Antique furniture
Antique Furniture
Furniture ages from the inside out. The parts nobody was meant to see, the underside of a drawer, the back of a case, the wood used where it would never show, hold more honest evidence of age than the finished surfaces do. Learning to read that evidence is a skill anyone can build.
This guide has two parts: the construction clues that place a piece in a rough period rather than take a seller's word for it, and a recognition survey of the styles you will actually run into, from the slender curves of Queen Anne to the plain oak of Arts and Crafts. Neither part substitutes for a specialist's opinion on a piece that matters.
Construction as evidence
The single most useful habit in furniture study is turning a piece over or pulling a drawer all the way out. Drawer joinery is the classic tell. Hand-cut dovetails are slightly irregular and unevenly spaced because a person laid them out by eye; fully machine-cut dovetails from the later nineteenth century onward are uniform and evenly spaced. Neither is automatically better, but the transition tracks the industrialization of furniture making, and a drawer usually shows which side of that line a piece falls on.
Saw marks on secondary wood, the cheaper stock used for drawer sides and case backs where nobody expected it to be seen, tell a related story: straight, uneven marks come from a hand saw, regular arcs from a circular blade. The wood itself is a clue too. Poplar, pine, and chestnut turn up constantly as secondary wood in American case pieces, and plywood or particleboard anywhere in the structure rules out an early date entirely.
Wood moves with humidity across its width and barely along its length, which is why a round tabletop that has spent a century swelling and shrinking is rarely still perfectly round; measured in two directions, a genuinely old top often comes up slightly oval. Hardware evolved too, from hand-filed, blunt-tipped screws toward sharper machine-made ones, and from tapered cut nails toward round wire nails. Finish is the last layer: shellac and true French polish, built up in thin hand-rubbed coats, age differently from later sprayed lacquers, and a finish that looks too even for the joinery underneath is worth a second look.
Recognizing the period styles
What follows is a vocabulary for recognizing broad styles, not a method for attributing a piece to a maker or decade. Queen Anne is built around the cabriole leg, a gentle S-curve ending in a pad or trifid foot, with restrained case work and little applied carving. Chippendale keeps the cabriole leg in some forms but adds ball-and-claw feet and considerably more carved ornament, alongside straighter Marlborough legs in other pieces from the same broad period.
Federal furniture, spanning the Hepplewhite and Sheraton names within it, turns lighter and straighter again, with tapered or turned legs and inlay rather than heavy carving. Empire style goes the other direction toward mass and weight, with scroll and paw feet and columnar supports. The Victorian era is really several overlapping revivals: Rococo Revival brings back curved forms with deep carving, Renaissance Revival favors architectural case pieces with pediments and burl panels, and Eastlake reacts against both with rectilinear forms and incised geometric ornament. Arts and Crafts furniture, Mission style being its best-known American branch, closes the century out with quartersawn white oak and exposed, honest joinery.
Reproductions of every one of these styles have been made continuously for over a century, and a well-made Chippendale-style chair from 1920 shares plenty of silhouette with one from 1770 while failing every construction test above. When the two disagree, believe the construction.
Reproductions, revivals, and when to call a specialist
Revival furniture is not fake furniture. A well-built Colonial Revival piece from the early twentieth century, made with real dovetails and solid secondary wood, is an honest period object; it is simply not an eighteenth-century original, and describing it as one is the actual problem. For anything with real potential importance, an attribution to a specific shop or maker rests on comparative expertise most collectors have not built, and that is a job for a qualified furniture appraiser. Two categories worth a closer look sit under this hub: a repeatable inspection method for the checks above, and antique bars and back bars, a specialized, architecturally scaled category with its own construction and value questions.
Furniture study connects directly to the rest of an estate; the hands that built a chest also built the cases that once held silver and jewelry, and a household cleared today usually surfaces all of it together. From here this guide moves on to estate collectibles. For the full map of what this site covers, start from the San Antonio antiques and collectibles guide.