| P3 has note
| - The commode is a form of furniture that was developed in France in the late seventeenth-century. French commodes were initially designed to store clothing and linens, replacing the large coffers that had tended to be used up to that point. The French commode was generally divided into drawers, making it much more practical for storage than a top-opening chest. By the 1720s, commodes were common in even relatively modest French interiors.
Commodes were popular in English interiors from around the 1740s. English commodes differ from French designs in that they most often consist of ranged shelves behind a central set of doors, rather than drawers. They also tended, like this example, to have veneered tops rather than being topped by a marble slab.
Commodes were initially used, in both England and France, for storage in bedrooms and dressing rooms. While they continued to have a functional role as storage for clothing and linens up to the end of the eighteenth-century, English commodes also took on an increasingly prominent position in drawing rooms and libraries. Here they would be placed against the wall, often performing a largely decorative role by adding a curve and ornamented form to the line of the room. Commodes were often positioned underneath mirrors, thus forming part of a mid-eighteenth century decorative scheme in which the appearance of the interior was extended, and created as a reflecting spectacle. Commodes were also frequently paired with matching corner tables which served to further eliminate square edges from the rococo interior.
The commode was one of the most characteristic pieces of furniture of the French eighteenth-century interior. Its wide-scale adoption in England reflects a great fashion for French style in eighteenth-century English interior design, most specifically the mid-eighteenth century fashion for the French rococo.
The commode was a type of furniture very strongly associated with the serpentine shapes of rococo design; as James Parker has noted, the word 'commode' was, during the eighteenth century, sometimes used in England in an adjectival way to describe a serpentine or curved form. (1) English furniture designers of the 1750s and 1760s provided local versions of French rococo commodes in their furniture-pattern books. The third edition of Thomas Chippendale's <i>Director</i>, published in 1762, included a drawing for a 'Commode Table' which is of similar design to this Vile piece (plate LXX).
<u>Notes</u>
1: James Parker, ‘Rococo and Formal Order in English Furniture’, <i>The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin</i> 15:5 (Jan 1957), p. 135. (en)
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