05/11/2016 Furniture & Decorative Arts
Technological advancements in the 18th century Continental furniture-making world allowed the master craftsmen in Abraham and David Roentgen’s famed workshop to produce the Berlin secretary cabinet, shown in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition, Extravagant Inventions The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens, 2012-2013. The cabinet is a unique achievement of aesthetic beauty coupled with extraordinary mechanical qualities. A video from the exhibition of the cabinet’s operation has been viewed almost 13 million times, demonstrating the public’s fascination with the intricacies of an object owned by Frederick William II, which includes keys opening secret compartments and buttons that automatically open drawers and doors, among many other features .
In England, the Industrial Revolution similarly produced changes in furniture and its production. Doyle’s English and Continental furniture sale on May 18, 2016 offers a group of objects from the Collection of John and Anne J. Willis that underlines the 18th and 19th century preoccupation and fashion for mechanical and patented furniture. Included in that group is a George III chamber horse, a precursor of present-day exercise machines. It was used to simulate riding a horse when one was unable to do so outdoors.
Patented furniture became popular in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. A design for a ‘circular movable bookcase’ illustrated in Rudolph Ackermann’s The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, etc., March 1810, is similar to one attributed to the Royal furniture-making firm of Marsh and Tatham, who also worked for Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey and Samuel Whitbread at Southill Park. In September of the same year, the London firm of Morgan and Sanders, Catherine-street, Strand, illustrated a design for a ‘Library Reading Chair’, “Gentlemen either sit across, with face towards the desk, contrived for reading, writing &c. and which, by a rising rack, can be elevated at pleasure. . . .” Another of the firm’s inventions is a “Metamorphic Library Chair – a truly novel and useful article . . . which forms, at the same time . . . where two pieces of furniture are combined in one – an elegant and truly comfortable arm-chair, and set of library steps, “ illustrated by Ackermann in July 1811. Both of these designs are represented by examples in the May 18 auction.
Morgan and Sanders also designed furniture that could be used for traveling. The Willis Collection includes a group of campaign (also known as ‘knock-down’) furniture, which was produced for the vast group of army officers, government and commercial agents who spread across the British Empire. Utilitarian, simple and elegant, it was made to be dissembled for travel and easily reassembled without nails or tools, thus supplying a homely atmosphere for travelers living on distant shores. Campaign tents, ‘field’ beds, chests of drawers, writing boxes, chairs etc. were made in the thousands by legions of companies competing for the enormous demand from expatriates. Designs by leading makers in the 18th and 19th centuries were illustrated in the various books of Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, the pieces were constructed of fine mahogany, satinwood and often bound in brass for added strength. Packed flat and easily stowed, large pieces of furniture could be sent abroad, with the added incentive that it was not taxable. Nicholas N. Brawer, discusses its origin, design, production and sociological significance in his seminal book, British Campaign Furniture Elegance under Canvas 1740-1914, 2001.
An interesting lot in the May 18 sale is a painted tôle case containing two pith helmets that once belonged to Gwilym Iwan ‘G.I.’ Jones (1904-1995). G. I. Jones was a British colonial officer in Nigeria from 1926-1946, who later returned to Cambridge University, where he became a fellow of Jesus College and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. His collection of photographs is now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, but most of the objects he collected from his time in Africa are in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the National Museum of Lagos in Nigeria. Pith helmets were a necessary accessory in the tropical climates of much of the British Empire. Made of either cork or a tropical swamp plant called sola and covered with cloth, the hats, also known as topee or safari helmets, shaded the wearer’s head and face from the beating sun.