Old Furniture

The triumphalism​ of the great auction houses tends to conceal the fact that certain categories of chattel have crashed in value over the last quarter of a century, and none more so than ‘brown furniture’. Changes in lifestyle have played a part. An indoor pool or family cinema is now a higher priority than a library among those who can afford such things; dining is less formal and a tea table not required for mugs. But you might suppose that objects made of old oak, a native as well as a natural material, would be in special demand now, and that a prestige would attach to the patina which demonstrated durability and sustainability.

‘It had a soft and assuaged appearance, as though it had never been new and could never have been new. All its corners and edges had long lost the asperities of manufacture, and its smooth surfaces were marked by slight hollows similar in spirit to those worn by the naked feet of pilgrims into the marble steps of a shrine.’ Thus Arnold Bennett described the dresser in the kitchen presided over by the heroine of Anna of the Five Towns. For Anna herself, this is merely ‘the dresser’. She has no consciousness of its ‘simple and dignified’ design, nor of its ‘ripe tone’, and she even regrets its limited practicality. Her suitor, a man of some education, is doubtless gratified by the evidence of the conscientious and continuous domestic servitude to which its high polish testifies. But he would not have sublimated this gratification into an aesthetic preference and, although he likens Anna in her kitchen to ‘a picture’, he has not yet graduated to an awareness of the picturesque.

By 1902, when the novel was published, dressers of this kind, accurately assessed by the author as seventy years old, were being eagerly collected by many of Bennett’s readers, and his lavish but gently ironic rhapsody was intended for them – a public seldom explicitly addressed in the novel. The year before, Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life, had purchased Lindisfarne Castle and commissioned his close friend Edwin Lutyens to adapt it as a retreat. The building was studiously modest, shorn of any obvious grandeur or pretensions to historical glamour, even austere in that it included few modern conveniences.

As preserved by the National Trust today, and as recorded in the photographs by Charles Latham (which are among the finest tributes to the increasing popularity of Vermeer’s paintings), we find ‘Windsor chairs’ and ‘Lancashire chairs’ as well as a Dutch 17th-century chest of drawers and an old refectory table placed on worn carpets and patterned brick paving and set against bare stone or whitewashed plaster walls. It is a manifestation of the slightly puritanical pastoral dream long fostered by the British professional classes, characteristic of much of the work of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the castle foreshadows thousands of rugged cottages previously occupied by labourers being adopted as holiday homes throughout the wilder parts of Great Britain in the century that followed. And to furnish these cottages honest, sturdy vernacular furniture was favoured – above all, an old dresser.

The pursuit of ‘old oak’ was also part of a passionate attachment to old tables, chairs and chests, of higher and usually earlier origin than the dresser in question, including the spiralling walnut of 1700, the robust mahogany ball and claw feet of 1750, the more fragile members of delicately decorated satinwood which found favour later in the 18th century, and the massive scrolling rosewood of the Regency. This taste for antiques endured for a century, concurrent with the idioms and accents of the King’s English and the smell of Mansion house polish. The value of all but the most exceptional examples of such furniture has now sunk and antique shops are going out of business.

‘Antique’ was a word which had referred to the plaster casts that students were obliged to study in art school and to standards of classic beauty commanding common assent. But soon after 1900 it began to be applied to the oak dresser, the old brass candlesticks (also to be found in Anna’s kitchen) and 17th-century needlepoint samplers retailed in the Cotswolds. The ideal of the more ardent hunters for such works seems to have been to inhabit a home in which there was little on view belonging to the 20th century, except perhaps the telephone in the hall and Country Life on the side table.

Until about 1970 such a taste was also defined by its aversion to anything Victorian. Despite this, the ambition among collectors to surround themselves so completely with creations of past ages had begun in the homes of rich collectors in the previous century. In 1896 Henry James described the way Mrs Gereth had furnished her house at Poynton, ‘written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest.’ This grand but cryptic passage hints at the concentration of successive generations of a cosmopolitan princely family in a mausoleum, as well as suggesting the profuse and wide-ranging magnificence of the Wallace Collection (then about to open). Some of the objects at Poynton may have been treasured for three or four centuries, but the old Venetian velvets, the chests with ormolu mounts (‘brasses that Louis Quinze may have thumbed’), many of the old chairs and cabinets, the ‘panels and the stuffs’ had been rediscovered or rescued.

What was remarkable about such a collection was not only the avoidance of modern vulgarities – among which James lists antimacassars, souvenirs, varnish, pink vases and family photographs – but also the absence of anything whatever of recent manufacture. In that purism it differed from most notable collections at that date, which typically included modern imitations as well as ancient specimens. Farnborough Hill, for example, adapted for the widowed and exiled Empress Eugénie by Hippolyte Destailleur in 1880, and the subject of Anthony Geraghty’s recent study (Paul Holberton, £40), is a case in point. Unlike the remarkable mausoleum, built by the same architect nearby for her husband, Napoléon III, and their ill-fated son, the Prince Imperial (killed in the Zulu war), which is perfectly preserved by the monks of St Michael’s Abbey, the interiors of the house are now largely denuded, but Geraghty has reconstructed the contents, noting the way they combined dynastic and personal commemoration – a setting which would recall for the empress the numerous splendid rooms, in both private and state residences, over which she had presided, and where memories of her husband and son would be cherished and the First and Second Empire honoured.

When the works of art appear in earlier watercolour views of the settings created for them in the 1860s – the full-length portraits by Gérard in the Tuileries Palace and the oval flower pieces at Saint-Cloud, for example – they look far happier than they do in the old photographs of the congested rooms at Farnborough, but the empress clearly had a talent for interior decoration and was even credited with a new approach to planning rooms which owed more to landscape gardening than to architecture and was best exemplified by the Salon de Thé at Compiègne, where the furniture filled the centre of the room and was traversed by ‘winding lanes’ and punctuated by a variety of secluded clearings.

The sources of Destailleur’s architecture, which are so skilfully explicated by Geraghty, may also be intended, at least for the erudite, as part of the meaning of the building, but it seems unlikely that the décor at Farnborough Hill was quite as programmatic as is here proposed. Certainly it is surprising that, on entering the house, the visitor encountered not only Winterhalter’s group portrait of the empress surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting but ambitious works of art by contemporary Italian woodcarvers: canopied settees of the ‘cinquecento’ style by Carlo Cambri of Siena (still in place) together with a life-size pageboy by Valentino Besarel of Venice. The most highly prized furniture in the house, as would probably have been the case also at Poynton, belonged to the French 18th century, and indeed the empress keenly admired the style associated with Louis XVI, owing to her ‘intense identification with Marie Antoinette’, which supplemented her veneration for the family into which she had married. ‘Empire furniture appealed to her less’, which isn’t surprising: readers of Proust find the Duchesse de Guermantes ridiculing such furniture early in À la recherche, although she develops a taste for it several volumes and a number of years later.

Geraghty frequently cites Lucien Daudet, son of the novelist and a friend of Proust, who fell under the spell of Farnborough Hill and its relics and ‘silent portraits’ which surrounded the dignified elderly empress in her exile and recalled the ‘glories and sorrows’ of the two empires. Even outmoded modern furniture fascinated him – ‘vieux Chislehurst’, he baptised some modest pieces which recalled the imperial family’s earlier years of exile. There is a sort of compassion as well as a hint of camp whimsy in this cherishing of things ‘pre-loved’ (as the charity shops put it), and the conservationist and the snob are allied in reverence for survival.

At Ricks, the former home of Mrs Gereth’s late husband’s maiden aunt, there were more modest and less cosmopolitan ‘relics and rarities’ than those at Poynton, and these the heroine, Fleda, finds touching – ‘the little worn, bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle legs … the little melancholy, tender, tell-tale things’. She considers the absence of such ‘ghosts’ to be the ‘only fault’ of Poynton: by ‘ghosts’ she means the shades of previous generations, the traces of former owners, as distinct from the trophies of former ages and royal owners.

This might remind us of Chapter 9 of Middlemarch, in which George Eliot describes the visit Dorothea makes ‘on a grey but dry day’ to Lowick, where she inspects her future home. It was of an ‘old English style’ and had an ‘air of autumnal decline’. Its ‘carpets and curtains with colours subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird’s eye views on the walls of the corridor … had no oppression for her’. And she was pleased by the boudoir with its bow window where the

furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset … A light bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf, completing the furniture.

Dorothea’s uncle, like a crass estate agent, proposes a brash modernisation with ‘new hangings, sofas and that sort of thing’. Dorothea understands that it was the room of her future husband’s mother when she was young. She is not a woman of educated taste in the visual arts and any relish for the fragile furniture and delicate shades of wall colour fashionable in 1780 belongs more to the author writing a century later than to the mind of Dorothea a little before 1830. But Dorothea has responded to the appeal of preserving something venerable and vulnerable, and many consciously aesthetic responses must surely be entangled with such sentiments.

It is easy to dismiss the collectors of ‘antiques’ as whispering the boast, essential to gentility, that they had not sprung from ‘a rude unreckonable race’. At some level, old furniture may have served as pseudo-heirlooms. No doubt it was also often associated with a sentimental regard for the traditional. The hard-hearted may be inclined to welcome the dissipation of such pretensions and falsifications, but something of value has been lost: contact with previous generations and their values, knowledge of alternative models and manners, even resistance to the novelties of fashion and commerce.