Talk:Escritoire

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Apart from a photograph (that I will submit soon) of a modern escritoire, I do not intend to put in much work on this page, so pitch in, all you furniture fans. Here is some comment from AlainV on my talk page to get you started: --Slashme 10:23, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

If you do a search for escritoire images on Google and look at oh, say a dozen pages of results you'll get mostly fixed desks with legs, and a majority of them will be fairly low ones with only a few layers of small drawers and nooks. Now if you do searches for the same desk name on antiques selling sites, you'll get something more precise. And if you do a search for "escritoire" on an antiques research site like the Getty art and architecture thesaurus (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/), you'll get this:

escritoires (writing desks, desks, ... Furnishings and Equipment)

Note: In modern usage, generally refers to small, portable writing desks that first appeared in 16th-century Europe, and were extremely popular in France in the 18th century. They are generally characterized by having a nest of drawers enclosed in a box, often with a sloping front that is hinged along the bottom edge and may be let down to provide a writing platform. An escritoire was placed on top of a table or had its own legs. Formerly, these small portable desks were also called "secretaries"; however, in modern usage, the term "secretaries" typically refers to larger pieces meant to be placed against a wall.

This is a form of small portable desk, quite different from the one you describe, or the one that usually (but not always) comes up in an image search on the Web. And you'll also find that they establish this definition on research in many printed books:

• Aronson, Book of Furniture and Decoration (1952) 207
• Fairbanks and Bates, American Furniture (1981) 530
• Fleming and Honour, Dictionary of the Decorative Arts (1977) 280
• Thornton, 17th C. Interior Decoration (1978) 310
• Verlet, 18th C. in France (1967)

Thus, they have reliable sources (some of which I have verified in person in local libraries and all of which I have verified indirectly on the Web) and this is why I would personaly consider the escritoire in general to be a close sibling to the Campaign desk within the notion of the Portable desk

But at the same time, the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus gives a definition of escritoire for a particular country, France, and it turns out to be a different kind of description from that of the portable desk escritoire, and that defintion too is also based on serious sources.

Again, naming desks is not an easy task. --AlainV 11:48, 4 November 2005 (UTC)