Games tables

games and cards table 18th century — Table from around 1750 has a backgammon board under a chess/checkers/draughts board, and nine men's morris at the other end. Probably German. Photo by Thomas Quine

This table is a fine example of the 18th century fashion for specialised furniture designed to suit particular interests and hobbies. It’s beautifully crafted by a skilled cabinet-maker for a client with plenty of money. Look at the inlay work in the games boards, the edgings, the pairs of dice – and all over. Set in the walnut surface are maple, plum, mahogany and other woods, expertly cut and fitted together.

The later 1700s saw more and more furniture created exclusively for people’s leisure activities. Clever metamorphic step-chairs for private libraries, and card tables for the drawing-room are two examples I’ve already written about. Ladies’ (needle)work tables were surprisingly often combined with chess boards, and are sometimes as elaborate and decorative as the games table shown here. Stylish, ingenious pieces of furniture suited the mood of the times.

Georgian games table — Mahogany games table with inlaid chess board. View from side and above showing sliding, reversible top and backgammon layout beneath. English, c1795

Games boards can be seen occasionally on earlier furniture, like the amazing 16th century “Eglantine” table covered with fine marquetry at Hardwick Hall, England. (Detail pictured below.) But the 18th century brought something new. The table to the right is not as fine as the one in the main picture, but it is probably more typical:

The top is inlaid as a chessboard on the under side, and is made to slide in grooves and to be reversible when required. The top when removed discloses two compartments fitted for backgammon. This game is one of considerable antiquity in England, and was generally referred to as “the tables”. Although now relegated to country vicarages and the homes of the smaller squirearchy, it was a fashionable amusement during the eighteenth century, and one at which considerable sums were won and lost by the “bucks” of the Georgian period and the days of the Regency.
Herbert Cecsinsky, English Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, 1909

Porcelain, and more table details

The bigger porcelain box on the table at the top of the page is for game tokens or counters, and was made by Meissen, probably between 1750 and 1780. The little green one is a Meissen snuff box made c1745. Inside the lid (sorry, not visible) is a scene of people playing tric-trac, a kind of backgammon. The glass beakers with playing card decoration are the oldest things in sight; they come from early 1700s Saxony.

16th century table — Chess and backgammon boards inlaid in 16th century Hardwick Hall table. Photo by Damian Entwistle

The German table, in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, is approx. 35 by 29 inches, and 29 inches high. The English Georgian table is 28 and a half inches high. The top is only 20 by 22 inches when the side flaps are down. When up, they rest on hinged supports, and make the table’s full length 39 inches.

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: Games table, Hardwick Hall table. More picture info here

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Card tables and a social life

antique American card table — American mahogany card table with gold touches. Hinged top opens out to about 36in. square. c1828. Photo by Jenny O'Donnell

Many finely-crafted card tables were made in the 1700s and 1800s. The social lives of prosperous families in America, Britain, and other parts of Europe depended on having a card table, or two, for friends to play at in the evening.

Before 1700, card-playing was popular with very rich people, and less so with people who were moderately wealthy. It stayed fashionable with the aristocracy in 18th century Europe. Wealthy gamblers sometimes lost huge sums of money in gaming houses or private mansions where a ‘banker’ oversaw games of chance like faro or basset.

During the 1700s and 1800s more people came to have more leisure time, and they furnished their homes to reflect this. Comfortably-off hosts in middle-sized houses organised card tables for their evening guests. People still played for money but the games, like whist or piquet, involved more skill and less betting. The players might enjoy conversation more than cards once a nice little group was gathered round the table. This often provides a useful scenario for dialogue in novels. Young women confide secrets over cards in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and older ladies whisper animatedly at Cranford card tables described by Elizabeth Gaskell.

17th century card table — Playing cards c1637. By Dutch painter Jan Olis

Before it became fashionable to have special furniture crafted by cabinet-makers, cards were often played at tables covered in a floor-length cloth, as you can see in various paintings of elegant 17th century players. Artists also show poorer card players, usually men, gathered round a stool or barrel when they had time for card playing.

Decorative or simple?

Early 19th century Empire or Regency tables, and later Federal Era tables in the USA, generally had fold-over tops concealing a playing surface, which might be covered in green baize. Carved pedestal bases had legs that could swing out to support the square opened top. Mahogany was a popular choice, but walnut, maple, rosewood or satinwood were also used.

pair neo-classical card tables — Card tables made in New York by Frenchman Lannuier c1817. Photo by Peter Roan

Ornamentation varied. Later card tables tended to have more elaborate flourishes than the relatively restrained pre-1800 designs. A semi-circular or demi-lune Georgian flip-top table might have simple tapered legs. Inlaid surface patterns were likely to be discreet geometric designs. Whether the top folded into a rectangle or semi-circle, a typical card table was about 30 inches high and 36 inches across: a good size for four people to chat as well as play. Some tables were made with recessed holders for coins or tokens. (See big picture below.)

In Victorian times social card playing was by no means only for the grandest section of society. A card table was almost essential for households aspiring to a middle-class way of life. An 1856 book* advising British people how to set up house on annual budgets of £100 upward assumed there would be a card table in the drawing room, even if it was only mahogany veneer on a softwood frame, with a simple round or square top.

By this time a particular style of simple oval or round table was known as a ‘loo table’. Loo, or lanterloo, was a popular game in the Victorian era, though its origins are older. Sometimes these tables had a tilting top (not folding in half), perhaps with inlaid veneer decoration, and so they could be kept upright by a wall.

18th century American card table — Card table, top open, Queen Anne legs, in the Robert Hooper House, built in Massachusetts c1754. Photo by Jonathan Dresner

There were always a few people who kept away from card playing for religious or moral reasons – but not always the ones you would expect. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch there’s a clergyman who plays cards well enough to pad out his modest income with regular winnings, though he attracts disapproval from some of his neighbours.

*JH Walsh, A Manual of Domestic Economy: suited to families spending from £100 to £1000, London 1856

More on American card tables influenced by cabinet-makers like Sheraton in Philadelphia Empire Furniture by Allison Boor

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: first mahogany table, Hooper table, pair of tables. More picture info here

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Early American candlestands: light at the right height

Threaded candle stand screw type — Threaded screw candlestand allowed someone working at the desk to raise candles that had burned down. The drawer is a nice base for stability as well as storage. In the parsonage at Mission Mill in Salem, Oregon, photographed by Glen Bedsoe

When you’re working by candlelight you want as much light on your sewing or reading as possible, but you don’t want to waste candlewax or tallow. It helps if you can raise or lower the light to suit the task, or to allow for the candle getting shorter.

Candlestands colonial screw tripod table type — Early 20th C candlestands inspired by early American designs. On the left, a model for a recreated early American room (photo Knoxville Museum of Art). On the right, a woodworking design for a so-called Puritan candle stand, a "copy of a genuine antique", to be made of maple with brass tubing to hold the candles.

Colonial Americans and their descendants left behind them a kind of threaded candlestand with a special charm. It’s thought of as a distinctively American design: twin candle holders on a wooden bar which moves up or down on a central stem. Floor-standing candlestands like this, with a small tabletop, are desirable antiques, while 20th and 21st century craftspeople have gone on making both full-height and “desktop” versions. For a classic example in maple wood look at this 18th century one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Grandmother’s front room had bow-backed chairs with flag seats, and tables supported by curiously-carved and twisted legs, a candle stand that screwed up and down like a piano stool, a handsome mirror, and the buffet was resplendent in its appointments.
Memories of a Massachusetts room c1800 in Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian by Sarah Emery, 1879

shoemaker candle stand — Candle stand in shoemaker's workshop at Colonial Williamsburg (a living history exhibit). Photo by Jeff Kubina.

What are they called?

Now for the name problem. Is there a name that summons up an image of a tripod-legged table with a pair of candle holders on an arm that screws up and down? Or even a name for the top part with or without legs? Here are some that I’ve seen used:

Candlestand or Candle Stand – the name used by the Met, but they use it for plain tables too. Light, portable tables, aka candlestands, were made in quantity in the 1800s as bedside or parlor tables suitable for holding a candlestick. Candlestand can also mean a very ornamental tall stand.

Shoemaker’s or Cobbler’s Candlestand – Adjusting the level of the candle was certainly important for shoe makers and other craftspeople, but they didn’t stick just to the threaded twin-candle type. The photo left shows a very simple candle holder with some scope for height adjustment, while the shoemaker’s shop at Williamsburg also has a more elaborate kind with the “light-focusing” globes associated with lacemaking.

Shaker Candlestand – Is it right to call screw-threaded candle holders “Shaker”? They weren’t just made by Shakers, and the Shakers themselves also made tables with a single hole and shaft for a candle holder, as well as plain small tables to place a candlestick on.

In the evening, after the dishes were washed and cleared off the table and the table set back, the candle stand would be moved out from its proper corner and the whole family gathered around it; some of the men reading a newspaper or a book or the women sewing or knitting, or spinning flax or tow. If there was not room around the stand for all, one or more would hang a candle on the back of a chair.
Memories of a Virginia farm in the 1820s by John Janney

Adjustable candle stand 18th century — A different way of adjusting candle height and position with this holder from Upper Saddle River, NJ, believed to date from c1735. (Bergen County Historical Society report 1920)

English candlestands

What ancestors or relatives did these candlestands have in Europe? I turned to Pinto’s Treen and other wooden bygones for clues. He describes a variety of adjustable one- or two-candle holders and stands: to go on the floor, on a table, or hanging on a wall. The type that sounds most like the taller early American kind discussed here is an 18th century “threaded wood stem or pillar, on which were mounted one or two threaded candle brackets, adjustable in height by turning them on the stem”. “Ratchet adjustment” or “friction rise and fall” were alternative mechanisms. He shows an early single candle friction type, floor-standing with a small square tabletop incorporated in the design. There’s also a short 18th century boxwood candle holder with threaded shaft holding an arm with a candle at each end.

As mentioned above, there’s some similarity with lacemakers’ candlestands, which Pinto says were used not only for lace but for other “close work” too. Usually, in England at least, these were “crude”, “three-legged” like milking stools, with holes for the “flashes” or water-filled globes and for a single “spring controlled rise and fall candle holder”.

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: main picture, scale model candle stand, Williamsburg candle stand. More picture info here
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Antique work tables for sewing and crafts

needlework and sewing table with silk pouch — A rosewood veneer work table with sliding needlework bag and chess board, from Georgian London c1815. Note the candlestick on a nearby stand. Photo by bortescristian.

Before the 18th century ladies used to keep their needlework projects in a work-basket or bag. Then furniture designers started to create elegant little tables for the drawing room with a silk work-bag or box-holder hanging beneath. You have only to look at one to understand why Sheraton, the famous cabinet-maker, called his designs pouch tables.

As well as slide-out pouches to hold sewing materials, these small tables had drawers and compartments under a flip-up top. The owner wouldn’t always be sewing alone, though. Many kinds of fancy craftwork were done while families, or groups of friends, sat together. The novelist Jane Austen mentions a “work-table” used for “making a filigree basket” decorated with rolled paper quills.* Later in the 19th century a “Complete Guide to the Work-Table” offers instructions for “Berlin work, crochet, drawn-thread work, embroidery, knitting, knotting or macramé, lace, netting, Poonah painting & tatting”.

Various extras like a pull-out reading & writing slope and a chess board were common, and you could have an ink-stand, a backgammon board, and fold-down extensions. By 1800 many prosperous households had a lady’s work station that doubled as a play station. One 1815 table auctioned in 2001 (for over £4000) even had a zograscope built in; a high-tech optical toy by the standards of its time. More ordinary furniture of this type included many nicely-made needlework tables with a couple of drawers, a compartment under a hinged lid, but no silk bag. Some fine pieces defy categorisation, like this French porcelain-topped tulipwood veneer table from the 1770s.

globe Biedermeier work table — Work table with sewing tools inside globe. Biedermeier style. Photo by DDDiana. (Please comment if you have more info about this table.)

American Federal or Empire work tables sell at auction for thousands of dollars; one made from mahogany and bird’s-eye maple in Boston around 1800 fetched nearly $20,000 in 2007. UK prices for Georgian and Regency tables vary a great deal according to quality: from hundreds to thousands of pounds. If you are buying, check any restoration work; newly-replaced silk pouches should be in an appropriate style.

Some rare European Biedermeier pieces are hardly tables at all, but globes opening to reveal perfectly crafted compartments for needlework tools and games pieces. Most of these elaborate neoclassical pieces were made, with great skill and fine veneer work, in Vienna or Berlin. Some drum-shaped work tables were made in this style, too.

A magazine in late Georgian London published a picture and description of a “fashionable” ladies’ work table in 1823. This suggests the idea was spreading out from the really wealthy and stylish upper class to more middle-class homes whose owners were interested in the furnishings of the upper social echelons. The writer of the piece quoted next probably thought readers would aspire to have a table like the one illustrated, instead of keeping their needlework in bags and boxes.

sewing table with drawing and writing flaps — Design for a work table from an English style and culture magazine in 1823. The needlework pouch slides out, the desk flap lifts to show a decorative interior, the writing surface can be sloped.

FASHIONABLE FURNITURE. Ladies’ Work-table –
This elegant table forms a pleasing and commodious appendage to the sitting-room of mansions fitted up in a style of superior elegance. It is equally adapted to the boudoir and drawing-room, and answers the purpose of a drawing-table as well as a work-table, and a desk for writing and reading. The silk bag suspended from the desk is, in the engraving, of azure blue, with silk fringe of the same colour, but should be made to correspond with the colour of the apartment for which the table is designed.

In order that it may harmonize with the rest of the furniture, the frame-work should be formed of rose-wood of a rich dark colour, and varied in its grain. The ornaments are wholly of burnished and matt gold. The top of the table should be adorned with some rich design in water-colours, highly varnished, for the purpose of preserving it: this will be at all times a pleasing object to the eye. Fruit or flowers, well grouped, are particularly to be recommended. The interior may exhibit some pleasing landscape, or any other similar embellishment, according to the taste or fancy of the fair proprietor.
From: Repository of arts, literature, fashions &c, Ackermann & Shoberl, 1823

Photos

Photographers credited in captions. Links to originals here: silk pouch rosewood veneer work table, globe needlework table. More picture info here

Notes

* Sense & Sensibility

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Metamorphic library steps, chairs and tables

convertible steps table — Sheraton first published this design for Library Steps & Table in 1793.

In the 18th century wealthy men with private libraries in their grand houses wanted elegant furniture around them. The upmarket cabinet-makers of the period created fine desks and chairs, but how could they design new, improved versions of the step-ladders needed for reaching books from the highest shelves?

One idea was to conceal steps under the seat of a long stool. Turned upright, its upholstered seat to the wall, it made a short ladder with three treads, each smaller than than the last: perhaps not a very stable arrangement. It is rare to find any of these on the antiques market, and it is unlikely that many were made, as better furniture soon followed.

Chippendale designed the kind described above in the 1750s, but in the next decade he created hinged steps that could be folded into a stool. This type can be seen at Harewood House and Nostell Priory in England. One was described at the time as a “large mahogany library stool with the seat to rise as a step ladder the seat stuff’d and cover’d with black leather”. (Nostell Priory accounts 1767) The other was given a neo-classical look with rosewood veneer and marquetry.

Benjamin Franklin had something better than a stool: a leather-upholstered chair with steps beneath. There are claims that his seat was the first ever chair and steps combination. Whether or not this is true, it is comfortable enough to be a real reader’s chair: ideal for someone who loves books as well as good furniture.

Tables were part of this new wave of convertible library furniture, and a British patent for a dual-function table with steps was registered in 1774. Sheraton published a design for one of these library tables before the end of the century. (Picture above)

This design was taken from steps that have been made by Mr. Campbell, Upholsterer to the Prince of Wales. They were first made for the King, and highly approved of by him, as every way answering the intended purpose. There are other kinds of library steps which I have seen, made by other persons, but, in my opinion, these must have the decided preference, both as to simplicity and firmness when they are set up. The steps may be put up in half a minute, and the whole may be taken down and enclosed within the table frame in about the same time.
Thomas Sheraton, The cabinet-maker and upholsterer’s drawing-book, London, 1802 edition

metamorphic library chair steps — Steps folded under the seat of this Morgan & Sanders chair, designed c1811

The name metamorphic (shape-changing) was not used for the earliest pieces of library furniture, but appeared in a London patent of 1811. The first ever “patent metamorphic library chair” with curving arms spawned many varied chair designs, some quite plain, others very elaborate. Georgian or Regency pieces of dual-purpose library furniture can fetch thousands of dollars at antiques auctions, and even later Victorian metamorphic chairs may be quite valuable.

One 19th century curiosity is based on a library staircase design that was boxed in at the sides. One stair-tread was a hinged lid giving access to storage beneath. This was adopted as bedroom furniture and used in some homes as a commode to conceal the chamber pot for night-time use.

Note

Since I first wrote this short piece for another website, Clive Taylor has published a fascinating, detailed, and original dissertation on The Regency Period Metamorphic Library Chair.

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