Scottish Furniture 1603-1850
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Glasgow Museums has a small but significant collection of furniture made in Scotland, from the date period of 1603-1850. century furniture, and included chairs, desks, beds, and tables Many of these items were collected between 1908 and 1933 by Sir William Burrell (1861-1958), on behalf of the Provand’s Lordship Society, helping to refurbish Provand’s Lordship, Glasgow’s oldest medieval house. Despite none of the furniture of the Provand’s Lordship collection being original to the house in its medieval or early modern periods of use, it is still considered among Scotland’s best collections of 17th century furniture. Sir William Burrell, along with his wife Constance, Lady Burrell (1875-1961) also collected pieces of Scottish furniture for their own personal use at their private family home, Hutton Castle, just outside Berwick-upon-Tweed, in the Scottish Borders. Most of the Scottish furniture collection features oak or pine chairs made during the seventeenth century, produced in areas such as Fife, Kirkcudbrightshire, and Aberdeen. The Aberdeen chairs in the collection are often carved with dates of construction, and heraldic devices and initials of owner. Some of these chairs were commissioned to celebrate marriages, or to show the owner’s allegiances to a specific trade or guild. There is also a small selection of late seventeenth to early eighteenth-century Scottish walnut and cane chairs, probably made in established cane chair workshops based in Edinburgh since the 1690s.
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