Antique furniture clues, how to identify what you have and if it is a fake

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Enthusiasm for antique furniture is great. But it’s even better if you’re able to identify age and origin. Here, antique restoration specialist and collector Fred Taylor shows how to make an informed field decision, so you won’t have to rely just on the label and the word of the seller.
The most important part of identifying antique furniture is determining its age. Age is the primary unknown. Why do you care how old it is? As long as you like it, why does it matter? Well, there’s no point in paying an 1840 price for a 1940 reproduction. So know what you’re looking at. Recognize the clues left by a piece’s creator.
A period’s technology reveals itself in the way an antique from that era is constructed. But be careful: Any technique from the past can be duplicated today. The English are still very good at making dovetail joints by hand, for example, and a lot of the “18th century” and “19th century” pieces you’ll see are actually 20th-century English reproductions. You cannot rely on any single clue. You’ll have to look at everything if you want to accurately determine the age of a particular furnishing.
DRAWERS – On a very old drawer, you might find a rough surface or slight ridges in the solid wood that makes up the bottom. This tells you the wood did not go through a sawmill; it was hand-planed to its desired thickness. After the 1840s, steam-powered machines were doing more and more of the planing and sawing, so it’s unlikely that you have a drawer made after that time.
But it’s the drawer’s front piece that yields the best clues about its vintage. Another common feature of drawers from before the mid-19th century is handmade dovetailed woodwork joining the front of the drawer to the sides. In the authentically older pieces there are usually very few joints, they are oddly spaced and they lack the uniformity that would indicate machine construction.
A self-locking dovetail joint has a real advantage over simply nailing two boards together. A dovetailed drawer front won’t pull off without considerable force. But they are not easy to make by hand, so when the Industrial Revolution began to influence furniture making, new kinds of joints were devised. One of the earliest machine-made joints looks like a series of half circles with dowels through the middle of them. This scallop joint technique lasted from around 1865 to about 1885.
Scallop joints were easy to make, but they weren’t long lasting or sturdy, so drawer makers tried again. This time they came up with a finger joint, lots of small, interlaced joints of uniform size and shape. There was a great deal of surface area to glue with them, so they made a pretty strong joint. Still, they lacked the self-locking feature that made a drawer front practically indestructible, so they fell out of use when a better technology came along. When you see a finger joint, you can be pretty sure the drawer was made between 1880 and 1900.
Around 1900 came basic machine-made dovetail joints. You can tell machine-made dovetails from handmade ones because there are a lot of them, and they’re all the same size. There were a few attempts to make them with machines at the end of the 19th century, but you’ll never find a pre-Civil War drawer that has machine-made dovetails – regardless of what the label says.