The eighteenth-century Cuban sacristy chest of drawers

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2004 by Michael Connors

With more than five hundred years of written history, the island of Cuba has the oldest colonial heritage in the Western Hemisphere. One facet of this heritage is furniture. Thousands of examples of colonial furniture survive, but the one form that most Cuban furniture scholars feel best exemplifies the cultural essence, or Cubanidad, is the eighteenth-century sacristy chest of drawers (comoda de sacristia). One of the most famous of these (Pl. II) is in the Catedral de La Habana (Cathedral of Havana; Pl. I), although it is not as large as the one (Pls. III, IIIa) in the city's oldest church, the Iglesia del Espiritu Santo (Church of the Holy Ghost), which was built in the 1630s. The blockfront sacristy chest was used to store everything used in the celebration of the Mass, including the priest's vestments.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Cuba's capital, Havana, had become the third largest city in the New World after Mexico City and Lima. Partly this was because of the success of the tobacco trade. Tobacco was Cuba's most profitable agricultural crop until sugar gained the lead later in the century.

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The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) enabled the British to insist on taking over the asiento, the exclusive contract for supplying slaves to the West Indies over the next thirty years. Trade was opened to goods from England, France, and the Netherlands.

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French and English trading links with Cuba were well established by the second decade of the eighteenth century, and Cuban fashions, especially in furniture, were increasingly influenced by imports. It was at this point that the restrained Spanish colonial furniture of the previous centuries in Cuba underwent a dramatic change with the importation of other European styles directly and via Spain, which itself imported a good deal of English furniture. (1)

Although England was a source of inspiration for Cuba, the baroque style that developed in France during the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) influenced the Cuban baroque both directly and indirectly through Spain via the Spanish plateresque style, which was in turn influenced by the French baroque.

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When all Cuban governmental offices were centralized in Havana in 1733, the city became more attractive to commerce and a magnet for wealth. With the founding of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Jeronimo de la Habana (now Universidad de La Habana) in 1728 by Father Geronimo Valdes (1646-1729), one of Cuba's "builder bishops," there was a surge of ecclesiastical and private construction. As Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo has described the city:

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Havana--crossroads of the Indies--ceased to be a mere hub of American commerce, and became a thriving city, exporting the bounty of the tropics: tobacco (despite the state monopoly decreed in 1717), sugar, salted meat, hides, livestock, and hardwoods. It was an expensive city where wages were higher than in Spain or Holland. (2)

There is no better example of the Cuban baroque style in architecture than the Catedral de La Habana with its ornate columned facade (Pl. I). Constructed of coquina, a fossilized coral rock (also known as "black teeth" or "iron shore") and limestone, the cathedral dominates the city's Plaza de Catedral. Rebuilt in 1748, the cathedral has been described by the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) with the adage "music turned to stone." Because rich members of local congregations spent large sums building and furnishing their churches, ecclesiastical furnishings, including sacristy chests, were fabricated without thought of expense. Most of these chests were made of Cuban mahogany (Swietenia mahogoni) with West Indian cedar (Cedrela odorata) interiors.

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By the mid-eighteenth century Cuban architecture became more dynamic, and decorative arts and furnishings followed suit. A later, more elaborate, baroque style began to incorporate traces of the French rococo asymmetry (see Pl. IV).

In 1762 Havana and the western half of Cuba was ceded to England as one of the consequences of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Havana became an open port, which changed the social, economic, and political landscape. As one historian has written:

During the British occupation, Havana's residents had enjoyed their ability to purchase coveted consumer goods from the British merchants that had descended upon the city. With the return of Spanish rule, the government had instituted a degree of comercio libre, or free trade, which, while not the economic freedom of unrestricted laissez-faire, was a vast improvement over the previous system. (3)

With comercio libre, fashionable furnishings were now imported directly from France, England, or the Netherlands as well as from Spain. Consequently, Cuban furniture made during this period was quickly given foreign forms and styles such as the Queen Anne style, as well as French and Dutch baroque and rococo elements. In an article about English eighteenth-century furniture exports to Spain and thence, perhaps, to Cuba, Robert Wemyss Symonds wrote: