Furniture on the March

QUESTION: My great grandfather was an officer in the British Army. He owned a chest that has been in our family ever since. The unusual thing about this chest is that it comes apart into several sections. We’ve always wondered why. What can you tell me about his chest?

ANSWER: With the rise and expansion of the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries the demand by the military for portable furniture increased. People referred to any furniture specifically designed to break down or fold for ease of travel as campaign furniture, specifically designed to be packed up and carried on the march. 

Campaign furniture has been used by traveling armies since the time of Julius Caesar, known to carry elaborate furnishings on his month-long military campaigns.

From foldable work chairs and desks to portable wooden mosaic floors, the interior of a Roman general’s tent would have been lavishly decorated. In order to simulate the comforts of home while on the move, those furnishings needed to be easy to pack up and transport. A prominent example was the curule seat, the traditional chair of Roman magistrates and field commanders, which could be folded up for transportation. But in modern times, it came to be associated with British Army officers, who sought to create a palatial feel while on the road. 

The most common type of campaign furniture was the chest of drawers, often referred to as a military chest or campaign chest. Most often made of mahogany, teak,  camphor, cedar, or pine, it broke down into two sections and had removable feet. This type of chest also had brass corners and strapwork to offer some protection while traveling. 

Some pieces of campaign furniture also had brass caps on the tops of legs, hinges in unusual places, protruding bolts, or X-frame legs depending on the functionality of the piece. However, some pieces were designed to be up to date and fashionable, looking much like domestic furniture. Ross and Company of Dublin were innovators of campaign furniture design and much of their work is obviously Victorian in period.

Campaign furniture came in a variety of forms, from portable beds to collapsible candlesticks. The numerous items specifically made for travel include a variety of types of bed from four poster or tent beds to chairs that would extend for sleeping; large dining tables, dining chairs, easy chairs, sofas and couches, chests of drawers, book cabinets, washstands, wardrobes, shelves, desks, mirrors, lanterns and candlesticks, canteens of silver, cooking equipment, toiletry equipment, and box-seats for chamber pots were all made to be portable.

There seemed no limit to the number of items an officer would take with him if he could afford to. How well his tent was outfitted could indicate his social standing.

By the mid-19th century the demand for campaign furniture encouraged manufacturers to invent unusual and interesting pieces that offered ease in dismantling or the compactness of their storage. Makers produced tables cleverly hinged to fold down into a box the size of a briefcase. Chess board boxes would contain tripod legs and a telescopic column to convert into a table. Chairs would break down to a minimal size, and often converted into a sedan-chair. The need for each piece to pack up quickly into a portable package with minimal complication drove innovation. By the late 19th century, over 85 manufacturers were producing campaign furniture in the London area alone. That period also saw campaign furniture growing increasingly unique and opulent.

Much of the early portable furniture would have been made to order. Soldiers often asked their local cabinet makers to take a domestic design and adapt it for travel. As demand grew, a number of well known designers, including Chippendale, Sheraton and Gillows, considered portable furniture. The end of the 18th century witnessed the rise of specialist makers, with Thomas Butler and Morgan & Sanders being the most recognized. The number of such specialists increased during the 19th century.

The beginning of the 20th century saw changes in the way armies conducted war. During the Boer War in South Africa, the British realized that their adversaries could move quickly and discovered that their own mobile units weren’t quite as mobile as they had thought. The early 20th century also saw the rise of the motor car which meant that travel was faster, making it less of a necessity for officers to equip themselves for a long journey, creating less of a demand for campaign furniture.

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Whiskey by the Jug

 

QUESTION: Recently, while browsing the tables of a local flea market, I discovered a cute little porcelain jug with the name “Old Maryland 1881...St. Louis, Mo.” Stamped on the bottom was the mark “K.T.K./CHINA.” Can you tell me what company made this and what would the jug have contained?

ANSWER: Little ceramic jugs like this usually held whiskey. They were a gimmick used by distillers to promote their liquors. The firm of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company of East Liverpool, Ohio, made many of them and their “K.T.K./CHINA” mark the bottom of many of them.

From the early 17th century, people drank liquor regularly. And there were always people who viewed it as evil and sought to prevent its use, usually by taxation. In 1753, the legislature of the Colony of New York established an excise tax. By the 1850s, at least 13 states had enacted some type of prohibition laws against the use of liquor, yet by the Civil War, most of these laws had either been repealed or declared unconstitutional.

The Civil War Excise Law of 1862, which established a license for "retail dealers in liquors," originally exempted pharmacists. Two years later, Congress amended the law to apply a $1.50 per gallon tax on all distilled spirits that also applied to pharmacists. But in 1870, Congress again amended the law permitting pharmacists to dispense alcohol for "medicinal purposes.”

There are some Knowles, Taylor & Knowles china whiskey jugs that have the words "expressly for medicinal use" imprinted on them. An ad in the Daily Crisis of East Liverpool, Ohio, on September 10, 1892, stated, “Cholera, the best and finest prevention of this dread disease is to use a few drops of Diamond Club Pure Rye in every drink of water." The distiller declared this whiskey to be “officially recognized by the medical profession in every part of the United States as the purest on the market and is used extensively of medicinal purposes, in kidney diseases and ailments of a like character. It is acknowledged to be unequaled as a bracer and appetizer and as a rejuvenator of a debilitated system." Not only did liquor distributors continue selling their products, they also found a way to avoid paying the excise tax. 

The firm of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company began operations in 1870, when Isaac Knowles, Colonel John N. Taylor (Isaac’s son-in-law), and Isaac's son Homer formed a partnership.. By the early 1890s, the firm had mastered the making of bone china called Lotus Ware. 

The china whiskey jugs produced by the firm were bulbous and tapered to a slender neck, decorated with gold trimming. The top of the applied handle, also decorated with gold, had the look of a serpents head, a novel way for the jug to stand out from other whiskey jugs.

The mass-produced jugs came in several colors with transfer designs. Green seemed to be the most widely used color, but sometimes the same style jug appeared in red, blue, and brown.

Jugs also came in different sizes, the most common being the quart size, but there were also pints and half pints. Most jugs had one handle but some had two.

The sharp and artistic transfer designs on the jugs showed off the talent of the artists and the innovative ideas of the firm. The fancy lettering on the jugs may have inspired collectors to keep the jugs as decorative pieces, instead of discarding them as just another container.

George W. Meredith of East Liverpool, Ohio, a former employee of Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Company, fast became a leader in the distribution of his product called "Diamond Club Pure Rye Whiskey." At his peak, he distributed his whiskey from coast to coast. Meredith, who was always looking for new ways to sell his whiskey, and his association with the firm of Knowles,Taylor & Knowles Company, probably had a lot to do with the production of the unique china whiskey jug.

An aggressive advertiser of his "Diamond Club Pure Rye Whiskey ," Meredith was the only distributor known to use the pint and half-pint containers. He also had a 154-inch size, known at the time as a "watch fob." Though it didn’t contain any whiskey, it was a consistent reminder to its possessor of the G.M. Meredith Company.

During this same period, American liquor distributors were also looking for ways to sell  their products, and on special occasions, to provide a gift to their best customers. The fancy liquor containers, inexpensive to purchase, were the perfect solution. The Irish, British and Scottish distributors of the same era had been using fancy jugs to promote their whiskey and had been very successful in thwarting thefts.

Knowles, Taylor & Knowles Co. also produced hand-painted china whiskey jugs. Companies or individuals not in the liquor business purchased these jugs for special occasions. The hand-painted jugs were interesting in themselves, as they showed the Victorian influence. Some had Victorian ladies painted on them surrounded by silver overlay. The scenes often depict flowers, from single roses to bunches of flowers with leaves and stems.

Though Knowles, Taylor & Knowles made jugs with transfer designs, their hand-painted jugs aren’t as easily recognized. The firm didn’t mark its jugs, whether hand-painted or not, any differently. During the Victorian era and into the 20th century, it was popular to buy undecorated items and paint them for business or gifts. Often a professional artists decorated the piece, so the decoration itself cannot offer a clue as to whether or not a piece had been decorated at the factory. Also, most of the factory pieces weren’t signed because the artist worked by the piece and too much time would have been wasted by signing and dating items. However, amateur artists did like to sign their pieces. Most hand-painted items found today that are signed and dated probably fall into that category.

Knowles, Taylor & Knowles produced their china whiskey jugs from 1891 to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, when bankruptcy forced the company to close.

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Buttering Up!

 

QUESTION: I first became introduced to little butter dishes, known as butter pats, while browsing tables at a local flea market. Most of the time, dealers place these in glass cases and unless antiquers look carefully, they can easily be missed. 

ANSWER: In the United States and many parts of Europe, wealthy people who had elaborate dinnerware sets for formal dining used butter pat plates primarily in the 1800s and into the early 1900. Each dinner guest was given his or her own butter pat plate on which to put a pat, or lump, of butter.

Butter pats, manufactured in a variety of designs and shapes by the finest porcelain manufacturies, first appeared in the 1850s and reached the height of popularity between 1880 and 1910, though some restaurants and railroads still used them into the 1950s and 1960s. Although also known as butter chips, butters, butter pat plates, or individual butters, they’re commonly referred to as butter pats.

And no proper Victorian table could be set without them. The Victorians loved excess and nowhere was this more evident than in their table settings. During this age of elegance, each kind of food had its own piece of china or silver, and butter wasn’t any different.

Victorians folded a serving a bread, often consumed without butter, hidden in the folds of a napkin at each place setting. If a meal course required bread to be buttered, servants placed individual miniature plates above and slightly to the left of center of the service plates. 

However, butter during the Victorian Age wasn’t commercially processed but made at home. Victorian ladies or their servants labored hard, creating butter in a wooden or stone churn, shaping it with a paddle and squeezing it to remove excess moisture. They then placed the newly churned butter into a mold or shaped it into a mound with wooden paddles. 

The molds typically held a pound of butter. Either the lady of the house or her servants cut the butter into smaller pieces  to serve for special dinners. Sometimes, they shaped the small pats of butter into unusual forms, such as rosettes. Very wealthy families often used decorative individual hand-carved butter stamps featuring the family crest or a special design. 

Made for holding an individual servings of butter, the butter pat reached its zenith during the Victorian era when ornate elegance dictated that every place setting at the dining table consist of several dishes for different foods. As a necessary part of a complete set of fine china, dinnerware manufacturers crafted butter pats with the same attention to detail, and by the turn of the 20th century, they produced them in an array of designs, patterns, and shapes—round, fan-shaped, shell-shaped, as well as the more common square. They often decorated with fish, fowl, and floral motifs, making them into miniature works of art.

Eventually, the extravagance of the Victorian Era gave way to more informal dining. This created a need for durable and practical everyday dishware. Potteries needed to destroy outdated molds and streamline production. This included butter pats, no longer required on the informal dinner table.

Butter itself was often molded or stamped to form patterns, such as flowers, on the butter’s surface. Each individual lump of butter was then placed on a butter pat plate belonging to a specific guest.

Butter pat plates produced in the 1800s and early 1900s were primarily made out of either porcelain or sterling silver, and some made of glass. They were produced as part of dinner service sets or to match existing dinner service sets. Each tiny plate was typically less than three inches square and held either one or two pats of butter at a time.

The colors and designs on the butter pat plates also got more elaborate as time went on. Floral designs were quite common. In some cases, the manufacturers shaped and colored the butter pats to resemble flowers. Square or round ones featured pictures of flowers in their centers or floral patterns around their edges. Other popular butter pat themes included animals and birds.

Butter pat patterns also changed as advertising methods evolved. Some later butter pats had pictures and slogans on them, advertising businesses, events, or advancements of some kind.

Many of the most popular butter pat producers were the “big name” porcelain producers which were historically popular for their dinnerware and decorative pieces. Haviland, Majolica, and Waverly were the most popular. Of Haviland’s up to 60,000 different patterns, most included butter pats as part of a place setting. However, there were many companies which each produced anywhere from a few to dozens of patterns made from many different materials.

Although butter pat manufacturers mass-produced them, some were more unusual. For example, several French and German butter pat manufacturers produced butter pats in the 1800s that artists hand-painted later with elaborate designs and patterns. Some of them even featured hand-painted portraits of people.

With the advent of the modern lifestyles of the 20th century. Butter pats, along with many other forms of formal Victorian dinnerware, lost their appeal. Bread and butter plates, averaging 6 inches in diameter, eventually replaced the butter pat.

Though Wedgwood and Royal Doulton still produce butter pats, they only do so for luxury hotels and First Class airline service. 

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Time on the Wrist

 

QUESTION: I have an unusual wristwatch that belonged to my great grandfather. According to my father, he wore it while a soldier in World War I. Evidently, it was a special military watch that soldiers used to calculate the distance of mortar fire. What can you tell me about the history of this watch?

ANSWER: You, indeed, have a special watch. Wearing a wristwatch for men actually began after World War I. And it was because of the military the wristwatch is as we know it today.  

The word "watch" came from the Old English word woecce, meaning "watchman" because town watchmen used them to keep track of their shifts at work.

But it was military officers who first wore wristwatches. One chronograph had a scale calibrated to tell the difference in time between the flash of field artillery and the sound of the report. This helped a soldier know how far away the guns were.

However, wristwatches as they look today first appeared in the 1890s. Evolving from pocket watches, makers specifically developed them for women. And because of this, men didn’t wear them, continuing to use pocket watches instead.

Some historians believe that Abraham-Louis Breguet created the world's first wristwatch for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, in 1810. And by the 1850s, most watchmakers produced a variety of wristwatches, marketing most of them as bracelets for women.

So when and how did men begin to wear wristwatches?

Military men first began to wear wristwatches towards the end of the 19th century, when the importance of synchronizing maneuvers during war without potentially revealing the plan to the enemy through signaling became important. It was clear that using pocket watches while in the heat of battle or while mounted on a horse wasn’t practical, so officers began to strap the watches to their wrist. 

The Garstin Company of London patented a 'Watch Wristlet' design in 1893, although they had been producing similar designs from the 1880s. Garstin’s owners realized a market for men's wristwatches was opening up. Officers in the British Army began using wristwatches during colonial military campaigns in the 1880s, such as during the Anglo-Burma War of 1885.

During the Boer War, the importance of coordinating troop movements and synchronizing attacks against the highly mobile Boer insurgents increased. Subsequently, British officers began using wristwatches. The company Mappin & Webb began production of their successful “campaign watch” for soldiers during the campaign at the Sudan in 1898 and ramped up production for the Boer War a few years later.

These early models were essentially standard pocket watches fitted to a leather strap, but by the first decade of the 20th century, manufacturers began producing purpose-built wristwatches. The Swiss company, Dimier Frères & Cie patented a wristwatch design with the now standard wire strap lugs in 1903. 

Omega advertisements mentioned that soldiers used its wristwatches in the Anglo-Boer War not only to highlight their excellent quality but also to break through the wristwatches-are-for-women barrier.

When World War I broke out in 1914, air warfare was in its infant stages, thus creating  a heightened need for military watches. Military fighter pilots also found wristwatches to be as needed in the air as on the ground. With the increased sophistication of battle techniques, wristwatches for fighter pilots and ground soldiers became essential items. At that time, Hamilton first supplied its flagship military watch Khaki to the American army.

In the chaos of the trenches during the heat of battle, it was impossible for soldiers to rifle through their pockets for a watch. European soldiers began outfitting their watches with unbreakable glass to survive the trenches and radium to illuminate the display at night. Civilians saw the wristwatch’s practical benefits over the pocket watch and began wearing them. 

World War I dramatically shifted public perceptions on the propriety of the man's wristwatch and opened up a mass market in the post-war era. The creeping barrage artillery tactic, developed during the War, required precise synchronization between the artillery gunners and the infantry advancing behind the barrage. Manufacturers produced service watches specially designed for the rigors of trench warfare, with luminous dials and unbreakable glass. The British War Department began issuing wristwatches to combatants from 1917.

By the end of World War I, almost all enlisted men wore a wristwatch. After the War, the fashion of men wearing wristwatches soon caught on. In 1923, John Harwood invented the first successful automatic winding system. And by 1930, the ratio of wrist- to pocket watches was 50 to 1. Wristwatch ads boasted wristwatches “for men with the promise that a watch could make a man more soldier-like, more martial, more masculine.”

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Pottery Marks and What They Tell Us

Mark showing pottery name, factory,
country, date, and pattern.

QUESTION: I go antiquing with a long-time friend. Inevitably, whether we’re browsing the tables at a local fleamarket or browsing in an antique shop or show, he always picks up a piece of pottery or porcelain and turns it over to see the mark. What do these marks say about the pieces besides who possibly made them? And are there any other marks from the making of the piece and what do they tell him?

ANSWER: An experienced collector of pottery can tell a lot about a piece’s origin by reading the manufacturers' marks on the bottom of each piece. These marks tell the pottery's name, its location, its company symbol, and often the pattern name or the name given to the body shape of the piece. 

Stamped mark

But there may also be other, less obvious, marks that indicate the method of production or factory flaws that show the level of quality control used by the firm. Collectors familiar with these signs can quickly distinguish between factory flaws and more serious indicators of damage and wear inflicted upon that same piece once it has left the  factory. Knowing the difference allows the experienced collector to purchase pottery with confidence.

While most manufacturer’s marks, which may he printed, incised, impressed, stamped, or applied as paper labels, usually contain the pottery’s name, initials, symbol and location---or some combination of these—some are rather sparse and may only contain a letter within a geometric shape or a crest. 

In the case of the larger firms, a pottery mark also has publicity value and shows the buyer that  a long-established company with a reputation to uphold has made a piece. Such clear name- marks include Wedgwood, Minton, Royal Crown Derby, Royal Doulton, and Royal Worcester in Britain and Bennington, McCoy, and Hull in the U.S.

Though these marks are one of the best and easiest ways to identify ceramics, the shear number of them makes it impossible to every mark. Additionally, many small firms either saw no reason to use marks or sometimes used marks that haven’t been identified because of the short life span and limited production of the company.

Metal stamped mark into clay

To the collector a pottery mark can also identify the manufacturer and help establish the approximate date of manufacture and in several cases the exact year of production, particularly in the case of 19th and 20th century wares from the leading firms which employed private dating systems. With the increasing use of ceramic marks in the 19th century, a large proportion of English and American pottery and porcelain can be accurately identified and often dated.

Pottery’s added marks to their wares in several ways. They could incise them into the soft clay before the piece air dried, in which the mark will show a slight ploughed-up effect. Potters often do this to handmade pieces. Some manufacturers of quantity pieces, such as Wedgwood, impressed a mark into the soft clay using a metal or clay stamp or seal. 

Many pottery manufacturers used painted marks—usually containing their name or initial—added over the glaze at the time of decoration. Some used stencils.

Engraved transfer printed mark

Lastly, most 19th-century pottery makers used printed marks transferred from engraved copper plates at the time of decoration, often in blue under the glaze when the main design is also underglaze blue.

Pottery marks weren’t always universally used. In 1890, President William McKinley introduced the McKinley Tariff Act that imposed tariffs on many imports, including pottery, so that American manufacturers could more easily sell their products. The Act required that all such imports show the name of country of manufacture, such as “England,” “Germany,” “Nippon,” or “France.” In 1921, an amendment to the Act required that the phrase “Made in” precede the country of origin, such as “Made in England” or “Made in Japan.” However, some foreign companies began using the phrase as early as 1898. This is a great way for collectors to date foreign-made pieces.

Underglaze marks

Beginning pottery collectors often miss marks or flaws from manufacturing and instead focus only on the maker’s mark. These marks give clues to the quality of the ceramic bodies each maker used. Potteries used different firing techniques for different grades of ceramics and the distinctive marks each technique left behind, once known, help to establish the quality of a piece.

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History on the Dining Table

QUESTION: Ever since I began collecting antiques, I’ve always been fascinated by the beautiful Staffordshire transferware designs on dinnerware. Recently, I saw several stunning pieces at an antique show. These featured American battle scenes and images of historical sites. I thought transferware had only bucolic scenes of the English countryside. Why did English potters produce this type of ware and when was it popular?

ANSWER: That’s a very good question. In fact, most Americans today probably don’t know that English potters were some of our country’s staunch supporters, even risking near treason to do so.

It was bad enough that American soldiers defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, but then on December 14, 1815, the British military conceded defeat to the Americans for a second time. Josiah Wedgwood, a prominent 18th-century English potter, had proclaimed the American Revolutionary War a serious mistake for Britain. He and his fellow potters of the Staffordshire district felt no better about the War of 1812. After all, with the destruction,   blockades, and hatred it generated, warfare was bad for business since the Americans had always been good customers.



To make amends, the Staffordshire potters promptly began decorating their dinner services, tea sets, and assorted crockery with scenes of American military victories guaranteed to make   Americans proud while leaving British generals and admirals glowering in disgust. To add to the victories, the potters exported dinnerware with images of America's war heroes, elder statesmen and favorite politicians. With these, the potters of Staffordshire won back the hearts of their American customers. Historical Staffordshire became the success the potters had hoped for—an economic victory where the British military had failed.

Historical Staffordshire wares were popular, durable, mass-produced in quantity and reasonably priced. They reached a wide audience and offer today’s collectors with fascinating glimpses of America’s past.

Although the Staffordshire potteries produced mugs, pitchers, foot baths, and chamber pots, dinnerware and tea services dominated production of historical Staffordshire ceramics. The potteries first produced it in pearlware and later in a number of durable white wares. Both pearl and white wares were almost as white as porcelains but were rugged enough to survive rough oceanic voyages. Artists decorated the earliest of these with printed transfers in deep cobalt blue that had become popular in the United States. A wider range of colors followed in the 1830s. Running short of military victories and notable personages, the potteries turned to more peaceful subjects, such as individual buildings, towns, idyllic landscapes, and the newest advances in Victorian transportation.

Staffordshire potteries manufactured historical dinnerware from about 1820 to 1860, reaching the height of its popularity between 1820 and 1845.

Printing scandalous portraitures to promote sales was nothing new to the Staffordshire potters. Putting pots before principle was an old habit. Britain’s politicians had long been lampooned and her military heroes hailed on transfer printed pots and mugs to promote sales at home.

During the War of 1812, industrious British engravers supported the cause of American freedom with near-treasonable anti-government images of cringing British lions emblazoned with insulting, anti-English slogans. These could be slipped out through the neutral Netherlands and taken to shore by any number of unrecorded vessels navigating up lesser traveled American waterways.

The designs on historical Staffordshire wares were examples of an early mass- production technique of the growing Industrial Revolution, transfer printing. England's potters developed the technique during the 18th century and perfected it in the 19th century. Industrialization provided British potters with the most rapidly growing stock of earthenware bodies in history. Transfer printing allowed them to quickIy produce large numbers of identically decorated wares from this stock for the first time in potting history. Together the new, white earthenware bodies and the printed patterns would provide a popular, quality ware at a fairly low price, a ware many families of modest means could easily afford.



The quality of the transfer printed pattern, however, was crucial. The artwork determined whether the ware sold well or not. Artists created transfer printed patterns, some of whom had great skill while others didn’t. The largest pottery manufacturers hired their own artist engravers. Smaller companies purchased their patterns from engraving firms. The transfer printing process perfected by Sadler and Green of Liverpool in 1756 allowed a potter to duplicate a pattern by transferring it from an engraved and pigmented copper plate to a ceramic vessel using a specially treated paper.

Artists copied artwork directly from books of the day and from competing engravers' portfolios. They created illustrations for dining services featuring different central prints on each piece, all following a common theme—a "City Series" or a series of "Picturesque Views" for example. Since the central print varied from plate to plate, the artists created a standard border design  to identify the pieces of a single service. Most Staffordshire potters identified specific border designs as their own unique trademarks. In most cases that view was respected. However, smaller companies did copy these designs from time to time.

Women did the meticulous work of correctly placing the inky paper carrying the pattern onto the bisque pottery and for joining the seams of the borders and designs. Most took great care in doing this since they were aware of the Victorian ideal of the "perfect finish." Many of the historical Staffordshire prints how these ladies tried to achieve that ideal. Their printed patterns appear seamless although they placed most of them using several pieces.

However, hastily engraved, copper plates provided transfers that were often larger than the  pottery on which they were to be placed. These oversized patterns, once transferred to their papers, had to be cut and trimmed to fit the smaller vessels. The trimming often led to virtually illegible inscriptions as the women cropped the letters away. While the images frequently remained whole, the words suffered as few of the women trimming the prints could read. They trimmed that which had little meaning to them. Not that it mattered too much because many of their customers couldn’t read either.

And while housewives used historical Stafforshire ware for serving guests and at holidays, eventually the transfer images evolved into peaceful bucolic scenes and souvenir plates.

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50 Shades of Veneer

QUESTION: At several antiques shows I’ve attended recently, I noticed some beautifully decorated veneered boxes from the 18th century. At one of them, I also saw a hall table with a top decorated with a floral marquetry bouquet.  I know nothing about how veneering is done, nor do I know how it originated. What can you tell me about this intricate work?

ANSWER: Today, the art of veneered marquetry and veneer decoration is almost non-existent. But back in the 17th,18th and early 19th centuries, it was all the rage.

Early furniture makers recognized and appreciated beautiful woods and wood grains for their beauty. Veneering, the process of gluing thinly cut layers of precious wood to surfaces of less exotic wood, goes back to ancient times and became popular during the Renaissance, when inlay designs were common forms of furniture decoration.

But there was a problem early on with cutting large enough slabs of wood to the desired thinness in order to cover entire surfaces with single sheets of the more precious wood. So cabinetmakers cut small pieces of wood and glued them to the carcass of a piece of furniture in patterns and designs that took advantage of the beauty of the wood grain and variations in color.

By the 17th century, veneering became an art, and the decorative use of thin sheets of wood could be found on many examples of European furniture. The French were the style-setters in marquetry inlay, and British and other European craftsmen soon followed suit.

There were two advantages to using veneers. The first reduced the cost of a piece of furniture or a box by applying an exotic and expensive wood to a less expensive domestic wood. The second advantage was that the tensile strength of the surface of a piece could be increased many times when the cabinetmaker laid a veneer cross grain to the under piece of wood. The layer of glue between the two surfaces also added to the strength of the finished piece.

The aesthetic advantages of the use of veneers in the decoration of cabinetry  increased, also. The cabinetmakers, using thinly cut sheets of the same piece of wood, could repeat the grainings and markings in order to form interesting patterns. This use of the natural design in wood required artistry as well as craftsmanship. By using veneers judiciously, cabinetmakers could inlay designs and decorations of different kinds and colors of wood, thus producing interesting motifs and styles.

Before the 19th century, specially trained veneer cutters, skilled in slicing the layers of expensive wood to uniform thickness, cut veneers by hand. They then sold these sheets to furniture makers and box makers who used them in decorating the many kinds and styles of decorative furniture and boxes that developed in the 17th and 18th centuries.

At the beginning of the19th century a steam-driven saw, registered in London, that made it cheaper, faster, and easier to cut large, thin, uniform slices of wood to be used for veneers. After the invention of the special saw, wood could be cut in many different ways to take advantage of the variations in grainings.



The different designs that could be obtained in veneered wood depended on the type of wood used and the way in which the log was cut. The earliest methods of cutting veneers by hand produced only vertically cut grains. This vertical slicing achieved a pattern which was circular and was known as "oystering." Other types of graining commonly used in the 19th century were "crotch," cut from the area of the tree where two limbs fork out, the "burl," a growth on the tree trunk and a particularly attractive gnarled design, and "bird's-eye," which was formed by the deep growth of buds most commonly found on the maple tree. Many other patterns could be obtained by the expert cutting of the wood in different cross sections and the employment of the saw in cutting circular sections around the log.

Woods often used in producing veneers were chestnut, poplar, walnut, elm, birch, rosewood, ebony, satinwood, sandalwood, sycamore, box, yew, olive, pear, teak, tulipwood, laurel, and many other similar exotic woods. Mahogany was and still is the most popular veneer wood. It was strong and hard and had figurations in the various cuts of its grain that were unmatchable for their beauty. Mahogany also takes a high polish extremely well.

A large variety of boxes were made of veneered wood in the 19th century. British box makers, especially, produced a great many veneered boxes. Often, they made elaborate boxes to protect valuables against damage, and more often, theft. Sometimes, they made elegant boxes simply as a means of displaying the contents to its best advantage.


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