Bureaus and Clawed Feet

MS sends me pictures of a table she felt compelled to buy because of its unique feet in the shape of paws with toenails. Animalistic feet are the most common body part to be carved onto furniture since the days of the Egyptian pyramids. The symbol of a bird’s talon was carved on furniture; likewise, lion’s and dragon’s feet on chairs, bureaus, tables, for thousands of years.

To have a usable piece of furniture that is anchored by the image of the strongest animal in the food chain was meant to inspire confidence and superiority. Each culture of furniture-making humans had their own: the three-taloned Chinese dragon’s claw holds a ball, representing a pearl (of wisdom), and in the carved rosewood furniture of 19th-century China we see a beautiful sculptural blending of the claw around the ball. The adoption of the Chinese foot was capitalized by Thomas Chippendale for English 18^th century furniture. 

The claw foot in England became a crystal held by a bronze bird claw. In Japan, carved feet of bird’s claw anchored a piece in reference to the myth of the noble mother crane, who stands on one leg monitoring her nest; in the talons of her other raised leg, she holds a round stone. If she falls asleep, she would be awakened by the noise of the stone dropping from her talons.

The best of this furniture is indeed attributed to Thomas Chippendale in the mid-18th century England. The animal foot came to America a little later, as the colonies were slow in adopting new fashions. Flourishing in America into the beginning of the 19th century and again in mass-produced oak furniture in the late 19th century, American furniture makers loved the claw foot or hairy paw. This is the style of MS’s table: a classical square American Golden Oak tabletop, with carved pillar and post legs, with a slightly Asian carved base, raised on four-toed lion’s paw feet. The Asian reference was due to the Aesthetic Era’s fascination with the opening of the ports of Japan in the mid-19th century.

A magnificent surreal testimony to the Chippendale style is the largest chest of drawers in the world, three-stories high (38 feet) and located in High Point, North Carolina, the gateway to American furniture. This one piece of furniture references the debt Americans paid to Thomas Chippendale’s 1754 book The Director, as from this book America discovered the Chippendale foot, eagle’s talons, and lion’s paw feet. 

North Carolina’s towering chest of drawers originated in 1926 as a huge bureau topped by a gigantic mirror on a stand, built by the town fathers of High Point in a rebuttal to the 1922 world’s largest Duncan Phyfe chair in Thomasville, NC, and immortalized in 1955 as a monument on Main Street. Famous legs attached to famous posteriors have climbed the chair, such as Lyndon Johnson in 1960, posing upon the seat, 10 foot square. The mirror was stenciled “High Point, NC, The Industrial City: Bureau of Information.” Naturally, the Big Bureau stood as a backdrop for all high school graduation group portraits for 70 years, until the mirror rusted and the knobs fell off.

In 1996, a High Point craftsman redesigned the Big Bureau thinking his name would be forever linked to the greatest piece of furniture made. Sadly, he died in 2003 after completing the new chest of drawers in the style of Chippendale, painting it cherry red to mimic Chippendale’s favorite wood. He carved massive pairs of socks to hang out of a giant-sized drawer in a nod to the town’s hosiery industry.

A real estate developer in 2004 bought the three-story chest, painted it battleship gray, and the socks in neon colors, as a tourist attraction. The town objected, but no one would purchase the giant bureau until 2018, when High Point University hired a local designer to bring it back to Chippendale style and color, and to repaint the socks in a more respectable palette.

This is the largest example of a period piece with Chippendale feet in the world – delicate cabriole feet that harken back to the paw design. MS’ table is a much later (and smaller) version of the style, manufactured in the late 19^th century for Golden Oak furniture, Grand Rapids.

If MS’ table were 38 feet tall, it could be worth many tourist dollars as the largest 19th-century table with lion’s paw feet. That would make the table’s toenails 20 inches long (note however; lions do not have toenails; they have retractable claws). The value of MS’s table, as it is, is $500.