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AMERICAN HOMES 
A carefully made replica of an Eighteenth Century Bavarian bride’s dower-chest, 
AND GARDENS 
vpeer 
painted in colors 
Painted Furniture 
By Abbott McClure and Harold Donaldson Eberlein 
Photographs by T. C. Turner 
sqgj|O you ever think of furniture as having per- 
4] sonality? Whether you do or not, it has 
personality and has it to a marked degree. 
After all, personality is only an outward 
manifestation of character, in the case of 
furniture at any rate, and if furniture has 
not character we haven’t a jot of reason for preferring one 
sort to another. Of course, if a chair is simply a chair, a 
table a table and-a chest a chest, if we suffer from such a 
Peter Bell-like lack of all aesthetic sensibility, we may deny 
personality to furniture; otherwise we must concede it. Our 
tables and chairs, our sideboards and cabinets, all our house- 
hold goods in fact, are refined or vulgar in feeling; they are 
patricians in mien or simple peasants as the case may be, 
but they all have distinctive personality and one of the chief 
factors in conferring that personality is the element of color 
and its manner of application. Color and life are insepa- 
rable. From our cradles up we are surrounded by it. We 
cannot escape from it if we would, and few of us would wish 
to if we could. From the lowest depths of savagery to the 
height of artistic refinement, from north to south and from 
east to west, from the remotest past to the present moment, 
color and color combination have always been of paramount 
concern, and the way we deal with them determines whether 
or not we possess that much coveted and oft disputed qual- 
ity—good taste. We may choose to surround ourselves 
with a Whistlerian atmos- 
phere of drab and sepia or 
we may be like the eccen- 
End panels of the Bavarian dower-chest, 
tric gentleman who, in flat defiance of all accepted conven- 
tions of male attire, designed himself an eiderdown padded 
greatcoat of cerise samite quilted with bottle green; do what 
we will we cannot escape from the color problem. 
So then, since color and its application are matters of so 
vastly important and universal consideration, we can readily 
understand how men came to embellish the furniture in their 
houses with designs and colors pleasing to their eye. Espe- 
cially was this the case where the furniture, chest, cupboard 
or what you will, was severely simple in form and line and 
suggested the need of something to relieve its austerity of 
aspect. In the Middle Ages, however, at which period we 
begin to hear of painted furniture in Europe, such was the 
passion for gorgeous color that even ornately carved chests 
and cabinets or armoires were heavily overlaid with gilding 
and rich diaperwork picked out in scarlet and blue, choco- 
late and green, or gaudy with heraldic devices blazoned in 
all their proper tinctures. If you would have a lively pic- 
ture of a baronial hall made ready for a banquet or my 
lady’s bower with its varied garniture, look in the pages of 
Christine de Pisan or at some monkish illumination. From 
those englamored days, when primal traits of character and 
primary colors held the field together, to the second half 
of the Eighteenth Century, when Adam, Heppelwhite and 
Sheraton gave fresh impetus to the vogue for painted fur- 
niture, an impetus perceptibly felt on our side of the Atlan- 
tic and still vigorously ac- 
tive, there has scarcely ever 
been a time when the aid of 
four Bavarian kitchen boxes, and a small Biedermeyer jewel-box 
