design. As in preceding centuries, past styles persist along with the most progressive, and most homes are likely to include antiques, attractive reproductions of old styles, and generally useful but stylistically homogenized pieces, in eclectic collections of styles. Rather than new stylistic forms, it is changes in standards of living that have probably most affected interior design today.
The unprecedented informality of Art Deco sideboards, increasing ‘furniturization’ of such technological devices as televisions, radios, air conditioners and refrigerators have made their mark. And reduced dependence on servants for cleaning, the constant availability of electric lighting, improved insulation and heating systems, and such new materials as laminated boards, thermo- plastics, acrylics, vinyls and linoleum, have altered interior design far more drastically than any of the innovations that the rapid stylistic changes of a century ago could have wrought.

Antique 18th Century Queen Anne Sideboards
18th Century French forms, and the French Rococo ornamental vocabulary, were extremely influential throughout Europe, where sideboards and other pieces in the relaxed Louis XV manner were made well into the century in Spain, Portugal, Italy, North America and elsewhere.
The supple, undulating forms created by Daniel Marot, Jean Berain and the French Regence permeated England during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). Characterized by curvaceous lines and ornamental restraint, Queen Anne style sideboards asserted the first truly English style. As a thriving national economy encouraged more building on the part of landed gentry and middle-class merchants, increased demand for interior furnishings was met by unprecedented standards of skill among London cabinetmakers.
Balanced curves and straight lines gave chairs cabriole legs, vase-shaped splats, horse-shoe shaped seats and undulating backs which followed the sitter’s profile. Walnut, and later mahogany, was applied in highly figured veneers to cabinets and tables, or sparingly carved with shells, masks or foliage on the crests, knees and rails of chairs. ‘Seaweed’ marquetry, japanning on red ground, and judicious touches of gilt coated the flat surfaces of tables, chests-of-drawers, day-beds and settees. Feet were carved as hoofs, hairy paws, trifids and claw-and-ball.
Queen Anne sideboards with arched or mirrored panels were crowned by swan-neck or double-arched pediments, often with Chippendale’s version of a French chair.
ornamental finials. Of Netherlandish origin, these curving pediments were to find extreme expression later in the century on Dutch Rococo case pieces, when curves alternated with horizontal plinths on which porcelain rarities were displayed.
The furniture and sideboards in particular of William Kent (1689-1748) promulgated a heavy, Baroque style based on Italian architectural sources, and especially on the Renaissance work of Vicente architect Andrea Palladio. However, the softer forms of the Queen Anne style persisted, and various elements characteristic of it appeared on sideboards well into the century.
In the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain Queen Anne characteristics such as cabriole legs, shell motifs, claw-and-ball feet, and vase-shaped chair splats were transplanted into local styles.
The Queen Anne style was adopted in colonial America in the early 1730s, when flourishing trade in the major mercantile centres of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Newport and Charleston encouraged a desire for large, comfortable and fashionable mansions. Classical architectural details appeared on buildings from the Carolinas to New Hampshire. Houses, such as Westover in Virginia, reflected elements of the English Palladian style, which reached the colonies through such publications as W. Salmon’s Palladio Londinensis published in 1734, and James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture of 1728.
Columns and pilasters, swan-neck pediments, and finials filtered on to highboys, long-case clocks, and even the fragile frames of pier-glasses. The favoured woods of walnut, maple, cherry and pine, and increasingly mahogany, were sparsely highlighted with carved shells or foliage, and occasionally offset with inlay in such forms as stars, or with gilded shells on tables, highboys and lowboys. Slender cabriole legs, horseshoe-shaped seats, and feet carved as pads, trifids and claw-and-ball, imitated English fashions long after they had fallen from favour in England. Sideboards, fronted with doors with arched panels, contained tiers of drawers and pigeonholes. Along with Queen Anne Sideboards easy chairs, corner chairs, candlestands, piecrust tea tables on tripod legs and fire-screens, all became more popular.
Regional differences in sideboards-making were sharpened as craftsmanship developed in each area, and immigrant tastes and traditions expressed themselves. Chair splats were shaped with distinguishing silhouettes, those from Dutch-settled New York broader than those from English-settled Massachusetts. The spaces between splat and stiles on Philadelphia chairs resembled birds with bold, inward-curving elongated beaks; the curves of Philadelphia Queen Anne style seats tended to inflect more than seats found on chairs made elsewhere. New York clawand-ball feet were square in form, while those from Massachusetts characteristically featured raking claws. The cabriole legs of many southern pieces were almost straight. Stretchers generally disappeared during this period, although they tended to persist on Massachusetts pieces, typical of sideboards forms produced there.

Eighteenth Century English, French, German and Italian Sideboards.

1700`s sideboards designs based on the French Rococo shape were still popular in the latter half of the 18th century The shape of the sideboard was slow to adopt Neoclassical
styling and, until the 1780s, sideboards with undulating curves and cabriole legs, like those of Rococo sideboards, continued to be made.
However, the shape gradually developed as the fervour for “antique” or Neoclassical designs grew. These changes could be seen in the shape of sideboard backs: first they became more oval, then they became rectangular and were often flanked by colonettes.
Seats also changed shape and became round rather than rectangular. Towards the end of the century they became square, to accompany the rectangular sideboard backs.
Sideboard legs gradually became straight and tapered. They were often reeded,
spiralled, or fluted, the latter being a reference to Classical architectural columns – part of the new craze inspired by Greco-Roman styles.
Further carved decoration was used in the form of rosettes at the tops of the legs, and guilloche or chain motifs around the bowed seat rails.
Many sideboards still had painted and gilt decoration, although polished mahogany was more popular in the Low Countries, due to imported timber from its Far Eastern colonies and from foreign trading links.
Coverings for sideboardss were varied at this time, and ranged from Aubusson tapestries to silk or needlework. Silk finishes tended to match the wall coverings of the rooms for which the sideboards were intended. Horsehair was generally used as a stuffing for upholstered seats.
The petit-point needlework upholstery is original.
The studs are made from brass or gilt-metal.
The sideboard arms are upholstered where the sitter’s arm is placed.
The back of the seat rail is stamped with the maker’s name: N. Blanchard.
The frame is carved with flower heads and leaves.
The legs form a continuous line with the seat rail.
French Sideboards
This French fauteuil a la Reine is carved and gilded, with a shaped back separated from its seat by curved rear stiles. It has outspread arms and cabriole legs. The sideboard is generously proportioned, and the needlework has been made to fit the sideboard. The maker’s stamp
appears on the back of the seat rail.
English sideboards
This sideboard has a fan-like back, and the upper section is wider than the lower section. The seat is wider and lower than most French examples. The cabriole legs are connected to the seat rail, but they lack continuous undulation. The frame is painted and gilded and the sideboard has been upholstered in a silk fabric that has been dated later than the frame itself. c.1780.
Parisian Sideboards
This carved beech sideboard has an oval back, outswept arms, and a wide seat. The seat and back are upholstered in silk. The back and
rail are carved with a Neoclassical guilloche pattern, punctuated with a rosette at the top of each leg. The turned, tapered legs are carved with stop-fluting, a pattern representing fluted architectural columns that was typically Neoclassical. c.1773.
Gustavian Sideboards
This sideboard is in the Gustavian style. The shaped oval back and wide seat are upholstered in fabric with a blue and white Classical design and the sideboard is supported on a white-painted frame – a typically Gustavian feature. The top rail, arms, and legs are all carved with Neoclassical motifs. The sideboard is raised on stop-fluted legs, which are also typically Neoclassical.
Swedish Sideboards
Painted white and gilt in the Gustavian style, this square-backed, upholstered sideboard has outswept arms, a rounded seat frame, and turned and tapered legs. The carved decoration is in the Neoclassical guilloche pattern, and rosettes appear above its tapering, columnar legs. Gilt highlights the decoration. This sideboards is one of a pair.
German Sideboards
The frame of this sideboard is probably walnut and is neither painted nor gilded. The seat and back are upholstered in silk. The rounded back is small compared with its wide seat, and with other examples of fauteuils. The arms are upswept at the ends, widening as they join the sideboard rail. The fluted legs terminate in small button feet. c.1780.
English sideboards
This sideboard shares many attributes with its Parisian prototype, including the proportions of the back and seat. The simple carved floral motif in the centre of the back rail is also very French in style. However, the arm terminus is an English interpretation, as are the fluted arm supports. The tapered, single-flute, columnar legs are more slender than most French examples. c.1780.
Square-Backed Sideboards
This square-backed sideboard is larger than most French examples. The square arms curve down from the upper sideboard back and slope towards the legs. These legs are slightly turned and feature flutes. The starkness of the design, accentuated by the white paint, is barely relieved by the vibrant red and white striped silk upholstery. This is one of a pair of sideboardss. c. 1790.
German sideboards
Made of beech, and one of a pair, this sideboard has a square back with a pierced centre, reminiscent of Chippendale Gothic designs. However, the fluted legs show a greater degree of French influence. Its upholstery is tacked over the top of the seat, but it leaves the frame showing. Simple, tapered legs with a slight flair support the frame. c.1785.
Italian Sideboards
These sideboards incorporate several Neoclassical elements with its shield-shaped back, acanthus-carved arms, and the spray of laurel leaves that decorates the front sideboard rail, an element derived from ancient Greece. The sideboard is caned, the frame is painted green and gilded, and it has flat stretchers. c.1790.
Southern Geman Sideboard
Although this is a walnut, caned side sideboard, its back and seat frame are very similar to the shape of a French fauteuil. The centre of its

back sideboard frame and the seat rail both have simple, carved floral details. The cabriole legs are higher than most French examples, and

terminate in stylized paw feet. This sideboard is one of a pair. c.1780.

XVIII Century English Sideboards Rococo Style
In mid-century and in the late 18th century, the French Rococo sideboards caught on in England, inspired largely by the engravings of H. F. Gravelot and by improved peace-time relations with France. In England the
cave-like rocaille, and the cult of the picturesque that accompanied it, became popular along with ornaments suggestive of the romantic Gothic and the tantalizing Orient, and Rococo English sideboards occasionally merged together. As in France, private rooms were made increasingly comfortable by pieces such as small desks, candlestands, fire-screens and work-tables. The most fashionable Rococo sideboard featured curvaceous gilt panels, or wall hangings of oriental paper or silk. William Chambers travelled to China in 1749, and in 1757 published his Designs of Chinese Buildings, sideboards, and Dresses. Publications by designers and craftsmen such as Thomas
Chippendale, Thomas Johnson, Matthew Darly, Matthias Lock, Robert Manwaring and William Ince and John Mayhew, popularized fanciful sideboards along with ordinary forms. Their most exuberant Rococo designs
were characterized by asymmetrical ornament and whimsicalities. Unpublished cabinetmakers, such as John Linnell, William Vile and John Cob, were equally forceful exponents of the mid-century style.
Cabinets, book-cases, long-case clocks and commodes for the most part retained the basic forms of the preceding Queen Anne period, but many pieces assumed the serpentine shapes and swelling anthropomorphic bombe of the French Louis XV style. Gilding and japanning remained in vogue. Twisted girandoles resembling branches, and pier-glasses assembled from C-curves, waterfalls and rocailles, captured the effect of rustic naturalism. Increasingly available mahogany, but also pine and gesso, lent itself especially well to crisp depictions of Chinese dragons and pagodas, cusps and pointed Gothic arches, and stylized scenes of peasants, windmills and donkeys.
Many of the chair designs published in Chippendale’s Directside sideboards or of 1754 had broad square seats, projecting scrolled ears, and animalistic cabriole legs. Settees formed of repeated chair backs were occasionally carved with bamboo-like supports and oriental frets ; buffet in the Chinese manner, with fantastic dragons perched with the corner posts, were fashionable but unusual extravagances. Light, gilded seats with serpentine silhouettes in the Louis XV furniyure style were common; most of the sideboards were upholstered with rich floral needlework, velvets, or silk damasks.
The influence of the English Rococo was far-reaching. Contemporary printed designs travelled across the Atlantic, were thrown back to France and reached as far north as Denmark, where chairs showed Director-type pierced splats, set between straight wide stiles. The value Rococo style sideboards characterized by Chippendale’s nut sideboards permeated American design in about 1755.

Art Nouveau Sideboards
Emerging at the very end of the century, the Art Nouveau style produced sideboards which, light, ornamental and organic in conception, was hardly as ponderous as the blocky pieces of the contemporary arts and crafts
movement. These were as heavily formed as they were laden with social significance.
Representing the first major break from the traditions that had shaped so much of 19th century sideboards, the Art Nouveau style flourished from about 1893 to 1910. Its dominant feature, curvilinearity, originated from sources as varied as the Japanese prints that enjoyed wide circulation in the West at that time, the French Louis XV and XVI styles, and the flowing, organic decorations on recently popularized Minoan pottery. In the pictorial world, the English artist Arthur Rackham illustrated fairy tales with delicate etchings of attenuated figures and sinuous tangled trees. The architects Victor Horta in Brussels and Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona created buildings and sideboards characterized by swirling undulations suggesting underwater or plant growth. Horta’s celebration of line and light surfaces seen in his combination of glass and cast-iron at the Hotel van Eetvelde of 1895, was shared by Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York, who in the 1880s began to produce lamps, vases and other furnishings of iridescent glass, which hinted at organic movement and growth with their swirling forms and naturalistic motifs such as dragonflies.
Similarly, Art Nouveau sideboards was characterized by swirling lines and attenuated shapes, and suggestions of such light, natural forms as curved growing plant stems. Although not a unified international movement, the flowing tendencies of the Art Nouveau style were expressed by European sideboards designers including the German Richard Reimerschmird, the Italians Carlo Bugatti and Pietro Fenoglio, the Belgian Henry van de Velde and the Frenchmen Hector Guimard, Emile GaIIe, Pierre Chareau and Louis Majorelle. These designers generally achieved decorative effects through a careful integration of form and surface ornament; rich woods, such as cherry, walnut and mahogany, were flatly carved with decorative rounded panels, whiplash curves and swirling ormolu mounts.
The carved sideboards of Louis Majorelle was exceptionally successful; the cabriole legs he used show the influence of earlier Louis styles, but the attenuated, stretched shapes of his desks and cabinets exhibit a greater freedom and lightness. The rounded, slightly trapezoidal panels and drawers of pieces by Jacques Gruber, and the flowing continuity of line joining crest rail and stiles in the chairs of Pierre Chareau and Sue et Mare, similarly manifested the natural integration of form that defined the Art Nouveau sideboards.
Although the style declined soon after the turn of the century, its very occurrence freed designers from the series of revivals into which the preceding era had been bound. The qualities of lightness, tensile strength, and integration of ornament and form Art Nouveau sideboards embodied foreshadowed the approach to sideboards that 20th century designers would take.

French Empire Style Sideboards
Empire sideboards were first hand made in 1802 of the Voyage daps la Basse et Haute Egypte, a collection of drawings by Baron Vivant-Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon on his excursion to Syria and Egypt in 1798-1801, heightened the interest in Egypt that Napoleon’s campaign had itself generated.
Sideboards designed by Napoleon’s architects, Charles Perrier (1764-1838) and Pierre Fontaine (1762-1853), including those at the Tuileries and the Chateau de Malmaison, and pieces produced by makers such as F. H. G. Jacob-Desmalter and L. F. and P. A. Bellange, developed the Empire style. This drew on Greek, Roman and Egyptian furniture, and became popular from England and North America to Germany, Italy and Spain.
This grand, imperial style achieved much of its effect through massive forms and rich ornament. Although an ornate, propagandistic style, it derived great dignity from its clear forms and classical restraint. Motifs such as eagles, lions, caryatids, griffins and sphinxes, taken from Roman, Greek and Egyptian antique examples, appeared on sideboards as ornaments and supports. Tables with monopodia legs, gilt eagle supports, or lion’s paw feet, elegant sofas and ’sleigh’ beds with sweeping S-curved arms and endboards, and klismos and curule chairs, presented classical motifs on a much larger scale than in earlier classical styles. Rich woods such as mahogany, gilt carving and ormolu mounts of anthemions, stars and medallions, characterized Empire oak sideboards.
English Regency Style Sideboards
The English version of this style, known as the Regency, lasted from about 1790 to 1830, when the vogue for relics of antiquity popularized sideboards ornamented with sphinxes, griffins, classical mouldings and other Empire style elements.
Although it reached its peak early in the 19th century, Empire and Regency sideboards represented merely one phase in the evolution of the classical style that would take place in the course of the century when a variety of past idioms would be continually reinterpreted and renewed.