Sideboard

This is a sideboard, a large piece of dining-room furniture used for storing and displaying tableware. It stands about one and a half times the height of a small child, roughly 182 centimeters tall. With its leaves extended it is about 255 centimeters wide, and it is only about 50 centimeters deep. It is made of mahogany that has been ebonized, meaning finished black so that it looks like ebony, a very dark wood. The maker also used glass and silvered brass, which is brass coated with a silver-colored layer. Together they make a dark, sharply outlined piece.

Edward William Godwin was an English architect who also designed interiors, furniture, textiles, and theater sets, and he wrote criticism about art and architecture. He first designed this sideboard in 1867 for his own dining room. This example is a variant, a slightly different version of that first design. It was made around 1876 in London by William Watt. Godwin kept rethinking the form for about twenty more years. His spare style attracted notable clients, among them the painter James McNeill Whistler and the writer Oscar Wilde.

In the 1860s, much British design was heavy and ornate, especially the Gothic Revival, a style that borrowed from medieval buildings. This sideboard turns away from that weight. Its look depends on a careful balance of solids and voids, which means solid parts set against open spaces. In 1904 the German critic Hermann Muthesius wrote that Godwin's furniture pointed ahead to the more modern look of the early twentieth century. He called it wildly picturesque, yet felt the overall effect was one of elegance. Look at the whole front for a while, and notice how the solid parts and the open spaces answer each other.