In order to help the less artistic of us understand when we are looking at a certain piece of furniture that it should be considered “art,” some furniture styles have the term incorporated into the name just to make sure. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there was that style called “Art Moderne.” That was the style that came from the 1925 Paris convention known as the International Exposition of Decorative Arts. It evolved into the “streamline” look of America in the 1930s, with waterfall bedroom sets and round nose trains. The name of the style was updated in the 1960s to “Art Deco,” still retaining the “art” part just so we remember.

Just before that was the Art Nouveau movement, the “new” art that came at the turn of the century that incorporated elongated organic forms into the structure of the furniture. It was primarily a European phase in furniture but it did have some influence in this country in other decorative arts.

But there was an “art’ movement even before that one. The 19th-century version of the “art” movement can sometimes be very confusing to the average shopper for older and antique furniture. It sort of looks like something else but not really. And sometimes the color is awful. The movement actually started around the middle of the 19th-century with some of the same people involved in the advent of the Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Eastlake among them. The new movement gained a significant foothold on the American furniture market after the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The American public was smitten with the Japanese exhibit in Philadelphia, and furniture styling immediately picked up an Oriental flavor. At the same time, people were beginning to tire of the overwhelming size, complexity and severity of Rococo and Renaissance Revival furniture. They were tired of high Victorian styling. Eastlake’s simplistic approach to furniture design suddenly was very popular even though he didn’t design much of the furniture himself.

The desk on the left illustrates the Oriental approach. It is ebonized with gold incising. The desk on the right, in a wood finish, is the Moorish approach to the style with geometric fretwork. Both desks are based on Eastlake’s design principles.

His concepts were linear and the guiding principle was that of visible craftsmanship. It didn’t take long for the basic Eastlake style to be adapted to the new movement. By adding a few Oriental touches to this simple idea, the form of “Art Furniture” was born, characterized by shallow carvings, devoid of veneer and excessive ornamentation. The entire movement, in architecture and decorative arts as well as furniture, became known as the “Aesthetic Movement,” implying that the existence of art was for art’s sake; a direct conflict with the Victorian concept that art must serve a moral purpose by reinforcing moral values. Even the name, “Aesthetic,” means artistic or beautiful.

One of the favorite finishes of Aesthetic movement craftsmen was the ebonized look. Cherry was a favorite base material because it did not telegraph the grain or nature of the wood through the solid black overcoat yet it somehow retained the warmth found in natural wood. The wood was stained, not painted, a jet black and then highly polished. The black background further enhanced the contrast with the gold incising or the lighter woods used in marquetry panels and floral inlays. But not all Aesthetic furniture is ebonized. Walnut and rosewood were popular mediums, and bird’s eye maple was a favorite accent wood. And not all decoration was Oriental. It ranged from classical molding to medieval spindles, inspired by Oriental, Moorish, Gothic and Egyptian influences. The furniture was complex and often very expensive in both material and labor to construct.

This desk is somewhat plainer than the others but it is still in the style It may have been ebonized originally and refinished somewhere along the line.

This period of American furniture is perhaps one of the less-distinctly defined periods in both style and time. Styles were often eclectic and forms ranged as far back as updated versions of the 17th-century court cupboard to interpretations of the modern, for the time, Davenport desk. The Aesthetic Movement in American furniture generally is regarded as being from the mid 1870s to just after the turn of the century. This minor aberration in furniture style served as the bridge between high Victorian morality and the radical lurch about to come in the form of Arts & Crafts, a true revolution.

So now you may have an idea about that mystery piece you have seen in a shop or at an auction. It looks sort of like late Eastlake but it is a little too fancy or elegant. It also seems to be a little foreign, Oriental or Near Eastern but it obviously is a domestic piece. It could very well be an Aesthetic Movement piece from the late 19th century. And whatever you do – don’t try to strip that awful black paint. It’s part of the “aesthetics” of the piece.

Fred Taylor is a Worthologist who specializes in American furniture from the Late Classicism period (1830-1850).

Visit Fred’s website at www.furnituredetective.com. His book “How To Be A Furniture Detective” is now available for $18.95 plus $3.00 shipping. Send check or money order for $21.95 to Fred Taylor, PO Box 215, Crystal River, FL 34423.

Fred and Gail Taylor’s DVD, “Identification of Older & Antique Furniture,” ($17 + $3 S&H) and a bound compilation of the first 60 columns of “Common Sense Antiques,” by Fred Taylor ($25 + $3 S&H) are also available at the same address.

For more information call 800-387-6377, fax 352-563-2916, or e-mail info [at] furnituredetective [dot] com.

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Join WorthPoint on Twitter and Facebook.

Owning a piece of the past, however, is often an expensive proposition—even a luxury in some cases—and most of us cannot afford to own something of significant size or extreme value if it does not contribute something concrete to our lives; something more substantial than the esoteric “feel good” things we often associate with the ownership of antiques. This is especially true of older and antique furniture.

Furniture in its barest form is functional sculpture. The key word here is “functional.” Furniture is made for a specific purpose to fit in our daily lives. It may be no more than a box to put our clothes in or frame upon which to rest our frame at night. But whatever it is, it was first built to fill a physical need. The beauty and art must come later.

This is a nicely made 1920s era Victrola cabinet.

With a little work and no damage to the cabinet, it can be fitted to hold audio equipment; its original intended use.

This is especially true when the piece of furniture is not a Federal Pembroke table from New York, ca 1800, worth many thousands of dollars, but is a second- or third-generation, machine-made, factory-produced, American Empire drop-leaf lamp table, circa 1900, worth only a few hundred dollars at best. You may really like the dark rich mahogany veneer on the lamp table and admire the solid feel of the thick brass lock in the top drawer, but that broken base that makes the whole table tipsy is starting to bother you, not to mention putting the $500 lamp in jeopardy.

And as nice as the lamp table is,, and as much as you admire the style and historic references incorporated into it (Duncan Phyfe, Honore’ Lannuier et. al.), you can acquire a brand-new, very nice looking and most important of all—stable—new lamp table at the mall for about what you paid for the Empire piece, or less. In other words, the Empire piece is no longer fulfilling its prime function: that of providing a stable platform and is being tolerated merely for its form.

Don’t do it! If you like the lamp table, for whatever reason, invest in getting the old one properly repaired—for less than the cost of the new table—but get it done before you break both the table and the lamp beyond repair. If you don’t want to invest more money in the old piece then sell it, at a bargain, to someone who will. They aren’t making those old tables anymore and when they are broken beyond repair that’s one less there will ever be.

If this old Empire Revival table is not strong enough to support the lamp, be prepared to: 1) properly repair the table; 2) replace the table, or; 3) replace the lamp.

The same especially holds true for chests of drawers. Most of us confront a chest at least once daily to retrieve clothes and other personal items. Is it one of those transparent events in your life that you barely notice, or is it a struggle to be dreaded with drawers that are either stuck shut or falling out? Older chests are notorious for recalcitrant drawers, and drawers that have problems like this are creating other problems for the older or antique chest. Prominent among the secondary problems is the chipping of veneer on the lower rail, the horizontal piece below the drawer.

Also, if the drawer sides are worn and allow the front of the drawer to hit the rail each time it closes, it damages the veneer or at least the finish on the rail. It probably is also wearing a notch in the rail at the corners. Tugging at stuck drawers eventually will weaken the case structure and will cause the pull or hardware to break sooner or later. Don’t continue to frustrate yourself and cause further harm to the chest. If you like the piece, have it repaired so that it is functional as well as old and pretty. Be aware that drawer repair is often a difficult job and usually requires some work inside the case. It may be expensive, but a good professional repair will add many decades to the life of the piece and increase the quality of your daily life.

The channel gouged in the lower rail below this drawer and the loose veneer on the side are early warning signs that this drawer has problems. Fix it.

This drawer has already been repaired with an extra piece added to the bottom of the side.

Older beds are notorious for being less than stable sleeping platforms. If your antique bed wakes you at night with its squeaks and groans, get some help before it dumps you on the floor. Most truly old beds are assembled with some type of bolt arrangement and the fix may be as simple as tightening the hardware. Twentieth-century beds with hooks, rather than bolts, are harder to repair but it can be done. The most important item of bed care is not to attempt to move a bed ANY distance at all—even just two inches—with just one person. It takes two no matter how strong you are because you can’t drag a bed. It must be carried. A bed frame is built to withstand downward pressure, not lateral pull. But whatever it takes, either fix it or get rid of it!

Sometimes a bed repair is as easy as tightening a bolt like on this Empire bed.

The last category of chronic disrepair is chairs. Probably more than 50 percent of all older and antique chairs that you will ever see are loose and in need of repair; most of them not for the first time. Virtually all chairs that have legs entering the seat bottom, especially Windsors, are loose somewhere, as are most turn-of-the-century oak press backs. The longer you wait to have them repaired the less likely you are of getting a good repair. Eventually, they are not worth the cost of making the broken pieces from scratch or not repairable at all.

Upholstered chairs and sofas are almost as bad. When a spring goes or webbing starts to poke out the bottom, its way past time to visit an upholstery shop. Continued use with broken springs and rotten webbing places undue strain on the frame of the chair and the longer you wait to fix the upholstery the more likely you will need to fix the frame too.

In other words, make your antiques work for you and pay their way as functional pieces. It usually costs less to repair an antique than it does to buy a new piece, and the satisfaction of owning an older piece that actually functions well generally exceeds the cost of repair.

Fred Taylor is a Worthologist who specializes in American furniture from the Late Classicism period (1830-1850).

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

Visit Fred’s website at http://www.furnituredetective.com/. His book “How To Be A Furniture Detective” is now available for $18.95 plus $3.00 shipping. Send check or money order for $21.95 to Fred Taylor, PO Box 215, Crystal River, FL 34423.

Fred and Gail Taylor’s DVD, “Identification of Older & Antique Furniture,” ($17 + $3 S&H) and a bound compilation of the first 60 columns of “Common Sense Antiques,” by Fred Taylor ($25 + $3 S&H) are also available at the same address.

For more information call 800-387-6377, fax 352-563-2916, or e-mail info [at] furnituredetective [dot] com.

Cabinet and chest locks come in three major designs: full mortise, half mortise and surface mount. Mortise refers to the cut out portion of wood in which the lock is mounted. A full mortise lock is fully enclosed by the drawer front or door in which it is mounted. Only the selvage—or top edge—of the lock is visible on the lip of the drawer or door, and nothing shows on either side. Full mortise locks are usually found on higher-quality 20th-century pieces, although they are used in rare cases in 19th-century goods.

A full mortise lock is completely enclosed in the wood with only the selvage visible.

A half mortise lock is exactly as it sounds—half exposed. The top selvage is visible, but so is the back or lock plate of the lock on the inside of the drawer front. Also, usually visible on a half mortise lock are the screws or nails that hold the lock in place. The half mortise lock is almost universal on 19th-century American and English case goods.

A half mortise lock is implanted part way in the wood but leaves the back plate visible form the inside.

The simplest design is the surface-mounted lock that is not inset in the wood at all, but is mounted with screws or nails flush to the inside surface of the drawer or door. These locks are most common on early 20th-century pieces and on inexpensive reproductions, and are commonly used as replacement locks by inexperienced restoration “experts.”

A surface mount lock is simply nailed or screwed to the interior surface.

The purpose of a lock, of course, is to keep someone out of a private place. But since most locks are designed only to keep honest people honest, a determined trespasser can almost always find a way in. Most older and antique furniture locks work on the simple idea of a key moving a bolt through the lock and into the adjoining frame member. The key usually fits over a center pin of a given size and rotates around it. The blade of the key engages a semi-circular cavity in the bolt and moves it forward or back as the case may be. The bolt, however, may have a built-in resistance to impede the use of an unauthorized key. The resistance is a notch in the bolt that engages a surface of the lock housing and prohibits the bolt from moving. A spring holds the bolt notch fast to the face of the lock housing. The key must not only be the right size to move the bolt forward and back, it must be the right size to compress the spring and release the bolt so it can move. Most bolts have two notches, one in the locked position and one in the unlocked position.

This diagram show the parts of a half mortise lock.

In addition to correct barrel size and blade size, a lock may employ other features to prevent the entry or use of a bogus key. The most common is an inside ring of raised metal, concentric to the pin that requires a notch in the key.

These keys are all “notch” keys with cuts in the face of the blade.

This illustration shows how a notch key works over the internal security ring of a lock plate.

This feature is easy to overcome by inserting a new blank key in the lock and working it back and forth. This will put a mark on the blank where the notch should be and it can be cut out with a hack saw. A little practice makes nice notches. A variation is two inside rings of different heights that require two notches of different depths but that’s a detail. A more serious impediment to the interloper is the accursed English “lever” lock. This lock relies on a series of spring loaded levers, each of different thickness to deny entry. The levers must be aligned in a perfect line to allow the bolt to pass but since their thickness is random and hidden, figuring out a cut pattern is very difficult. This lock requires notches to be made on the bottom of the key blade rather than on the face of the blade and is much more difficult to fabricate. Most lever locks are labeled as such. Apparently, the 19th-century English had more of a need for security than we did. This is one case where if you don’t have the key, don’t worry about it.

The key to a lever lock requires notches to be made on the bottom of the key blade rather than on the face of the blade and is much more difficult to fabricate.

The second most-common problem in the old locks, besides no key, is a broken spring. Symptoms of broken springs include bolts that can be moved without keys, bolts that don’t lock into position or bolts that do not line up with the holes in the selvage. Removing the housing around the pin and bolt will reveal the condition of the spring. Most springs are merely flat pieces of tension steel inserted in a slot in the bolt and wedged against the housing. If the spring is broken, remove it from the slot by punching it out with a small screw driver. Then replace it with the spring from a salvaged lock, or better yet, with a piece of a modern bobby pin. It works very well.

The most common problem with old locks is neglect, especially if the piece has been worked on before and the locks were not removed before stripping and finishing. In this case the locks should be removed, cleaned thoroughly and submitted to liberal applications of WD-40 before any key is tried at all.

Blank keys are available from lots of places including, Van Dyke Restorers in Woonsocket, SD., or your local locksmith and flea markets. Collect as many steel keys as you can to try stubborn locks with before you cut soft brass ones. Brass keys may break in a reluctant bolt. Good luck.

Fred Taylor is a Worthologist who specializes in American furniture from the Late Classicism period (1830-1850).

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth

This is a piece of 1/8-inch square rolled iron nail stock that was used by a “nailer” to hammer out a handmade nail.

One of the key ingredients in the process of determining the age of a piece of older or antique furniture is how the wood is assembled to produce this functional work of art. Drawers are typically put together using various methods of wood joinery, i.e. dovetails, scallop joints or rabbets. Older case goods generally employ mortise and tenon joints, as do old chairs and doors. But the most straightforward method of all construction techniques is the use of a fastener, an external device that holds two pieces of wood together without additional shaping of the wood and the simplest fastener is a nail—in essence a tapered metal dowel inserted by the brute force of a hammer blow.

Nails, of course, have been around for thousands of years, but their general application to furniture making is fairly recent. Until modern times all nails were hand made, one at a time by a blacksmith or a specialist, called a “nailer.” But since nails are such useful items, not just for furniture but for general building applications, it is not surprising that some of the first modern machinery was devoted to the manufacture of nails.

These are hand-made iron nails from the 18th century. Note the “rosehead” hammered head and the sharp point.

In the American Colonies, one of the early industries to be well established, after glassmaking and spirits distilling, was the nail stock business. Up and down the East coast as early as the late 17th century, rolling mills turned out long, thin, square pieces of iron called nail stock, to be sent to the local nailer.

The nailer then heated a section of the stock and pounded out a point on all four sides. After cutting to length the section was inserted in hole on the anvil called a “swage” block and the head of the nail formed by repeated blows to the top of the nail, giving it the “rosehead” look we identify with hand made nails. A lot of work for just one nail.

But this method had its rewards. The pounding of the nail to shape it made the iron denser and thus more water resistant and durable, as well as malleable (bendable). This malleability was one of the key factors in the success of the handmade nail; it was so flexible that as it was driven into a piece of wood it followed the internal grain pattern, often in an arc, and thus provided a clinching effect that help hold the nailed joint very tightly. The hand-wrought iron rosehead nails leave a very identifiable clue—a square hole—when they are removed from wood. No other type of nail leaves a square hole.

By the early 1800’s, nail cutting machines were in general use in America. These early machines cut angular strips from a thin sheet of metal resulting in a nail with two parallel sides, representing the thickness of the sheet of metal, and two cut angular sides forming the point. The heads still had to be hammered by hand and these nails are easily confused with hand-wrought nails because they both have hand hammered rose-like heads. The difference is in the shape of the hole. The machine made nails leave rectangular holes which are easily distinguished from the square marks of the earliest nails. This type of nail is the kind frequently found in early 19th century Federal and American Empire furniture and just as frequently misidentified as hand wrought.

These nails were all cut from a sheet of iron. The top nail with the “notch” head is from the early 19th century. The middle nail with the rectangular flat head is from around 1830/1840.

Another type of early nail merely had a notch as the head. This wasn’t very effective but it was quick and cheap and machine cut nails became a staple of both the construction industry and the furniture building trade. An even better nail came around 1830. The machines by now were producing nails that actually had flattened protruding surfaces to function as the head. These were made by a single, forceful impact on the top of the nail by the machinery itself and no human work was required. As erratic and small as these new heads were, they were still the best yet.

By the 1840’s, the nail making technology settled down to making the best cut nail yet. This mid-century nail had a large, uniform, machine-made head and it became the standard nail for more than 50 years, and it continued to leave the characteristic rectangular hole. These nails are ones found in late Classicism (C-scroll Empire) and Victorian furniture throughout the rest of the 19th century. As good as these nails were however, they did have a drawback. They did not benefit from the hand pounding reserved for the making of hand wrought nails and thus were more brittle than earlier nails. This stiffness meant that they did not have the same internal clinching power as their predecessors and tended to snap off under duress rather than bend.

This is the standard wire nail first introduced around 1880.

Around 1880 came the next major leap in nail development. A machine was invented that produced a round nail drawn from a piece of steel wire and formed with a perfectly circular, stamped head and a sharp, cut point. This does not mean that all cabinet shops instantly stopped using cut nails when the new style showed up. Cut nails continued to be used early into the 20th century until existing stocks were used up. And hand-wrought nails continued to be made throughout the 19th century for certain specialty applications, such as gate building and other instances where the benefits of the clinching nail outweighed the cost of hand production.

But in the end the round wire nail became the universal standard and still is today. It represents a technology that is still in use and virtually unchanged for more than 100 years; quite a rarity at the beginning of the 21st century.

Even if the nail itself is missing in a piece of furniture, you can sometimes determine its origin by the hole it leaves. Handmade nails leave square holes, cut nails leave rectangular holes and wire nails leave round holes.

Each type of nail leaves its signature hole.

Fred Taylor is a Worthologist who specializes in American furniture from the Late Classicism period (1830-1850).

WorthPoint—Discover Your Hidden Wealth