OF THE SOURCE OF THE WORM-HOLES IN NEAR-ANTIQUE FURNITURE—OF THE LATEST WORM-HOLE MACHINE—OF THE MODERN METHOD OF PRODUCING ANCIENT WOOD-CARVINGS IN FIVE MINUTES—AND OF THE UNLIMITED FURNITURE OWNED BY MARIE ANTOINETTE
Thecollector of antique French and Italian and other foreign furniture is to be congratulated upon other benevolent circumstances that prevent supplies of wonderful old things from approaching exhaustion.
So long as there are any ancient houses in France and Italy, just so long will the manufacturers of French and Italian antiques have enough working material of absolute genuineness. This is due to the fact that the wainscoting and all the concealed woodworkof these venerable houses have been heartily eaten by many generations of true worms. Whenever a house is pulled down, therefore, the Old Masters of furniture-making flock to the scene and acquire large stocks of truly worm-holed wood. This, when incorporated into the magnificent chests, tables, sideboards, and other pieces which are destined to fill the antique-shops of Paris, Rome, and Florence, catches and holds the eye of the purchaser. It is obvious to any one—or at least to any amateur—that any piece of furniture which contains such intricate and symmetrical worm-holes must have been made before the worms started to bore, and must, therefore, be very ancient.
The old, worm-eaten wainscoting is used to make the shelves and drawer-bottoms of sideboards which are known ascredenzasin Italy andcrédencesin France. It is also drawn on for the backs and bottoms of chests, for picture-frames, for wooden stirrups, and for almost any beautiful, wonderful old thing Milady or Mimister brings home to exhibit upon the sitting-room table.
The fronts and tops of chests and sideboards may, however, be made of new wood and will probablylook just as well. For example, the new wood can be carved even more prettily than the old, and when the carving is finished, the manufacturer turns over the product to three or four muscular hirelings whose sole duty is to injure furniture. They are armed with large sticks of various shapes, and their activities are limited to chastising the wood with extreme severity. In this way the chests and sideboards acquire, in a matter of half an hour, the scratches and indentations for which slow centuries might otherwise be required. The wood is given the proper color by boiling it with walnut rind. Or it may be given the peculiar irregularities of great age by applying nitric acid, which eats into the surface, and then coloring the marks of the acid with permanganate of potash.
Plate XICOLONIAL KITCHEN SINK FROM THE OLD PALAVER THOMPSON MANSION IN HAVERHILLThe metal work, all done by hand, is in a remarkable state of preservation. There was no spigot; but here we find an illustration of the ingenuity of our forefathers. Professor Kilgallen has come to the conclusion that the water was all poured in from a bucket and entirely by hand.
Plate XI
COLONIAL KITCHEN SINK FROM THE OLD PALAVER THOMPSON MANSION IN HAVERHILL
The metal work, all done by hand, is in a remarkable state of preservation. There was no spigot; but here we find an illustration of the ingenuity of our forefathers. Professor Kilgallen has come to the conclusion that the water was all poured in from a bucket and entirely by hand.
The new wood, of course, must be carefully worm-holed.The crudest variety of worm-holing is done with a shotgun. The result looks sufficiently wormy to suit the most captious worm-hole collector; but one can always find a Number 10 shot at the bottom of each hole. The shotgun method, therefore, is not acceptable to members in good standing in our Society. The worm-hole machine, which is used by several of the leading Parisianchineurs, is a new and excellent invention. Its front is a square plate with serpentine grooves in it. When the plate is pressed against a piece of wood and the handle turned, a number of slender augers push out and make a cluster of worm-holes. A turn of a lever changes the position of each auger slightly, so that the worm-hole pattern does not recur.
But the best worm-holes in the world are made in Italy by hand. The auger with which they are made is bent in an irregular shape; and the purchaser of a piece of furniture which has been worm-holed with it is at liberty to thrust wires into the holes in order to investigate their wormy crookedness.
The most thorough furniture manufacturers, knowing that the careful collector will rap on the furniture in order to see whether dust falls from the worm-holes—as would be the case if the hole is the work of a normal worm—should be careful to fill the holes with wood dust.
In a number of the antique-shops along the Rue Saintes-Pères and the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, one may see many specimens of carved wooden panels about a foot and a half long and about fiveinches wide. Every one of these has been taken from old châteaux and palaces which have been recently torn down. This statement is obviously reasonable; for if it were untrue, practically every château in France would be standing to-day, whereas nearly all of them have long since been demolished to provide the great number of wooden panels that have been placed on sale in the past few years. The panels are attractive and not made by great pressure—a method sometimes used in France and Italy in making cheap antiques. Pressure-carvings, as they are called, always show a bent grain; whereas the small carvings show a severed grain.
But in order to save a few châteaux for tourists to visit, it was decided to make panels somewhat artificially, so to speak. That would make a tourist twice happy: he could visit a château and look at the panels; then he could return to Paris and buy them to take home. Iron moulds were heated until they were white-hot, and then pressed against very dry wood. When the moulds were removed and the burnt surface brushed with steel brushes, the wood had the color and the polish and the texture of ancient carvings. A dose of Number 10 shot fromthe manufacturer’s shotgun supplied the worm-holes for each panel, after which they were ready to be sold to the travelling public for about four dollars apiece. Their cost was approximately forty-five cents—twenty cents for the wood, twenty cents for the labor, and five cents for the shotgun cartridge, and thus an embarrassing problem was solved to the contentment of everybody concerned.
Articles as large as mantels for generous fireplaces are made by this burning method and passed on to eager collectors at prices that distress the proletariat greatly and cause frequent demands for an equal distribution of wealth.
There is a wood-carving company in Paris which advertises that it will be glad to deliver the furniture of any period to antique-dealers at a moment’s notice.... There are workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine which produce boule cabinets decorated with birds, beasts, and flowers of which André-Charles Boule might well have been proud.... There are places in Auvergne where the best ancient artists in the world turn out furniture which Parisian dealers later are kind enough to guarantee to have been owned by Marie Antoinette.
There is a true benevolence in all this. Culture is spread, and many people otherwise innocent of history learn that Marie Antoinette furniture is similar to that produced under one of the Louies. It is quite untrue, however, that she sent it all over to this country in the Mayflower.