``In setting out your sideboard, you must study neatness, convenience and taste; as you must think that ladies and gentlemen who have splendid and costly articles wish to have them seen and set out to best advantage. . . .`` --Robert Roberts
``The House Servant`s Directory,`` 1827 DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
There are hundreds of types of furniture in this world, and the sideboard is only one of them. Yet, upon close observation, the sideboard--a kind of table containing drawers and cupboards specifically used in the dining room
--represents a compact history of changes in domestic manners and taste.
A collection of four important sideboards has recently been put on display in the American wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Using butlers` directories, diaries and other obscure source material, decorative arts curator Jean Y. Burks was able to match the sideboards--dating from 1800
(Federal), 1820 (Empire), 1876 (Victorian) and 1930 (Art Deco)--with appropriate period accessories.
``Now I know why they had butlers,`` jokes Burks, who single-handedly polished 100 crystals on two oil-burning astral lamps displayed with the 1820 sideboard. The museum`s conservation staff, in fact, spent 250 hours polishing the brass and restoring the veneer on the pieces, heretofore in storage.
Sideboards were introduced during the last quarter of the 18th Century. Before then, dining was done in a ground-floor parlor, which doubled as a sitting and dining room. Planks sitting on trestles were first used for serving in the medieval period, and it wasn`t until English designer Robert Adam devised a three-part ensemble, consisting of an oblong table flanked by two pedestal cupboards mounted with urns that sideboards came into their own. ``Before dinner and all during dinner, as is the English custom, all the silver one owns is displayed on the sideboard in the dining room,`` wrote a visitor to America at the beginning of the 19th Century. The sideboard was both utilitarian (the urns were lined with lead and used to hold hot water for rinsing silverware and iced water for drinking) and an excuse to show off possessions.
Although the sideboard originated in England, U.S. cabinetmakers, as was their wont, rapidly Americanized it. The heyday of the American sideboard began around 1790 and lasted well into the 20th Century. By the centennial year, 1876, the sideboard was the most conspicuous object in the room, with
``more attention given to its design and construction than to any other of the pieces of furniture,`` according to contemporary historian Walter Smith.
The imposing walnut and marble sideboard displayed in the American wing, for example, is an homage to Victorian excess, an elaborately carved structure that houses a Staffordshire tea service, a cut-glass decanter and glasses and other Victorian gems.
But times change. By 1930, domestic philosophies were altogether different, and so was the sideboard.
``The dining room is essentially a place in which to eat and should not be a museum for china and glass,`` cabinetmaker Eugene Schoen wrote of his own Deco masterpiece in a 1929 issue of House and Garden.
The work mentioned in the magazine, a walnut and oak sideboard, sits stunningly in the American wing along with a to-die-for silver soup tureen by Jean Puiforcat.
Today sideboards no longer are ubiquitous, although many American manufacturers still produce them as part of 18th-Century or Early American collections. The Lane Co. has introduced four sideboards in five years as part of its America collection.