September, 1919 
15 
Rich and intricate in¬ 
lay is found in this \~ith 
Century walnut cabinet, 
a type showing Flemish 
influence. Courtesy of 
A. Alavoine & Co. 
FRENCH WALL FURNITURE of the 16th and 17th CENTURIES 
Chests, Hutches, Buffets, Dressers, Cabinets, Hanging Cupboards and Bedsteads 
Comprise the Furniture Families of Those Eras 
H. D. EBERLEIN and ABBOT McCLURE 
F RENCH furniture suffered a griev¬ 
ous mischief to its good name at 
the hands of the decorators and de¬ 
signers of the Victorian era. Thanks 
to the same agencies and the miscon¬ 
ceptions they fostered, the general pub¬ 
lic has been defrauded of a significant 
share of its decorative heritage. The 
perversely vulgar taste of those same 
19th Century decorators and designers, 
and their lack of discrimination in se¬ 
lecting French types, led them to ex¬ 
ploit all the blatant, bombastic, gaudy 
or flippant phases of French mobiliary 
art, chosen from the most pretentious 
epochs of design—such types as we see 
in some flashy hotel furnishings, sup¬ 
posed to be elegant—to the exclusion 
of the more restrained and comfortably 
domestic forms that existed in abun¬ 
dance. When they did not succumb to 
their hankerings for gilt and saccharine 
over-elaboration, they put forth, as typi¬ 
cal products of French cabinet making, 
only such museum pieces as few could 
ever hope to own or to have reproduced. 
In justice, therefore, to the Gallic 
artificers of past centuries, and still 
more in justice to ourselves, it be¬ 
hooves us to eradicate the preju¬ 
dice commonly entertained against 
French furniture and to recover the 
use of this portion of our art heri¬ 
tage by acquainting ourselves with the 
simpler, more domestic, and more hu¬ 
man mobiliary expressions of a richly 
imaginative, inventive and ingenious 
people, whose every activity we may 
well contemplate with profit, expres¬ 
sions that we have commonly too long 
ignored. 
The Furniture Families 
As wall furniture antedated the de¬ 
velopment of movable seating furniture 
in all its highly diversified forms, we 
will first consider that aspect of the 
subject. 
The principal classes or families of 
16th Century articles of cabinet work 
were (1) chests of the familiar pattern 
with lifting lid; 
(2) bahuts or hutches as they would 
have been called in England, which 
were close akin to chests in purpose 
and general shape, but had doors in 
front and a shallow drawer, or two 
shallow drawers side by side, below 
the cupboard portion, and were some¬ 
times a little higher than chests; 
(3) buffets, which were of several 
varieties but were commonly about three 
and a half or four feet high and con¬ 
tained a cupboard; 
(4) dressers or credences, which had 
both closed and open bases but almost 
invariably a superstructure with cup¬ 
board or shelves; 
(5) cabinets or presses, which had 
both cupboard and open stand bases, 
and cupboards in the upper part; 
(6) armoires or hanging cupboards, 
which were the equivalent of ward¬ 
robes; and 
(7) bedsteads. 
This may seem a meagre list but, as 
a matter of fact, each one of the fore¬ 
going classes comprised many related 
species so that the mobiliary resources 
of the period were ampty diversified. 
The Confused Names 
It is impossible to apply French 
terminology to the distinctive types for 
the'utmost confusion of definition pre¬ 
vails among the encyclopaedists them¬ 
selves and, in some cases, they are flat¬ 
ly at variance. French writers have 
followed now one authority, now an¬ 
other, without arriving at any unanimi¬ 
ty of usage and when a piece becomes 
embarrassing to classify they sometimes 
merely call it a “meu'ble” and let it go 
at that. The comparatively few British 
and American writers who have es¬ 
sayed the subject have created con- 
An interesting type of armoire or hanging cupboard of 
Boule workmanship in the Louis XIV style has inlay of 
engraved brass and tin 
