French Kingwood Oval Bedside Cabinet with Brass Details

A French transitional style kingwood oval bedside cabinet.…
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A French transitional style kingwood oval bedside cabinet. Early 20th century, the small oval-form veneered bedside with three-quarter pierced brass gallery, three banded drawers, raised on slightly tapering cabriole legs with applied sabots and brass decoration. Height 73 cm, width 42 cm, depth 33 cm

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  • Gallery - On furniture, a gallery is a small upright section, frequently pierced and decorated, around the tops of small items of furniture, such as davenports, side tables, and so forth. Galleries are made in brass or bronze,and be fretted, pierced or solid timber. A three-quarter gallery is one that surrounds three of the four sides of a table, desk or other top.
  • Veneers - Veneers are thin sheets of well-figured timber that are glued under pressure to the surface of a cheaper timber for decorative effect, and then used in the making of carcase furniture.

    Early veneers were saw-cut so were relatively thick, (up to 2 mm) but is was realised that saw cutting was wasteful, as timber to the equivilent of the thickness of the saw was lot on each cut.

    A more efficient method was devised to slice the timber, either horizontally with a knife, or in a rotary lathe.

    Flame veneer, commonly found in mahogany or cedar furniture, is cut from the junction of the branches and main trunk. So-called fiddleback veneers, where the grain is crossed by a series of pronounced darker lines, is usually cut from the outer sections of the tree trunk.

    During the 17th and 18th centuries, and in much of the walnut marquetry furniture made during the latter part of the 19th century, the veneer was laid in quarters, each of the same grain, so that one half of the surface was the mirror image of the other.

    The use of veneer allows many other decorative effects to be employed, including stringing, feather banding, cross banding, and inlaid decorative panels in the piece. The carcase over which veneer is laid is usually of cheaper timber such as pine, oak or, sometimes in Australia during the first half of the 19th century, red cedar.

    The important thing to remember about veneers is that prior to about 1850 they were cut by hand, and were consequently quite thick - ranging up to about 2mm deep.

    From the mid-19th century veneers were cut by machines and were almost wafer-thin. This is a critical point when trying to judge the approximate age of veneered furniture.
  • Pierced Decoration - Ornamental woodwork with part of the background cut through and removed to produce an open-work pattern.
  • Cabriole Leg - The cabriole leg evolved from an elongated scroll, curving out at the knee which may or may not be carved, and forming a serpentine shape as it descends to the foot.

    First introduced into English furniture in the late 17th century, cabriole legs were widely used during the Queen Anne and early Georgian periods, where they frequently terminated in a pad foot or ball and claw foot. The style has had many imitators since then. The cabriole leg was re-introduced in the mid-19th century, and is commonly associated with the balloon-back dining or drawing-room chairs made in walnut, mahogany or, in Australia, cedar. The Victorian cabriole leg, on the whole, was rather more slender than the earlier form, following the French style, which emphasized the delicacy and daintiness of the chairs they were designed to support. Cabriole legs are sometimes found on windsor chairs, especially those made during the 18th century.

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