That is an excerpt from Wonderful Woodworking #13, Winter 1978
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Writing desks, whether or not for enterprise or family, want a bigger work floor than one may in any other case need within the room. Additionally they want some technique of speedy closure, whereby litter and necessary papers could also be hid from snoops, shielded from thieves, or merely swept out of sight when company arrive. The same old resolution, discovered on all method of furnishings because the seventeenth century, is a hinged flap that turns into a writing floor when open and a locked door concealing drawers and pigeonholes when closed.
The falling flap (typically referred to as “slant prime”) is direct and simple in building, though quite a lot of ingenious technique of supporting the opened flap have been devised. Its two disadvantages, if such they might be referred to as, are that the working litter should be cleared off the writing floor earlier than the desk could also be closed up, and that the flap is of necessity flat. Many designers wouldn’t take into account this flatness a handicap, but it surely apparently troubled the grasp cabinetmakers on the court docket of Louis XV (1723–1774) of France.
Their reply, in all probability the creation of Jean-Francois Oeben (1720–1763), was the “secretaire a cylindre,” the cylinder bureau or roll-top desk. Oeben’s masterpiece was made for his patron, Louis XV, and shortly turned generally known as “Ie bureau du roi,” the king’s desk. The French court docket at the moment was the middle of excessive style, and the desk with its broadly curved prime receding right into a slot above the pigeonholes was extensively imitated.
The king’s cabinetmaker and the king himself shared a ardour for mechanical units. Typical of Oeben’s work are sophisticated locking units and mechanisms that launch or elevate drawers by hidden processes. Louis XV devoted a substantial period of time to his personal workshop and passion, the then-fashionable apply of decorative lathe turning. He had one of many world’s first elevators put in at Versailles in 1743, for the comfort of Mme. de Chateauroux. Somewhat later, he commissioned “tables volantes,” which, by rising and sinking by means of the ground, enabled him to entertain with out the intrusion of servants.
Whether or not the cylinder desk was an authentic concept on the a part of Oeben is tough to reply. The earliest description of such a mechanism dates from about 1760, though somefactor like it may be seen in an engraved design for wall ornament from about 1750. The supply could have been Oeben’s early experiments, or Oeben could have picked up the concept from elsewhere. In any case, Oeben’s work is the primary documented instance of furnishings of this kind.
Begun in 1760 , the desk took a full 9 years to finish. Upon Oeben’s demise in 1763, Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), his first journeyman or foreman, married Oeben’s widow, carried on the workshop, and accomplished the necessary work left by the grasp. (It was widespread within the 18th century for a cabinetmaker’s widow to remarry on this method.)
Oeben had left the desk in a reasonably superior stage of building, with the working mechanisms accomplished. Riesener might be credited with the lavish pictorial marquetry of holly, boxwood, purpleheart, and different exotics. He employed specialty craftsmen to finish the clock, Sevres porcelain plaques, gilt bronze sculptural figures, and ormolu mounts that unite to make the desk a tour de power of French ornament . Its completion in flip established Riesener as a worthy successor to Oeben. His monogram has been discovered on a number of different spectacular cylinder desks now in outstanding collections. One is at Buckingham palace, one other is within the assortment of the Duke of Bedford, and two are within the Rothschild assortment at Waddesdon Manor.
Desks with fall flaps typically had cabinets or drawers above the writing floor and have been of architectural scale in a room. The early cylinder desks have been typically of the same scale, matching the massive writing tables inherited from the primary half of the century. However the style quickly turned to smaller, much less formal furnishings, made for rich patrons who most popular the intimate lifetime of the boudoir to the formal salons of an earlier technology. Cylinder desks have been extra suited to the smaller scale, and as they turned smaller in addition they turned daintier, extra delicate in character.
There have been exceptions to this pattern, notable amongst them a big roll-top attributed to David Roentgen (1743–1807), grasp cabinetmaker to Louis XVI, which was made round 1785 for Catherine II of Russia. Roentgen, like Oeben, was well-known for mechanical ingenuity, and his works are filled with springs that launch panels and uncover secret drawers.
By about 1780, the French style had taken maintain elsewhere, aided little question by warfare all through central Europe that deposited German artisans in any respect the royal courts. Most of the outstanding cabinetmakers of Paris have been German emigrants identified for his or her talent at marquetry, who returned to the small German courts of the electoral princes when hostilities subsided, taking the most recent fashions with them. The cylinder fall writing desk turned in style in London about the identical time, with a lot of designs featured in such books as Thomas Shearer’s Cupboard Maker’s London Guide of Costs (1788) and Thomas Sheraton’s Drawing Guide (1791–1794) and Cupboard Dictionary (1803). Sheraton explains that the place of the acquainted slant-top desk had been ” amongst modern individuals” taken by a secretary or bureau with a roll-top or cylinder entrance. He makes use of the time period “cylinder desk and ebookcase” to explain a chic, mild piece mounted on tapering legs, with the drawers and pigeonholes enclosed by a tambour entrance and supporting a low case of cabinets with sq. doorways. An analogous piece is illustrated by George Hepplewhite within the Cupboard Maker and Upholsterer’s Information (1788), the place it’s referred to as a “tambour writing desk and bookcase.”
By the point the design reached Sheraton, the cylinder prime had been linked through an iron trammel to the writing floor, which robotically slid out as the highest was raised. Sheraton provides the primary written description of this mechanism with clues about how you can make it. The plates in his drawing ebook present nice fertility of creativeness. Some have a low arched prime containing small unenclosed drawers, others retain open cabinets with brass galleries, and several other are surmounted by china or ebook cabinets with glazed doorways. Nonetheless others have further writing slides that pull out from both facet of the body. These desks, lighter and less complicated than their predecessors, typically had tamboured roll-tops.
The unique cylinder was a inflexible quarter-round pivoting on a hid bracket, often guided by a tongue on the sting, which ran in a semicircular groove. It opened right into a slot above the pigeonholes and disappeared behind them. Cylinders have been often fabricated from two or extra full-width staves of wooden, edge-glued and planed to a round arc, then veneered. Some have been guided by a stable rail tongued throughout the ends of the boards, a extra secure building, whereas others had tongues labored immediately on the boards themselves. As a result of it was inflexible, the form may solely be an arc of a circle, generally a full quarter-circle, extra typically a sixth-circle, and as a lot house needed to be left behind the cylinder as in entrance of it. This necessitated a cumbersome design, and in addition pressured the pigeonholes or drawers to be foreshortened to suit the cramped house. Making a quarter-cylinder is principally the identical as making barrels, and the cooper is the probably supply of the approach.
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than some cabinetmaker, in all probability in France, noticed that the boards of the cylinder didn’t need to be glued collectively right into a inflexible form. They might nonetheless comply with the curve, and different curves as effectively, in the event that they have been glued to a versatile backing. The same old backing is stout canvas, though generally a robust wire is threaded by means of a gap in every tambour as an alternative. The slats might be made very small (and would then comply with a really tight curve), they might be molded into an attention-grabbing number of profiles, or they might be left flat and veneered simply as in the event that they have been stable, and the veneer subsequently slit. Tambours loved nice recognition in England (the place they have been typically referred to as reed tops) and gave rise to a welter of recent designs.
When used to switch the cylinder fall, the tambour has the benefit of requiring little house on the again, for when opened it’s going to drop behind the pigeonholes in a straight line. Tambours additionally might be fitted horizontally to cowl a gap like shutters, changing the same old doorways. Tambours that slid sideways have been discovered to be passable on all method of small items apart from desks the place no nice energy or safety was required, together with stitching cupboards, the decrease cabinet of sideboards, and bedside tables.
When used on massive items, nonetheless, tambours do have disadvantages: They’re insecure, and they’re liable to harm, typically requiring restore. Each cylinder tops and reed tops typically have suffered the ravages of too-constant use over the centuries. Many French flat desks, in line with one vintage supplier, began life as cylinder desks. They seem in right now’s retailers with their tops eliminated. One of many loveliest tambours in existence happens on an American Federal mahogany sideboard, made in Baltimore c. 1795–1800. This elaborate Sheraton-style sideboard was ordered by David van Ness for his nation home on the Hudson and is without doubt one of the most elaborate items of furnishings executed in the US. Its enormous tambour construction conceals elaborately fitted containers for knives and forks. Baltimore produced furnishings that intently adopted English precedents as a result of it was settled virtually fully by the English and Irish. Its furnishings was based mostly totally on items featured in Hepplewhite’s Information (1788) and Shearer’s Guide of Costs. Unknown in different areas of the US was the extremely particular person fashion of girl’s writing desk, derived from plates 44 and 47 of Sheraton’s Drawing Guide (1793): Such Baltimore desks have been elaborately embellished and all the time had a folding prime or a roll-top.
The cylinder kind was additionally in style within the cabinetmaking facilities of Massachusetts. Within the Boston Museum of Wonderful Arts, there’s a group of cylinder and tambour desks by John Seymour (c. 1738–1818), an English emigrant whose work owes a lot to the elegant kinds of Sheraton and Hepplewhite. The Winterthur Museum homes a bunch of cylinder desks from Baltimore, Salem, Pennsylvania, and New York.
As a result of the revolving prime was an awesome comfort for hurriedly hiding papers from indiscreet eyes, the attraction of the cylinder desk elevated throughout America’s Empire interval (1815–1840). Within the Nineties, manufacturing corporations in Grand Rapids and elsewhere turned out roll-tops by the handfuls, a few of mammoth proportions constructed for the American businessman. Throughout this “Golden Oak” interval, Sears Roebuck catalogs contained advertisements for “curtain-top desks.” These roll-tops had spring locks, with “all drawers locking robotically when the curtain prime is pulled down.” Such a desk, 5 ft, vast, offered in 1897 for $20. And within the first twenty years of this century, even Gustav Stickley, the daddy of the Arts and Crafts motion in America and a strict individualist in design who despised reliance on conventional varieties, made concessions to public taste-he often made roll-top desks for places of work.
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