Antique Sideboard

SIDEBOARDS  art nouveau and progressive, 1890-1915
We have explained elsewhere how art nouveau is a term now used to describe furniture which many of its English original designers would have hotly refuted. The Scottish school and the Century Guild are another
matter, since their sinuous designs are much more akin to Continental art nouveau.
In this section we show sideboards from blatantly art nouveau originals to commercially watered-down versions and one or two other ‘progressive’ designs. There are many side cabinets which might have been
included here but we have preferred to retain them in the Cabinet section out of a sense of technically philological purity.
A sideboard-cum-side cabinet of interesting art nouveau decoration on serpentine bracket feet. Included here because surely the lower half with, its three central drawers and flanking cupboards, dictates that it was
intended as a sideboard. The piece has rather astonishing inlaid ‘tulip’ decoration with whip-lash curves and the two high side cabinets on the top half flank a much more conventional glazed cabinet of shorter
dimensions. The glazing bars have an additional curved bar each side of the central panel, as though the designer was tired of the verticality of the construction and wanted to relate something to the sinuous inlays.
Note the interesting use of diagonally-chequered stringing lines which give an arts and crafts touch.
A mahogany sideboard of interesting design which combines a traditional English form with the use of inlays of ‘whip-lash’ art nouveau floral decoration. The canted glazed side-cupboards are a design associated with Liberty’s, who espoused art nouveau and quaint furniture enthusiastically. C. 1900
An almost aggressively art nouveau oak sideboard, more on the Continental lines of the style than the British. The sides of the lower half, with their protruding tapering stiles in the ‘Eastlake’ manner, are broken by the sinuous curves of carved floral decoration. The bronze hinges, handles and applied tulips are over-decorative and there is a good deal of ostentation about the amount of carving used all over. Notice the flat capped finials along the top  a feature used by Voysey but emulated in a way he disliked intensely.
A nice small oak sideboard which shows how the principles of the arts and crafts movement could be applied to a piece with restraint. The bronze panel let in to the back with its typical spade shapes and the carved `trees’ in the door panels relieve the almost altar-like severity of the pointed uprights. 1900-1914
Commercial adaptations of the ‘art nouveau’ style in sideboards, from the use of leaded-light cupboards (an English favourite, this) to the simple, rather bankrupt embellishment of heart-shaped frets and added fretted
curves on (e). Notice the tapering upward columns on the sides of the top of (b), ending in flat caps  a feature of Voysey’s designs for several pieces of furniture.

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.