Featured Identification/how old is this English? Bureau/Desk

I like the desk but the dovetails look weird for a Georgian piece ..plus the oak desks of the Georgian period pre-date the walnut and mahogany pieces so I think this could be a very nice but probably later piece, re-dressed with 18thc style hardware.

 

Agrees, I think a later piece as well, guesses late 19th - early 20th-century revival piece.

 

some more close ups of the dovetails

 

Shouts early 19th - 1820s/30s to me. Probably had much simpler plainer almost knobs - brass - as the pulls. Later on, people replaced stuff with fussier things, but these still look nice. Drawer fronts are way too thick for later Brit stuff, would have been probably a veneer.

 

PS: Feet look fine. Interior is also typical of the period.

 

Being a "British member" I can't see this being English at all. The Georgians were in love with mahogany and finely French polished to show the colour. The maker seemed overly enthusiastic about his cross-banding skills and forgot the importance of the body wood. The wood looks to be mahogany but there it ends as furniture of this period was fine mahogany veneered. English Georgian furniture of this calibre bureau had hand made fine pointed dovetails. These dovetails are crude. As above, the handles/pulls have been replaced at least once and the present ones are in keeping with early-mid 18thC but the round nuts look too concentric to be hand cut and of the period . An image of a drawer bottom would give a rough guide to an early or later piece whether it/they run NS or EW. The bracket feet are wrong for any English Georgian or Victorian furniture. The finish on the cock beading is poor. The small brass pulls on the slides either side to support the drop leaf are indicative of circa 1800 either way but what must be remembered, is that a big city design may have taken 10 years or more to filtrate to a provincial 'cabinet maker' in a country the size of America. Without prejudice, I suggest this is a American early-mid 19thC provincial piece "in the style of". This is a retired professional's critique, not a damning indictment of the piece itself.

 

Adrian, thanks for your opinion.
The Desk was purchased in England in the early 1990ies. So either it found its way from America to England or it originates indeed from England.

Tomorrow I will take some photos of the bottom of a drawer. Maybe also of the back side of the desk if that helps.

 

Weirder things have happened, especially if it was a prized piece in a family escaping the fall of the Confederacy, or it migrated to Canada first, or...?

 

No-one can be 100% sure as we are all going on past experience and accumulated knowledge and not one of us has all the answers on this very long learning curve. All I can say is I had a lot of America furniture, glassware, oil lamps etc through my auction house over the years. 20/30 years ago and more Mary Gregory glassware was the epitome of 19thC glass collecting in England, Fenton glass and Carnival glass etc etc were other huge areas of collectables. In UK we also had a lot of itinerant workers from Europe in many trades so I do't exclude European design/copy possibly made in England. Mid late 19thC London was full of German silversmiths importing German silver for example. I was taught a simple but sometimes long winded method of identification: Take away what isn't and you find out what is, as I tried to do in my first post and I am confident this wasn't made by a good "English" cabinet maker of the day.

 

Country made pieces are often not as fine as town or city makers. Made for a different market.

 

Or an apprentice cobbling something together for his own use and not needing "fancy" just effective.

 

Yes and we’re a friendly bunch!

 

Welcome Frank!
What a lovely piece! Thanks for sharing!
Cheerio,
Leslie