THE appeal of old furniture which has the merit of form, design, and workmanship of high order is one that is not the reflection of a passing fad or fancy; it has come to be one of attachment and genuine sincerity. If it took the greater part of the nineteenth century to teach us the futility of fixing our affections on exaggerated novelties, such as those which dimmed the reign of Queen Victoria and boomed the Bunthornes of the ’eighties, the twentieth century finds us discriminatingly chastened. We are taking out of our houses, those of us who can, the pieces of furniture that ought not to have been made, putting into their places old-time things of beauty, or, when it is not possible for us to acquire veritable antique pieces, the high-grade reproductions of old furniture that now grace the market and show no abatement in popular esteem.

In classifying the hobbies of several thousand collectors who stated their preferences, I found that a greater number were interested in old furniture than in any one other subject. This fact is not strange, when one comes to consider the utilitarian phase. Generally, the collector of old furniture starts in with the chance possession of two or three antique bits which, by inspiring interest and appreciation, lead him to wish to bring the other house furnishings into harmony with the loveliness of the old pieces. Few collectors of antique furniture, of course, are without homes of their own, or the modern substitute—the long-lease apartment. The skill of the modern restorer of old furniture accomplishes wonders with the battered derelicts of the houses of yesterday by making the old pieces to shine forth in their glory anew; all of which lends encouragement to the collector and new zest to his traditional delight in the “hunt.”

Upon first thought, a collection of desks might seem like a mastodonian assemblage. So it would be if the collector placed them all in a row or all in a single room! But the house of to-day can accommodate—indeed, finds necessary—more than a single desk in its furnishings. And so the collector of old furniture has another impetus in his search, a utilitarian one. Under the term “desk” we may include the various escritoires, bureau-bookcases and the secrÉtaires. All of these, in common with our cabinets, tall-boys, and so on, had their origin in the chest or coffer of the Middle Ages. To the bottom of the chest came to be added a drawer. Next, side doors instead of a top lid came into fashion, and in this manner followed the many steps that led to the development of the piece of furniture we designate, for convenience, the desk.

It is not possible to tell just when the earliest desks were made. The desk is a composite affair, combining a cabinet, a bureau, drawers, and a writing-table. In Ghirlandaio’s painting “Saint Jerome in His Study”—a work of about 1480, found in the collection of the Ognissanti in Florence—we see depicted a portable desk of the “schoolmaster” type; and another painting of the same period and in the same collection, the “St. Augustine” by Sandro Botticelli, depicts a desk with drawers. In other paintings by the old masters, and in very early engravings, we see delineated the various pieces of furniture in contemporary use designed for writing purposes, as well as others for the account-keeper. All suggest to us the probable units which combined to produce the escritoire and the secrÉtaire of later centuries, and lend interest to the collector’s enthusiasm for searching out pieces of the sort.

When living was so much less complex in the matter of domestic doings than it is in our own time, there was far less need of such objects as desks. Whole families, even of the prosperous classes, could get along without them very well. Your Mona Lisa of the Renaissance could have carried her household accounts in her head, and probably did, while the housewife of the Northern countries had little use for a place to keep quires or reams of correspondence paper. Nor had they, in all probability, entered into the sphere of feminine prowess in home-banking matters that made necessary a writing-bureau sacred to personal command.

The finest examples of the craft of the old master cabinet-makers of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth were originally produced for wealthy patrons who paid well for the master’s skill. While such pieces must naturally be beyond the reach of the collector of moderate means—except in rare instances where complete ignorance of their value is combined with a desire to part with them—they are still always interesting to note, and many of them have been reproduced with wonderful skill by some of the leading masters of the craft of furniture-making to-day.

Of course, no reputable dealer will attempt to pass off a modern copy of anything as an original. At the same time, one may take great pleasure in acquiring a truly fine copy of a Queen Anne secrÉtaire or a Hepplewhite bureau, if it is knowingly purchased as a copy, whereas if deception is practised, the result must be a disappointment and discouragement to the owner, however fine the piece.

Unfortunately, all dealers are not reliable and occasionally fraud is perpetrated in connection with antique furniture. Even the metal trimmings—knobs, handles, etc.—are given the appearance of antiquity by all sorts of devices at the command of skilful craftsmen who produce worm-holes with buck-shot, antiquity with acids, and a worn appearance with friction.

The general furniture-collector is not likely to come across anything in the way of a find in a desk of the Renaissance, seventeenth-century, or even early eighteenth-century Italian periods; nor is he be likely to meet with the finer pieces of other early continental furniture, as nearly all of these, if not in public or great private collections already, would be justly held at a very high price by dealers into whose stock such pieces might come. However, there are frequent public sales of old foreign household furnishings, and great bargains may, indeed, be met with at these. In any event, the collector must cultivate alertness, decision, and intuition for opportunities to buy—and once in a while to sell, too!

To the European the name bureau, from its French derivation, is understood to be associated with writing. In America we connect the term with a piece of furniture designed to hold articles of clothing in its various drawers. It was somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century that the drawer was added to the lower part of the chest. Later in the century further drawer capacity was developed, and by the beginning of the next we find the complete chest of drawers in use. In view of this we shall not expect to find Jacobean desks, though we may find cabinets for writing-materials and documents and even occasional desk-like pieces.

In the William and Mary period (1688-1702) cabinets, secrÉtaires, and bureaus came rapidly into use. Simplicity and an unobtrusive elegance marked the designs of this period. The desks displayed distinct characteristics which differentiate several groups. In the first division may be placed the cabinet with bracket (straight) feet or bun feet; a whole front flap, which when let down displayed the drawers and the pigeonholes; a top either single-hooded or straight with ovolo frieze. In the second division we have the bureau-desk with its slant-top desk-plane. Here we find the taller desk styles, sometimes with double-hooded tops, with or without vase-shaped finials. The third division includes the narrow slant-top desks on cup-turned legs, flat stretchers, and bun feet. The knee-hole desks (desks with the center portion arranged to permit the knees of the writer to go below the desk-plane) constitute the fourth division, while a fifth sort of desk had gate-legs braced by serpentine flat stretchers. The two center legs (there were six in all), pulled out as a support for the desk-flap when its plane was let down.

In the William and Mary period and in the Queen Anne period succeeding, the middle classes had come to a state of education undreamed of in the time of Elizabeth. Letter-writing, pamphlet-writing, and diary entries occupied many hours of the day and many candle-lit ones as well. This scriptorial activity called for more accessories than had been needed earlier. These newly devised bureau-desks combined solidity and dignity. They were distinctly architectural in design, with their moldings, cornices, and broken pediments. BombÉ fronts came in with the Dutch influence. Walnut was the favorite wood employed, either solid or as a veneer for the wood bases.

The furniture-makers of the time of George I were beginning to find a demand, and to supply it, for writing-tables with tiers of drawers at each side of the knee-hole. From about 1720 mahogany entered into furniture-making extensively. Its use by the American furniture-makers in the colonies was coincident with, and possibly antedated, lacquer, which had been the rage and as a fashionable fad continued to hold the popular favor.

Of course, no writing-furniture is more eagerly sought than that of Chippendale. There were the writing-tables with bombÉ fronts, the bureaus, standing on legs that supported low bases, the bureau-bookcase style of desk (bureau-desk), the slant-top secrÉtaires, etc. In American desks of the period we find the block-front to have been very popular.

The writing-furniture of the brothers Adam exhibited the originality and excellence common to their other articles. They introduced the more general use of satinwood and others of the lighter-colored woods, and a contour of line in design that struck a new note. Painted ornament, too, was used by them more extensively than ever before it had been used in English furniture.

With the furniture of Hepplewhite we find the three section bookcase desk in vogue, and the pull-over top (tambour) which was ancestor to the modern roll-top. The Hepplewhite desks are in great variety and of much beauty and practical utility as well. Sheraton included in his desks all the forms brought into fashion by Hepplewhite or modified by him. All these various periods were reflected in American desks, some of them with local modifications and variations.