Elizabethan and Jacobean Furniture - Scallop Shell

Scallop Shell

In that portion of the Elizabethan which is often considered as the Jacobean, although it was but the completer development of the former, the globular excrescences of the columns elongated themselves into equally vast and far uglier acorn-shaped supports. A good deal of inlaid work was then used, and the carving did its best to reach and render the ideas of the cinquecento. It is, indeed, styled the cinquecento period of English art, every surface being rough with arabesques of griffins, vases, rosettas, dolphins, scrolls, foliages, Cupids, and mermaids with double tails curling round them on either side. Meantime the cartouche and its straps — ligatures they were called in Italy, cuirs in France and Flanders, were still often used. Scallop shells received a particular share of favor, having been recently brought home from foreign seas, and was immediately seized by the designers in need of other shapes. The Flemings made seats that enclosed the sitter in the valves of this scallop, carved just rudely enough to excuse their eccentricity. Settees were made at this time whose backs consisted of several just such immense scallops as those of these Holland House Gilt Chamber chairs; and the same idea of decoration peeps out in fan-like frills at every spare corner of the Neo-Jacobean revival of the style. These shell forms of furniture might befit an oceanside home, but they must have been singularly out of place on dry land and among the huge and heavy articles that surrounded them in the Jacobean mansions.

There was something, on the whole, in the early Elizabethan replete with dignity, a massy magnificence that agreed with that of the era and the monarch, that went well, too, with the mighty farthingales and ruffs of the ladies, the trunk-hose and puffed and banded doublets of the gallants, while the people who used it — Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon — still have a peculiar interest. Well as it suited doughy old Queen Bess herself, the forms which it took under her successor, with their assumption of foreign conceits and their display of profuse gilding, accorded no less characteristically with the arrogant, pedantic, and petty James. All of this furniture, however, is exceedingly attractive, and there are few who would not rejoice over any article of it which is not too unwieldy for modern quarters. A typical sideboard and dresser offer a medley of design, with not too well drawn fawns and satyrs, fruits and flowers, Cupids, birds, scrolls, shields and straps, cornucopias, mermaids, monsters and foliages. They belong to the beginning of the later period. It was no light matter to clear the floor for the dance of the Capulets when the servant cried "Away with the joint-stools, remove the court-cupboard, look to the plate!".