Elizabethan Periods

Queen Elizabeth I belonged to the tudor line of English royalty but played such a magnificent role in her young country's fortunes that her time is signified by her name rather than her father's King Henry VIII. Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne in 1558 and reigned until 1603. The Elizabethan age is most famous for, of course, its theater, hair styles, dress and fashiox, music, but it is the furniture of the Elizabethan period that holds our interest presently. At the close of the Elizabethan era in English furniture history furniture and interior decoration styles had undergone significant changes from the preceding tudor period and furniture had begun to be made in larger quantities and varieties. These developments occurred due to changes in house plans and design and greater European, such as Italianate style, influence on the furniture makers of the English Renaissance. The Elizabethan era, or as some would have it, Elizabethan, of English furniture history saw a gradual absorption of the Gothic tradition, dominant in the Tudor furniture period, into a native English version of the Renaissance movement, particularly that part of the Renaissance as had developed in Holland, Germany, and the Flemish lands.

At the end of Elizabeth's time a highly decorative and architectural, some would say garish, style had become established among wealthy and fashionable persons of the period derived from the Flemish Renaissance, but applied with perhaps less knowledgeable artistry than had obtained on the continent.


Flemish Inlaid Box, late 16th century.

Few bare, unadorned surfaces, whether walls or on furniture, escaped the attention of enthusiastic carving folk bent on leaving at least some form of mark. The plain linenfold panelling of early Tudor times was supplanted by strapwork ornamentation, lozenge decoration, masks, grotesques, and fruit and flower motifs, particularly grape and vine leaf ornament.

This emphasis on great amounts of ornamentation in the Elizabethan time can perhaps be looked at in two ways : for those who really admire classic decoration, that is, the finished and exquisite beauty of Greek and Roman ornament, then the myriad of bizarre distortions of such ornamental forms that were made in the name of enrichment on the furniture of late Elizabethan times can be painful or embarrassing; but if the decoration of Elizabethan furniture is looked upon as the free and graceful expression of a craftsman's developing skill, if the vigour of the ornament is appreciated and the source of its inspiration forgotten, then we can perhaps see a very real beauty and force in such work, a foretaste of much better things to come. The true copy of this Elizabethan furniture can be found in Jan's wood furniture website.

If we look at the melon bulb legs of the heavy mahogany tables, similar to the one in the picture, crowned by a quaint rendering of a Greek Ionic capital and laced over by sprawling acanthus leaves, we can see that it is richly decorative in a bold and lively way. Later on in the history of English furniture, in the long period of oak furniture making, decorative features for furniture were to gain a refinement, a tasteful holding-back, that brought style and grace to the fashioning of tables, chests and beds; but the first attempts of the Elizabethan age in the adaptation of Renaissance and Italianate forms strike us as being simply over zealous and uneducated.