Cabinet Design 1800 - 1900

This is an anonymous design for a cabinet, made with pen, ink, and watercolor on paper. As a design, the cabinet remains unmoored from a specific historical context, though its symmetrical curves gesture towards the late eighteenth century. However, we might ask ourselves what this cabinet represents beyond its function? Furniture is deeply implicated in social life. A space to hold precious objects, or perhaps even more intimately, personal effects, the cabinet implies a certain level of wealth. It speaks to the domestic sphere and the rituals of presentation and storage that are part of middle-class life. If this cabinet could talk, what stories would it tell about the intimacies it has witnessed, the secrets it has kept, and the identities it has helped to shape? What would it be like to look at yourself in the mirror in the center of the cabinet?