The Baroque Era - The Netherlands - 1

The long struggle for the independence of the Netherlands was won in 1609, when the seven northern provinces formed a republic. The Dutch East India Company had already been established in 1602. These two events occurring in the first decade of the 17th century helped to create the climate for a long period of successful free enterprise at home and abroad, in which the Dutch and Flemish handmade furniture industry fully shared.

From around 1650, carcase pieces, especially various kinds of cupboards with doors, developed flat panels free of carving, the emphasis being placed on finely-figured exotic woods, which became available through the activities of the East India Company and were used either in the solid or as veneers. Carving was often employed to decorate the arched framework of doors and panels, and often follows the soft, meaty manner known as auricular.
This treatment is common on the tall cupboards with rounded arches on doors and end panels made in the north, especially in the province of Holland. Arched doors with plain panels occur also on the two-stage cupboards popular in Zeeland at about the same time, but on these, the carving echoes the earlier Renaissance style of Mannerist figures and animal masks. Pieces of this type, together with chests-of-drawers with decoration composed of geometrically arranged mouldings, almost always stood on boldly turned 'bun' feet, which, like other non fitted furniture, were made of oak but were often stained and polished black to imitate ebony. Ebony or 'ebonized' pearwood was also used for mouldings. beadings and narrow strips of veneer employed to emphasize the line of a piece, giving it a dramatic, dignified but slightly mournful appearance. Ebonized mouldings were often chiselled on their surface to produce a ripped effect which reflected light in subtle ways.

Ebony played an even more important role in the cabinets-on-stands for which Antwerp in the south continued to be famous,very different from the reproduction furniture methods of today, combining the dark veneers with contrasting materials - ivory, silver, tortoiseshell and painted plaques. From around 1660, completed pieces of ebony furniture, particularly chairs, were imported from Dutch colonies in the East Indies and Ceylon. They are usually worked in solid wood rather than in veneers, and display remarkable skill in fashioning this hard material into legs and spindles of twist shape, as well as in carving the cresting rails of chairs with much the same patterns of masks and foliage as are found on Dutch silver of the period. Chairs of this kind had seats of woven cane - the first to appear in Europe.

...to be continued.