The American sofa table

Magazine Antiques, May, 1999 by Philip D. Zimmerman

In 1950 Albert Sack published "one of the few sofa tables produced in America," a New York example in the style of Duncan Phyfe.(1) Sixteen years later Charles E Montgomery declared sofa tables the "rarest of all American drop-leaf tables." He added that "all American examples known to the writer have pedestal bases and were made in New York."(2) Although they were not the first to publish this form, Sack and Montgomery established the interpretive framework through which subsequent writers still view sofa tables.(3) The present study draws on references to some fifty surviving American sofa tables predating 1835, several of which I have examined, and reconsiders the place the form occupies in American furniture history.

In one of the few comprehensive analyses of the sofa table, G. Bernard Hughes stated in 1966 that the form was a "purely English inspiration of the 1790s."(4) Nothing has come to light since then to challenge this claim. The sofa table seems not to have been as popular in Paris as in England. Thus Honore Lannuier (1779-1819), the influential French cabinetmaker who emigrated to New York City in 1803, introduced many new furniture designs, but no sofa tables.(5)

The earliest of the very few surviving references to sofa tables may be an order of July 18, 1801, for a mahogany sofa table that appears in the Estimate Sketch Book of Gillow and Company, a large furniture maker and upholsterer in Lancaster and London, England [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].(6) When Thomas Sheraton published a sofa table for the first time in his Cabinet Dictionary of 1803 he took care to describe its function, explaining that these tables were "used before a sofa" and that "the ladies chiefly occupy them to draw, write, or read." His illustration [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] shows the table placed in front of a sofa so that "a stranger may more clearly see the use of such tables."(7)

Two references suggest that the form was new at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Sheraton's plate of 1803 is one of only a few in his various publications that shows more than one piece of furniture in relation to another, implying that readers might not be familiar with the form. The second reference is another order for a sofa table, dated September 24, 1801, and entitled "A Pembroke Sofa Table," in the Gillow sketchbook [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. The term seems to confuse the two related forms. In fact, the sofa table is a variant of the pembroke table (also called a breakfast table), that differs in two essential ways. When the leaves are up, pembroke tables are approximately square, whereas sofa tables are long rectangles. Sheraton gives the optimal dimensions of pembroke tables as forty-four to forty-eight inches long by thirty-four to thirty-six inches wide. He advises that sofa tables be sixty to seventy-two inches long by twenty-two to twenty-four inches wide.(8) The Gillow "Pembroke Sofa Table" falls between these configurations, although at fifty-four inches long by thirty-six inches wide with the leaves up, it is still quite square.

The drawer facade of pembroke tables is narrow by comparison with that of sofa tables. The latter have two drawers side by side, and are sometimes fitted with a hinged writing surface that covers compartments for writing implements.(9) Because sofa tables were intended to be seen and used in the round, both drawer facades are finished alike. Usually one side has sham drawers imitating the functioning drawers. A less common configuration is one sham and one real drawer on each side. Even less common are sofa tables with four real, but shallow, drawers.

The top of the sofa table is almost always made of two boards glued edge to edge with the wood grain running across the table. This is a conscious shift from the otherwise universal practice of having the wood gram parallel the length of the table frame, or "bed" as it was commonly called. Over time, the boards comprising the top of a sofa table shrink, often opening a gap of as much as a quarter of an inch at the central glue joint.(10) For the cabinetmaker this result was more than offset by the need to have the grain of the wood aligned on both the top and the hinged flaps [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The consistency of the gram relates the top of the sofa table to the uniform expanse of upholstery on the accompanying sofa. Reflected light would introduce unsightly changes in the color and brilliance of grain patterns were the grain of the flaps perpendicular to that of the top. Practically, the grain of the flaps should be parallel to the hinges. Otherwise, splits from hinge screws might open, causing the wood around the hinge to weaken and the hinge to detach.

Sofa tables were quickly associated with convenience and flexible use. A few years after the publication of Sheraton's Cabinet Dictionary, the English designer George Smith in his Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration...suggested that sofa tables could be used "for the Drawing Room, Breakfast Parlor, or Library."(11) The early nineteenth-century painting shown in Plate II shows a sofa table in front of the hearth in the parlor. In early twentieth-century guides to tasteful decoration, sofa tables were placed in the center of the living room immediately behind a large sofa that faced the fireplace, the sentimental heart of the room. In the absence of the sofa table, pembroke, card, or other tables of similar size were placed in front of the sofa.(12) Regardless of how successful sofa tables behind sofas may be in modern interior decorating, that position sacrifices the point of their design, which is to be seen from all sides. The low coffee table is the modern substitute for the sofa table in front of the sofa.