Buffet or bowfat? The built-in cupboard in the eighteenth century

Magazine Antiques, May, 1999 by Betty Crowe Leviner

About 1710 the Council of colonial Virginia considered an itemized proposal for the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg that would render "the new House Convenient as well as Ornamental." On the list was "one Marble Buffette or sideboard with a Cistern & fountain."(1) This was apparently installed, since a 1720 document refers to painting "the Sideboard Shutter."(2) By the time of the death of the royal governor Norborne Berkeley (1717-1770), baron de Botetourt, the sideboard or buffet in the dining room was referred to as a "bowfat."(3)

This sixty-year period at Williamsburg can be seen as a microcosm of the history of the buffet niche, or buffet cupboard - the latter being the term I shall use to cover a variety of built-in cupboards (including the buffet niche) devoted to display and to the service of beverages at an eighteenth-century table.(4) These cupboards were usually painted a brilliant color and usually, but not always, secured by doors and locks. Both the buffet niche and the buffet cupboard provided an arena for display and storage as well as a staging area for the beverage service at the dining table. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the focus, contents, and gender associations of these cupboards changed.

Buffets and sideboards (the two words sometimes being synonyms) have been around since the Middle Ages, when they were tables or freestanding tiered cupboards placed against a wall in a room where drinking and dining took place [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED]. The word "buffet" appears to be French and may have evolved from a medieval French word meaning to drink. The earliest reference to a buffet in France dates to the twelfth century.(5)

By the late seventeenth century in France buffets could have included piped-in water, which would seem to account for the shell imagery used to decorate them at that time. The buffet was used to display plate, glass, and/or ceramics and to dispense beverages for the table.(6)

By the time of James II's accession to the English throne in 1685, prints of his coronation banquet show sideboard tables recessed into openings along the walls of the banquet hall [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED]. The same arrangement prevails in the Marble Dining Room at Ham House outside London, where, in the 1670s, the duke and duchess of Lauderdale installed tables in recesses on either side of the door into the room. These recesses were the first step in the evolution of the buffet cupboard.

The form evolved further during the closing years of Louis XIV's long reign (1643-1715), when Paris regained some of the eminence it had lost to Versailles over the preceding half century. Intimate interiors became preferable to palatial ones, and graining was used to simulate marble. Before Louis's death and into the regency of his great-grandson Louis XV (r. 1715-1774), the enclosed buffet cupboard began to make its appearance. What the French, and I think specifically the Parisians, did, was to enclose the recessed sideboard tables with paneled doors. The table itself was then incorporated into the recess, and a drop leaf was added to the outer edge to enlarge the table's work surface when needed. The drop leaf was folded down when the doors were closed and locked. This arrangement provided both display and security and fitted in with the intimate and relatively informal style of entertaining that emerged in Paris after years of oppressive formality that Louis XIV had favored at his court.

The first engravings of buffet cupboards were published about 1700.(7) The one illustrated in Plate VII shows the choices available in selecting a style, from an open recess with shelves to paneled doors closing over the display. There also appears to be a choice between plain paint and marbling as well as simple or embellished pilasters.

Given the cultural preeminence of France, it is no wonder that these built-in cupboards became the rage elsewhere. The Dutch and the Scots(8) especially became and remained buffet enthusiasm.(9) The relatively few surviving examples in England may be explained partly by the continuing wealth of an expanding English middle class during the eighteenth century and the consequent building, remodeling, and rebuilding of houses.(10) This activity took place during the period when the buffet cupboard began to fall out of favor among the more fashion conscious, so that there may originally have been more examples of the form in England than survive today.

Nonetheless, when it was gone, the buffet cupboard evoked nostalgia. A Scotsman recalled in 1856:

[I]n all the old dining-rooms there still lingered the former...cupboard or buffet, with shelves fancifully shaped out and their edges painted in different colours, such as green and light blue, and even tipped with gold. On these shelves were displayed any pieces of silver plate that were considered worth showing, and also the most valuable and richest coloured China punch-bowls, jugs and cups....Below these shelves there was a hanging leaf which during dinner was upraised and served as a sideboard, and when dinner was ended, it was again let down, and shut in with doors opening from the centre and reaching nearly to the ceiling.(11)