Antique 17th-18th Century Wooden Stands and Tables
Antique TABLES AND STANDS About 1630-1730
Portuguese side table, panels from 16thC Spanish cabinet forming the top.
Until about 1640, Louis X111 style still late-Renaissance with elaborately turned legs – a feature surviving until end of century in provincial France and other regions, e.g.
Portugal. Simultaneously, dramatic Italian baroque spreads through Europe, expressed in sculptural supports for tables and stands for cabinets.
After about 1660, equally grand but more classically disciplined version created in France for Louis XIV – fewer scrolls, more vertical legs. Low stands (gueridons) and taller ones (torcheres) for candelabra carved to represent blackamoors or Nubian slaves – finest French walnut loichete on spiral stem.
Pair of Venetian Blackamoor torcheres, 17thC style, actually mid-19MC.
by Brustolon in Venice, 1685-96. Engravings of palace interiors published in Augsburg and Nuremberg show side-tables surmounted by mirrors, and grand centre tables in entrance halls.
Turned leg types: Hardwoods, native (e.g. oak) or imported (e.g. ebony, jacaranda).
Carved types: Softwoods, e.g. pine, lime. Exotic woods for veneered and marquetry tops, hardstones for pietre duce (see DECORATION), marble for tops of side-tables.
Turned legs joined by mortise-and-tenon to frieze, which may have drawers made with coarse dovetails.
Common designs for turned legs and supports.
Carved types: necessarily unorthodox variations of traditional methods for joining sculpted figures of humans or animals to frame supporting marble top. Console table is fixed to wall and has leg(s) at front only. Small Venetian tables supported on upturned feet of blackamoor pageboys doing handstands.
Various designs for carved and scrolled feet, Turning: Baluster, bobbin, twist patterns. Carving: Often in the round for caryatid supports resembling mermaids with scroll tails; water nymphs holding giant shells; chained slaves pretending to hold up top; gods, goddesses, and cherubs frisking in foliage.
Marquetry: Arabesques, chinoiseries and (especially in Holland) floral subjects in exotic woods, ivory, mother-of-pearl.
Boullework: Brass arabesques inlaid into turtleshell.
Pietre dure: Florentine mosaic (see under CUPBOARDS AND CABINETS).
Flemish draw-leaf table, early-17thC.
Hardwoods oiled and waxed or varnished.
Softwoods painted, gilded. Italian (coloured varnishes) for torcheres carved as nubile Nubians wearing turbans, harem trousers, not much else.
Turned-leg side-tables, e.g. Portuguese type with fat turnings, often sell at prices comparable with good modern or reproduction furniture. Fine sculptural pieces usually expensive but not easy to place, so surprising things can happen at auction.
17thC blackamoor or Nubian figures usually have thin lips, later ones thick lips –but fakers know this, so pay high prices only if guarantee forthcoming. Convincing copies made in Venice in 1970s from redundant French telegraph poles.
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Tags: Antique, antique tables, cupboard, DECORATION, marquetry, mortise and tenon, scrolled feet, STANDS, TABLES