January, 1918 
13 
SPANISH WALL FURNITURE OF THE SIXTEENTH AND 
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES 
HAROLD DONALDSON EBERLEIN and ABBOT McCLURE 
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.. . . 
.. . 
by the traditions of Moorish usage, which em¬ 
ployed but little movable furniture, the people 
of Christian Spain furnished their rooms scant¬ 
ily—scantily even when compared with the 
contemporary custom in Italy and France, 
which nowadays most of us would deem meager. 
It is doubtless due, in some measure, to this 
fact that Spanish furniture acquired its quali¬ 
ty of sufficiency already alluded to. The 
same fact also explains the paucity of the 16th 
and 17th Century Spanish pieces extant when 
Fig. 2 is designed for use in the angle 
of two walls, a carved walnut table dat¬ 
ing from the 16 th Century 
Fig. 1. North African traditions of con¬ 
struction are evidenced in a low, boot¬ 
footed, 16 th Century walnut cabinet 
Fig. 4. The long wall table is of carved walnut, from the 16 th or 
early 17 th Century. An early \1th Century papclcra is standing on it 
O LD Spanish furniture has four outstanding 
qualities—dignity, concentrated interest, 
vigor and intrinsic sufficiency. The last men¬ 
tioned proceeds as a necessary consequence 
from the other three. There is enough dignity, 
enough interest and enough vigor combined in 
each individual piece to make it sufficient, in its 
own right, to command attention and respect. 
One might add that this quality of sufficiency 
assumes and, at times, even exacts freedom 
from interference by other crowding pieces of 
furniture, for reasons which will appear in the 
course of discussion. This is equally true 
whether a piece be of simple or of ornate de¬ 
sign and execution. And, whether simple or 
ornate, it is so virile that it 
holds its own by harmoni¬ 
ous contrast and so adapt¬ 
able that it appears to com¬ 
plete advantage against 
either a severely austere or 
a richly elaborate setting. 
It is only when placed in a 
weak, namby-pamby en¬ 
vironment that is neither 
austere nor consistently 
opulent that old Spanish 
furniture looks out of 
keeping. And, in such 
cases, it is the background 
that suffers by comparison. 
Traditions and Character 
Of Spanish wall furni¬ 
ture in the 16th and 17th 
Centuries, the pieces of 
most usual occurrence were 
chests of several kindred 
sorts, areons, vargueho 
cabinets, papeleras, cabi¬ 
nets both low and high of 
sundry variant types, small 
wall tables that may not 
inappropriately be called 
consoles, long wall tables, 
cupboards and bedsteads. 
In making a survey of 
early Spanish mobiliary 
equipment, it must be 
borne in mind that, in¬ 
fluenced to a certain extent 
compared with the relative abundance of Ital¬ 
ian and French pieces dating from approxi¬ 
mately the same time. 
When w T e examine the several articles of old 
Spanish wall furniture alongside of the cor¬ 
responding contemporary articles made in 
Italy or in France, w T e cannot help being struck 
by the fact that the vargueho cabinet is the 
most distinctively Spanish piece which the 
artisans of the period produced and that the 
mastery of manual skill and decorative facili¬ 
ty therein exemplified epitomizes the highest 
achievements of Hispanic cabinet-making 
craft. The origin of the vargueho cabinet 
antedates the 16th Century, and it is one of 
the oldest articles of Span¬ 
ish furniture. 
Vargueiio Cabinets 
Thanks to the Moorish 
habit of sitting upon cush¬ 
ions, a habit they trans¬ 
mitted in large measure to 
their Christian neighbors 
and pupils in the arts of 
peace, the vargueho cabi¬ 
net was for a long time the 
only important piece of 
Spanish wall furniture. It 
rested upon a stand of 
which the earliest form 
seems to have been a table 
with trestle legs and 
wrought iron braces, simi¬ 
lar to that supporting the 
papelera in Figure 14. 
Slightly later in date, 
stands of carved walnut, 
like that shown in Figure 
3, were especially made to 
hold the vargueho, or else 
the support was supplied 
by a cupboard base, con¬ 
taining drawers and doors, 
very like the low cabinet 
shown in Figure 12. In the 
latter case the base was 
often made to correspond 
more closely in design and 
decoration with the cabinet 
it supported than was the 
Fig. 3. The wood is carved walnut, 
with inlays of bone. The drop front 
and drawer arrangement are noteworthy 
