Elizabethan and Jacobean Furniture - Porcelain and Mirrors

Porcelain and Mirrors

By the close of the Jacobean era, the style held its own with slight variation and innovation, for some reigns. The execution of the carving was coarse and careless during the time of the first Stuarts, but afterward rose to be classed with the finest known; inlaid work, also, was more freely used and attained much excellence. There was increasing prevalent luxury in every thing. Fine pottery, for instance, became more frequent; for although glass had been made in London under Elizabeth's patronage, "porselyn" was rare, and even earthenware was not then very general, gold and silver plate making the vessels of the rich, and pewter mugs and platters and wooden trenchers being still those of the poor, while mention is made of "five dishes of earth painted, such as are brought from Venice," which were presented to the queen as something unusual; and it was thought a gift not unworthy of royalty when Lord Burleigh offered her a "porringer of white porselyn garnished with gold." The first use of the famous Dutch tiles is thought to belong to the reign of Charles I.

Mirrors, which were very rare in Elizabeth's time, became more common in that of the Charleses, the Duke of Buckingham, during the reign of the second Charles, bringing a colony of Venetian glassmakers to Lambeth. One Elizabethan mirror is some three and a half by four and a half feet in size — five feet was the largest made till the latter part of the eighteenth century — the frame is carved in oak and partially gilt, and the glass is set flatly. In one mirror of the time of Charles II the glass is beveled, and in the glasses of the Merry Monarch's predecessor the frames were so made as to throw the glass forward and give it projection. Quicksilvered glass itself, unset, became a novelty, so that sometimes whole rooms, and even the ceilings, were lined with it. The mirrors made by the duke's colony were of superior excellence; they had an inch-wide bevel all along their outer extremity, whether they were rectangular or curved. "This," says Mr. Pollen, "gives preciousness and prismatic light to the whole glass. It is of great difficulty in execution, the plate being held by the workman over his head, and the edge cut by grinding. The feats of skill in this kind, in the form of interrupted curves and short lines and angles, are rarely accomplished by modern workmen, and the angle of the bevel itself is generally too acute, whereby the prismatic light produced by this portion of the mirror is in violent and too showy contrast to the remainder."

Wall hangings had been long in use — the leather, the damask, velvent, and arras or tapestry. The Flemish tapestries, from the time of their first manufacture, were in great favor. Elizabeth had a set wrought signalizing the dispersion and destruction of the Spanish Armada. So fine had they become that they were often preferred to other decoration, and in the Stuart time were stretched across the noble old carved panelwork itself. "Here I saw the new fabric of French tapestry," wrote Evelyn, in the last years of Charles II, concerning the Gobelins tapestry, established under the royal patronage in France: "for design, tenderness of work, and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond any thing I had ever beheld. Some pieces had Versailles, St. Germains, and other palaces of the French king, with huntings, figures, and landscapes, exotic fowls, and all to the life rarely done." Yet works in tapestry had been, long before this, under royal protection in England also, the Raphael cartoons having been purchased by Charles I for the use of the establishment at Mortlake, which, however, did not outlast that sovereign more than half a century; and the employment of draperies had become so profuse that they now largely took the place of the heavy paneled wooden tops which had so long encumbered the bedsteads.

This article is text adapted from an article in Harper's Magazine from 1877-78