Amongst our current stock we have a piece of furniture that regularly inspires love at first sight … in a whole range of different customers! But here’s the riddle: this piece is simple but remarkably complicated, of considerable age but also very much at home in the most contemporary of settings, made by an anonymous craftsman yet all the more desirable for that…
In fact it is a North Country low dresser of majestic proportions. A very simple design - three drawers above squared legs - but given its distinctive character by the beautiful figuring and patination of the elmwood it is made from. The dresser dates from around the turn of the 17th Century but the craft and simplicity of its construction would give it pride of place in the most pared down of modern interiors; and the value of its unknown maker lies in his obvious knowledge, love and understanding of the wood he has worked to make such an outstanding item of country-made English furniture - wood from one of the most beautiful of our English trees.
In Britain the elm is believed to have been introduced 2,000 years ago by the Romans, young saplings likely used as supports in vineyards. From those juvenile trees, elms spread throughout the country. A mature elm is a beautiful tree: tall, narrow, dark green and weightily branched with a straight trunk, once especially seen along field divisions and in hedgerows. The height and stature of the elm trees imparted a wonderful sense of scale in various parts of our gently undulating English landscape. And they were a tree familiar to many: the 18th Century poet Thomas Gray wrote of the ‘rugged elms’ beside his country churchyard. One hundred years later writing when domiciled in Florence, Robert Browning recalled the elm:
Oh, to be in England Now that April's there And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! Home Thoughts, from Abroad 1845
And many of the artists of the first half of the 20th century, aware of the changes wrought by war and creeping urbanisation, painted the elm tree, artists including Philip Wilson Steer, Gilbert Spencer, Winifred Nicholson, Eric Ravilious and many others. Plantsman and painter Paul Nash loved the stand of tall elm trees on the boundary of his childhood garden in Buckinghamshire: ‘Older than most of the surrounding trees, these dominating elms evoked a sense of the past with a powerful and haunting presence’ Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape www.tate.org.uk
Elms have their drawbacks however, a startling and sometimes dangerous trait was that a tree could unexpectedly shed a large bough, even in calm weather. Sir Henry Rider Haggard writing in November 1898 records: “Today the weather is of the most perfect stillness and beauty … while we were at luncheon, suddenly, and without the smallest warning, a large piece fell off one of the great garden elms on to the path beneath.…it is this trick … that makes (elm trees) such dangerous timber to plant near houses.” A Farmer’s Year (1899)
Elms are also very susceptible to disease – and not just in recent years. Writing in 1938 Stephen Bone, the artist, bewailed their fate: “In thirty years or so they may all be gone for no one is planting elms now, and local authorities, alarmed at stories of disease and danger from falling limbs, are lopping and felling ferociously. It is a tragedy for the elm is one of the most beautiful of all trees and in spite of having been naturalised less than two thousand years ago is now the most English.“ Albion: An Artist’s Britain
Oak, fruitwood, ash and elm, these were the timbers used for most of the early furniture of England, worked by local carpenters using what timber was available. Elmwood was made into boxes, hanging cupboards, dough troughs, settles, dug out chairs carved out from a single length of trunk and simple boarded chests – amongst the furniture found on Henry VIII’s famous warship, the Mary Rose (sank 1545, salvaged 1982) is a boarded elm chest.
Elm does not decay when kept permanently wet so was often the timber of choice for water pipes and pumps. It also had many uses on the farm: “…especially for … work where strength was required, such as the division to stables, ever liable to a kick from a strong horse, the lining of mangers and cow-stalls, and the outside weather-boards of buildings…(Elm) could be used more extensively where the charm of natural unstained wood is desired… if systematically polished it will in time attain a rich tone. I have seen the tops of refectory tables made of it to which age and polish have given a deep bloom, as of a ripe plum.” Walter Rose, The Village Carpenter 1937
And a timber used not just for refectory tables. Dresser was a term long employed to describe a convenient piece of furniture whose function was as an area to serve and display food (a kitchen dresser was a much more utilitarian creature). The fashion for purpose-built formal dressers emerged towards the end of the 17th Century. Initially these low dressers had no superstructure, they were simply long side tables with drawers. Hence in a piece like our most beautiful and wonderful dresser, the craftsman has used the striking grain of elmwood as a mark of real quality and distinction. Our dresser was almost certainly a most prized and prestigious piece, very possibly made from a tree felled within the demesne of the manor house or prosperous farmhouse where it first belonged.
As a sad footnote but a footnote so relevant to current times, it has been estimated that Dutch elm disease - one of the most serious tree diseases in the world - has killed off around sixty million elm trees in Britain since the 1970s. This sobering fact alone makes our dresser a most precious item of proper English furniture, the quintessential celebration of English wood and English craftsmanship.
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A tree of majestic beauty … on a moonlit night, the elms have a grandeur peculiar to themselves