The cabinet is a development of the enclosed cupboard. The characteristic cabinet of James I.’s time is adorned with pillars, arch panels and spindle ornaments. The specimen just referred to on Plate X., No. 1, has these decorations. It stands on a frame of six legs,—a frame that was also used for the lower part of the high case-of-drawers that was coming into fashion towards the end of our period.
The cabinet was always a handsome piece of furniture equipped with shelves, drawers, compartments, and doors,—a repository for jewels, documents and curios. It was sometimes defined as a set of boxes, or drawers for curiosities, and from it the _cabinet-maker_, “one whose business it is to make cabinets and the finer kind of joiner’s work,” took his name.
The cabinet was known in England at an early date. In 1550, we read of a “fayre large cabinett covered with crimson velvet with the King’s arms crowned.” In the Seventeenth Century, the cabinet was panelled and carved, adorned with turned pillars, pendants or swelling bulbs, or it was of the newer style with applied ornaments and turned supports. Frequently also an imported cabinet was to be seen in the English home of this century,—a beautiful specimen of Dutch marquetry, of Italian inlay, of Oriental lacquer, or, indeed, of Boulle work, to say nothing of the splendid examples of Flemish carving.
Some of these cabinets were very ornate specimens of workmanship. Inlay or marquetry was the leading feature of decoration for them. Natural flowers, birds, animals and foliage in bright colours, or in the colours of the exotic woods, undyed, were in use. Ivory and mother-of-pearl, as well as shell were also employed. Even before the days of William and Mary, when the Dutch marquetry became universally popular, there was much inlaid furniture.
“Emblema, continued to this day by the Italians in their Pietra Comessa.... St. Lawrence at Florence, where the pavement and all the walls are most richly encrusted with all sorts of precious marbles, serpentine, porhirie, ophitis, achat, rants, coral, cornelian, lazuli, etc., of which one may number thirty sorts, cut and laid into a _fonds_ or ground of black marble (as our cabinet-makers do their variegated woods) in the shape of birds, flowers, landskips, grotesks, and other compartments.”