Antique Sideboard

Antique Vicorian, Edwardian and 1920`s Sideboards
By 1860 the sideboard had followed the evolution of styles in much the same way as other Victorian furniture, with a few slight differences. From its original, Adam form, it became a heavier, end-pedimented piece made in sub-classical, usually Grecian, style with a heavy, drawered top connecting the two end pediments. Sometimes there was a gap between the two pediments, under the top like a large ‘kneehole’, sometimes this area was cupboarded in. The latter type, with cupboards, has been much preferred by the antique trade and is more expensive. Rococo forms of sideboard exist, but rococo seems to have been more used for the chiffonier or side cabinet intended for the drawing room. The dining room furniture was far more serious, heavier stuff, more suited to the grave atmosphere to be associated with eating. Chairs followed a similar pattern.
Commercial production continued to supply these heavy dining room sideboards and even carved oak versions in emulation of the famous ‘Chevy Chase’ piece, smothered with carved fauna and comestible fruit and vegetables, until the end of the century. In the 1870s the return to 18th century reproductions saw the re-introduction of the Adam form and the ‘Sheraton’ or late 18th/early 19th century versions of it. In Edwardian times some satinwood reproductions were made  even the William Morris Company produced them  which were quite good versions of the originals, with the possible exception that inlaid or painted decoration in the Adam style tended to be overdone. These pieces are elegant, however, and are now quite highly priced.
The Gothic reformers, the ‘art furniture’ boys, Godwin, the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Cotswold crafties and the ‘garden city socialists’ in their various turns, despised `commercial’ sideboards almost more than any other form
of furniture. To them the Victorian sideboard epitomised the vulgarity, the parvenu tastelessness, the crass greed and the ostentation of the rising middle class Philistine. They reacted to it in their various ways and the commercial manufacturers copied them all. Talbert produced his ‘Pet’ sideboard in Reformed Gothic. Godwin, with William Watt, produced his celebrated Anglo-Japanese versions, one of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The art furniture boys laid the ebonising on thick, spindled the galleries, coved the tops and painted some of the panels in startling colours which contrasted with the ebonising. The Arts and Crafts
Movement went in for plain oak surfaces, flat-capped tapering columns, art nouveau beaten copper hinges with heart shapes and fretted holes in weepy shapes. The Cotswold crafties and the garden city socialists really didn’t like to get involved with sideboards at all. They preferred dressers, since dressers are more in the medieval tradition, more ‘country’ than the wealthily-inspired sideboard. The sideboards they produced are often really a form of dresser base or an adaptation of a simple dresser form or, in the case of Gordon Russell, a universal pedestal desk/dressing table principle used for sideboards.
By the 1900s the medieval oak taste had set in with a vengeance as well as the desire for 18th century reproduction. From about 1900 onwards the sideboard became subject to an extremely varied number of styles, some of them employed all on one piece. But the `Jacobethan’ mass production of post-1918 was probably the major feature and sideboards were produced to go with the bulbous-legged ‘refectory’ or draw-tables of cheap stained oak. The other rival would be a walnut ‘Queen Anne’ style which was probably slightly more expensive. Gradually overtaking them came a style now referred to loosely as ‘art deco’; modernistic, round-edged and ’streamlined’ with a few carved motifs stuck on.
SIDEBOARDS - 1860-1900
This section shows the contrast in styles to be found in English furniture over what was a very short period of forty years. From straightforward ‘Victorian’ mahogany, through Reformed Gothic, Aesthetic, and
Anglo-Japanese is a very drastic transition of styles, but that is what was made, at least by those in the `forefront of taste’.
A sideboard in mahogany with the low-arched panels which came into fashion in the 1840s and which continued to be made until the 1880s. This is a very simple version with serpentine shaping to the drawer fronts. 1840-1880
Another mahogany sideboard with classical pillars and cheap leaf-and-scroll carving around the mirror back. It is a type which, with dismemberment and reassembly, can be turned into a ‘Regency’ chiffonier by the adept converter.
A walnut sideboard in the severer lines of the 1860s with a galleried top incorporating turned spindles and finials. The inconsistent use of oval mirrors in conjunction with rectangular ones is disconcerting. The burr
walnut veneer is inlaid with boxwood and ivory stringing lines and formalised marquetry and there is a white marble top. 1860-1880
The characteristic early Victorian chiffonier-sideboard made from the 1840s onwards. Panelled doors with the flattened arch and ‘feather’ mahogany figures; ogee moulded drawer fronts; acanthus leaf carving; solid
plinth and carved curvy back. Cheaply made and mass produced; hated by all `progressive’ designers.
A carved oak sideboard of a design inspired by the ‘Chevy Chase’ type exhibited prominently in the mid-Victorian period. Carved oak (or mahogany) sideboards with large quantities of unfortunate fauna and flora suitable for gastronomy carved upon them became quite popular, even if expensive. It was a taste that continued despite the disapproving scowls of the Gothic reformers and subsequent progressives.
A Bruce Talbert ‘Pet’ sideboard made by Gillows in oak with characteristic carving of foliage, use of spindles in galleries and a quotation above.
An oak sideboard designed by Charles Eastlake (see Hints on Household Taste, Plate XI) showing the restrained version of Reformed Gothic with angled planking and incised mouldings so characteristic of the type.
There is a carved quotation in Latin across the top.
A simpler Reformed Gothic sideboard with tongued-andgrooved planking but with a pierced gallery above with four carved seated lions. c. 1880
Another oak sideboard showing a wealth of angled tongued-and-grooved planking and a carved panel of birds as well as painted panels in the Aesthetic Movement manner.
5,000+ Photo: Courtesy, Jeremy Cooper
1870-1880Wootton Patent Office
An ebonised Anglo-Japanese sideboard designed by E.W. Godwin (q.v.) of a type now exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Godwin’s use of Japanese design is discussed elsewhere on pages 27 and 28. What is important from a value point of view is that the piece exhibits a design trend towards the Modern Movement in its vertical and horizontal lines. It is thus, as a milestone in furniture history, that its value to suitable museums is extremely high.
Another ebonised Anglo-Japanese sideboard by E.W. Godwin. A buyer paid nearly 7,000 for this piece at Sotheby’s Belgravia in 1978. Why so much less than the previous example A telling point this  because it does not so clearly exhibit the horizontal and vertical lines which point the way to the designs of the Modern Movement. It is thus of less interest to museums as a furniture history milestone, even though it has great value as a piece by Godwin.
A characteristic Aesthetic Movement sideboard of ebonised and mahogany construction with a coved top with spindled gallery. The bevelled-edged mirrors, panelled construction and turning are all typical.
c.1880
SIDEBOARDS - 1900-1920
A rosewood inlaid sideboard which shows how, at the end of the century, the return to 18th century styles had affected commercial production. Indeed, this piece shows traces of the ‘Victorian Queen Anne’ style or
`bracket-and-overmantel’ style in the broken pediment and design of the upper half, yet it still has traces of a spindle-turned gallery and ‘pot board’ bottom shelf of the Aesthetic Movement. Yet the inlaid decoration is
‘Adam’ or ‘Sheraton’ and the piece would now be sold as ‘Edwardian Sheraton’. It is not quite as late as the Edwardian styles shown in later pages of sideboards, as the reader may note, however. 1890-1900
An odd oak sideboard of slightly progressive-cum-quaint associations in design. (The wavy-line pierced gallery is the ‘quaint’ part.) The photograph gives it a slightly asymmetric look, which is misleading. Probably by Liberty’s. 1890-1900
Six typical late Victorian /Edwardian sideboards of a type made in oak or walnut of the straight-grained American type. Mostly identified as to period by the bas-relief carving in panels or on pediments, and the use of a modified classical pediment so dear to the Edwardian heart. The common features to all are the large back mirrors with columns either side, drawers with cupboards under in the lower half and panelling to the cupboard doors, achieved by either fielding or mouldings.
1900-1914

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.

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.

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.