A Chest by Any Other Name

 

QUESTION: I have inherited a chest that originally belonged to my great-grandmother which had been passed down to her daughter, my grandmother, then to my mother, her daughter. My mother used the chest, made of cedar, to store blankets and linens in her bedroom. I inherited it when she died two years ago. People have told me that it was a hope chest. What was a hope chest and what was it used for?

ANSWER:  “A rose by any other name....” so go the words of William Shakespeare. The same can be said of the “hope” chest. Originally referred to as a dowry chest, cedar chest, or trousseau chest, it changed names with the times. The dowry chest was meant to contain assets–money and jewelry—that the family of the bride gave to the groom in exchange for their daughter’s hand in marriage. But hope chest implies something else—the hope for a good life for her in marriage.

Young unmarried women used a hope chest to collect and store items, such as clothing and household linen, in preparation for married life. Americans called this a "hope chest" or "cedar chest" while the British referred to it as a "bottom drawer." 

Using her own needlework skills to construct a trousseau was for a young girl the equivalent of planning and saving for marriage by her future husband. The collection of a trousseau was a common coming-of-age rite until the 1950s, a step on the road to marriage between courting a man and engagement. Such a chest was an acceptable gift for a girl approaching a marriageable age.

What did a young girl put in her hope chest? Typically, she stored traditional dowry items, such as special dresses, table linens, towels, bed linens, quilts, silverware, and sometimes  kitchen items. As a bride would normally leave home when she married, cabinetmakers often made hope chests to be portable by including sturdy handles on either side. 

Traditionally, a mother would pass her hope chest down to her daughter. She would start preparing a hope chest from the time her daughter was a young age and slowly build the collection as the years went by. The chests contained many things thought of as “essentials,” such as china, silverware, linens, clothing, and jewelry, that a young woman would need to start a new life in marriage.

It was also standard practice to include family heirlooms and mementos. Things like albums or photographs, letters or treasured objects passed down through the generations that may not have much monetary or practical value but which would comfort the young woman in her new home.

The chest itself was often made of cedar. At that time, cedar was easily available and a popular choice for storage thanks to its naturally fresh, long-lasting fragrance, as well as natural resistance to mold and insects. Cedar also had a naturally warm color and a softer, cozier texture.

But hope chests didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Around 3,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians created boxes and wooden chests with dovetail joints. The wealthier a girl was, the more ornately-decorated and -painted was her hope chest.

Between the 5th and 15th centuries, wooden chests saw a period of prosperity. In Europe, most were made of hardwoods like oak, poplar, walnut, pine woods and some soft woods. It was during this time that decorating a chest wasn’t just reserved for kings; it became common practice to add friezes and panels to the outer lid of a chest. Handles also began to appear, but not for decoration. During times of wars, battles and invasions, a household had to be ready to pack up their things and flee at a moment’s notice.

The 17th century witnessed a change in the hope chest—the addition of drawers. For the first time in history, cabinetmakers incorporated storage drawers into chest design. At first, it was simply the addition of two small drawers underneath the chest. By the end of the century, chest makers chose mahogany and employed inlay materials like pearl and bone. They also began to finish the chests with a coat of lacquer.

By the 19th century, the hope chest had evolved into a tradition in most families, especially among immigrants to America. This was typical among Scandinavian and German immigrants. The Amish have had a long traditions of plainly constructed chests with extensive painted decoration.

Today, the tradition of keeping a hope chest has faded away. One of the primary reasons is that such a chest tends to glorify the outdated idea of a “dowry.”  Also, it isn’t the most practical  since the items traditionally kept in a hope chest, like fancy linens and dresses, aren’t exactly the things a modern bride “needs” for a successful marriage. However, antique hope chests can be found in both antique shops and shows. And the more decoration one has, the higher the price.

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The Many Faces of Victorian Whimsy

QUESTION: My great aunt left me a very unusual chair, probably because I admired it when I went to visit her. The chair has a grotesque face carved into its back. It’s legs are curved and there are groves carved into the ends of the arms. Can you tell me anything about my chair?

ANSWER: What you’ve been admiring and now own is a bit of Victorian whimsy. The Victorians loved decoration, the more fantastic the better. This love of whimsy can be traced to the English Romantic Age.

Bored with the classicism and artistic restrictions of the Age of Reason, Romantic artists found their inspiration in the Medieval Age, albeit an idealized one. Crumbling castles, enchanted realms, and magical beasts filled their art. The Victorians loved this and when English draftsman Augustus Charles Pugin published his Specimens of Gothic Architecture in 1821, the Gothic revival was born. Wealthy English families built Gothic-style houses and filled them with furnishings reminiscent of castles and medieval cathedrals. As time went on, carved plants, animals, and mythical creatures began to appear on the furniture they used to decorate their homes.

A wave of whimsical furniture soon appeared in England and swept across the Atlantic where it flooded houses from Boston to San Francisco. By the end of the 19th century, parlors and bedrooms overflowed with fabulously carved furniture. Griffins supported sideboards, lions roared from the pedestals of dining room tables, and North Wind faces whispered from the backs of chairs.

The most curious item produced in America toward the end of the 19th century was the Roman-style,or cross-frame, "face chair." In design, the chair resembled the folding 14th-century Italian Savonarola chair. 

This odd little chair became a must-have item for American parlors. A backrest onto which grotesque faces or carved fruit had been carved, stood upon simply fashioned legs, gracefully curved arms, and a curved seat. The most common face was a stylized North Wind blowing wooden tendrils of” "wind" from its mouth.

Other faces included grinning ogres, laughing gremlins, and satyrs with wickedly out-thrust tongues. Neptune and the Green Man, or foliate head of Celtic mythology, were also popular subjects. It isn’t surprising that the stone ancestors of these faces stare down from the tops of medieval cathedrals and guildhalls across Europe.

The origin of the faces is fairly easy to trace. Woodcarvers arriving in America from Germany in the mid-18th century found work in Midwest furniture factories. They brought their traditions and mythologies with them. In a way, their carvings were like fairy tales and folk tales fashioned in wood to delight and entertain.

Heywood Wakefield of Wakefield, Massachusetts, and Chicago and Stomps Burkhardt of Canton, Ohio, were just two of the many furniture manufacturers to produce face chairs. Workman would roughly carve the faces using machines, then finish them off by hand. They fashioned the backrests from oak or mahogany while they used less expensive wood, stained to match the backrest, for the rest of the chair. While they lavishly carved the faces, they kept the rest of the chair’s design relatively simple. Sometimes, they carved grooves into the ends of the arms to suggest fingers, and sometimes they turned the chair’s stretcher bars.

By the early 20th century, face chairs had all but died. As time progressed, the design pendulum swept from sumptuous Victorian ornamentation through the more restrained carving of the Eastlake period to the even cleaner lines of Mission-style and Art Deco furniture. Unfortunately, even paint couldn’t modernize these chairs, so most of them ended up in attics and basements. Many people simple destroyed them.