CIRCA 1845

The inspiration for Elizabethan revival furniture almost certainly derives from Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), an amalgam of Gothic, Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture from great English house collections. This was quickly followed by a number of pattern books that included designs in the Elizabethan and Gothic styles, namely Furniture with Candelabra and Interior Decoration designed by R. Bridgens (1838), T. King’s The Modern Style of Cabinet Work (1839), and H.W. Arrowsmith’s The House Decorator and Painter’s Guide (1840). Possibly as a reaction to the classical lines and relative lack of carved decoration of Regency furniture there appears to have been an increasing desire for ‘rich three-dimensional ornament rather than for flat surfaces’ (R. Allwood, ‘Machine carving of the 1840s, and the catalogue of the patent wood carving company’, Furniture History Society, vol. 32, 1996, p. 90). In 1839, the Wardour Street cabinet-maker, R.H. Bowman wrote, ‘for the last 40 or 50 years instead of that gorgeous [sic] splendid furniture of Queen Elizabeth’s time we have had poor, plain and paltry’, and in 1841, the Art Union reported, ‘A taste has of late years arisen for carved furniture of the Tudor, Louis Quartorze and Renaissance periods’ (ibid.).