Work-Box

A small oblong wooden box, with or without a tray, fitted with a number of small compartments for cottons, silks, needles, and other essentials of stitchery. Sometimes there was a drawer instead of a tray. In the Stuart period ladies' work-boxes were often covered with needlework. Many kinds of wood, plain or veneered, have been employed in making these little boxes which, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were frequently edged with boxwood or rosewood.

Work-Table

Small work-tables for ladies, called also "Pouch-tables," often combining other conveniences such as for writing or playing games, were made in elegant forms during the last half of the eighteenth century, by Hepplewhite, Sheraton and others. A silk pouch underneath was provided to hold the needlework.

Worm Holes

The small holes found in old furniture, more frequently in soft than in hard woods, are the work of beetles such as the Anobium domesticum and the worm of the beetle, both provided with burrowing forceps. The holes made by them are crooked, whereas those made artificially are generally straight.

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723)

Although the name of this great architect is usually included in the number of architect-designers of furniture of the eighteenth century, his attention must have been more centred on the internal decorations of his important public and private buildings than on mobile furniture, in which other architects, such as William Kent, for instance, took so much interest. He is noted, among other achievements, for having gathered round him a school of carving of which Grinling Gibbons was the great exponent.

Writing-Chair

Chairs specially designed for the purpose came into fashion in the early years of the eighteenth century and soon were made in great variety, plain and upholstered, usually with arms, sometimes without head-rest, with seats in round, square and triangular form.

Writing-Table

Very early in the eighteenth century, when conveniences for writing, such as writing-cabinets, secretaires, desks, and writing-chairs became common, writing-tables in various forms were produced, a typical example of which was the knee-hole writing-table, with pedestal drawers and cupboards on each side, and sometimes a cupboard facing the knees.

X-Shape Chair

Folding chairs on the principle of the modern collapsible camp-stool, of rare woods or ivory, with or without backs, the skin of some animal or a network of cords forming the seat, were made in early Egyptian times, also later by the Greeks and Romans. In mediaeval times, a notable example of this type of chair of the seventh century exists in the bronze-gilt Chair of Dagobert (q.v.) now in the Louvre. Chairs in this form were made by the Italians in the fourteenth century, and those in York Minster and Winchester Cathedral of about the same period may have come from this source. Other notable ones with high back and arms, covered with velvet, in the possession of Lord Sackville at Knole, were in use in the seventeenth century. X-shape chairs in wood for ecclesiastical purposes were probably made in England in the sixteenth century.