The Baroque Era - Poland and Russia

In the early 17th century, Danzig (Gdansk), a port on the Baltic, was a thriving town with upwards of 40,000 inhabitants, where the country squires sold their produce and bought luxury goods imported from the West, as well as paintings and engravings produced locally, and various other artefacts that included the typical 'Schapp' or 'Schrank' - a heavily Baroque cupboard with doors having cartouche-shaped panels, drawers below and a characteristic gabled cornice above. This same type of cornice is found on the unusually tall Danzig cabinet-on-stand with twist legs and a third tier above the customary enclosed nest of drawers.
This gables cornice is so closely identified with Danzig that pieces exhibiting it are often attributed to that city when they may well have been made elsewhere, such as Frankfurt.

 

In the south, elements of folk culture were incorporated in more sophisticated handmade furniture. Motifs drawn from nature - birds and flowers - were used for marquetry decoration on other versions of the cabinet-on-stand. The legs are relatively slim and look too slender to support the bulky carcase. There was in fact a structural weakness in this type of article, for the same problem seems to have arisen in cabinets produced in many countries by many different makers, and many stands have had to be heavily restored or entirely replaced.

Russian fitted and non fitted furniture of the Baroque period inevitably tends to have a provincial flavour. Most of it was made by country craftsmen bound for life, unless freed by their masters, to the estates on which they worked. These labourers drew their inspiration partly from their own folk culture and partly from French imports. The result was a palace style that, however carefully executed, tends to look out of proportion and clumsy when seen out of context but no doubt suited the buildings for which it was intended.
Owing to their dispersal following the Russian Revolution, such pieces appear on the market from time to time but often go unrecognised for what they actually are, and it is not unknown for them to have been dismissed as 19th century copies of French or Italian period pieces.