Antique Sideboard

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.