Articles» In FOCUS: Antique Pine Dowry Chests or Marriage Boxes
One of the quintessential items of peasant furniture anywhere but especially in Europe is the colourful folk painted antique pine box, coffer, trunk or chest.
These were often made for a marriage and to hold the wedding dress, and Sunday best, and also linens and jewellery given at the time of marriage and so we call them "dowries", marriage coffers, trousseau, hope chests amongst other names. They were often accompanied by other similarly decorated pieces of furniture, whose role was similar, such as an armoire or a chest of drawers or a painted dresser and also by smaller items like a spoon or plate rack. A poorer family might have one marriage piece though and this in all likelihood would be a dowry box.
There is a fascinating group of photographs in a painted frame - it is a frame with red and blue flowers on a white ground - done in the characteristic folk painted style of the region the piece came from and it's dated "1945". There are 3 photographs - the larger one shows two newly married couples on their wedding day in their traditional finery - it's a great photo and worthy of being in an ethnographic study of the Hungarian tribes at the time - and it is a photograph (THE wedding pic) that you would expect to see framed in pride of place in any household. What is different here though is the two smaller black and whites in the bottom half of the frame - two pictures showing three men, carpenters, at work on the two couples suite of marriage furniture - one picture shows the three posed with their tools and the objects of their handiwork chiefly a dowry box. The other one shows one of the men, evidently the painter, posing "at work" with brush executing his traditional patterns of red and blue flowers on a white ground. Here is evidence in this region at least of the significance of the dowry furniture and the men who made and painted it. The men and the items they made have been recorded for posterity in the family home alongside the actual wedding photo.
We can conjecture the dowry furniture for tribal peoples like these was a source of immense pride to them - the care and attention that had been expended to make and decorate those items in the traditional manner gave a sense of guarantee for the future and the photographs here are perhaps like tokens of guarantee, a record that these couples are conjoined not only between themselves in the proper manner but also are secure and interlinked as in the continuous twining and encircling stem of the tulip flowers into a wider community and traditional sets of beliefs.
Dowry is defined as "a transfer of parental property to the daughter (and her husband) on the occasion of her marriage".
Each bride had her dowry. It was part of the package. A collection of items that an extended family would gather up for one of its daughters over years in order to make her both an attractive catch and also to provide her with financial security for the future. The dowry came with the bride on the day of her marriage. Dowry might consist of money, coins, jewellery, land but not only these obvious tokens of wealth. In Central Europe an important element of the dowry was bolts of home spun cloth. These would be stored thereafter in furniture. They were there to be used in times of hardship should such occur and often they were never used hence the abundance of antique textiles and linens in remarkably good condition that one used to see in recent times. Alongside bolts of cloth there were also other hand woven items, set of towels or sacks, and clothes, folk costumes - these were in their day valuable items that took many hours of labour to produce - a Hungarian shepherd's embroidered coat for example would cost more than a year's wages to have made. Some of these costumes were once in a lifetime pieces.
In some areas dowry trunks were replaced by chests of drawers or wardrobes, but even then these other types of furniture were more for everyday use. In general in Europe every peasant family 100 years ago and more would have at least one pine dowry that was a special store or safe and not used on a daily basis, it was for keeping one's finest items, especially the festive clothes, folk costume and jewellery (and these latter items, kept in the so-called candle box, the small lidded tray which most of these boxes had).
In Wales and in the British Isles, an equivalent to this custom and for a semi urban less country peoples, was the dresser, or sideboard, in the front room or tidy room, and on the dresser a fine and best set of crockery displayed, with a set of rarely used silver cutlery in the drawer, both wedding gifts.
Clearly the European peasant marriage box was an important piece of furniture but even more so because it was not just a place to store valuable dowry objects it was also a part of the dowry itself.
One of the purposes of the dowry collection was to set up a home for the bride and her partner. So the dowry gift might consist of several furniture pieces amongst other household items as well as everything else.
In countries like Hungary, there was a marriage procession on the wedding day. The bride and groom following the service did not drive off on honeymoon to the Cotswolds or to Heathrow but would ride through the village on a cart stacked high with a whole ensemble of furniture draped in colourful cloths. They would ride to their new home and the content of the cart was unpacked and this sometimes included a painted marriage bed and a coffer might sit at the end of this.
In the Harta region of Hungary and in the Kaloteszeg (now in Romania) a set of painted furniture was painted in the region's typical colours, the same colours and flowers and patterns were woven into the bride and groom's clothing so too the blankets that bedecked the wagon.
By definition the dowry box and dowry furniture had to look good. Town furniture, out of the reach both economically and logistically, signified value by use of exotic woods, inlays, cabinetry.
Some of the better dowry trunks in Europe, from Germany and Sweden, are quite finely made and well crafted with bold mouldings and panels especially 18th century examples but even then these pieces were generally made of pine which was not just the only affordable but in all likelihood in the old days the only available wood. It was the tradition when one had to use pine to conceal the poverty of the material with painted surface decoration.
For general furniture this usually meant painting in wood grain effect to imitate darker more expensive woods but when it came to making a dowry box which as we have said represented the dowry (ie. the bride's wealth) and could even play a role in the ceremony of the wedding day then moreover form a key furnishing of the new home then something more than mere wood graining was required.
Painting of a high order or something really distinctive was called for to achieve the required effect and for this reason dowry chests became a vehicle for some of the finest expressions of historic European folk and local decorative art.
Like a folk costume or young lady's festive peasant dress, tailor made to an individual, the dowry trunk had to look as beautiful as possible, bright and appealing.
Each area or region had it's distincitive styles, patterns, colours and there must have been local masters and workshops with specialist painters.
Other rules governing the painted decoration of marriage trunks were tribal, local and ceremonial. As a dowry gift and key furnishing of ritual importance the marriage box often had symbolic decoration. Religious symbols promoting piety, fidelity in love and faith, promise of the protection of Jesus. Flowers - but not just any flowers. Birds, but not any birds, birds with certain significations promoting fertility, prosperity, good fortune, like goldfinches, doves, golden orioles...
Painted marriage coffers often have the initials or names of the betrothed or just of the bride painted onto the front - normally there is a date, both of manufacture and of the marriage, and sometimes the name of the maker of the piece.
The painted decoration was not always just about the marriage or symbolic of prosperity but was tribal. Hungarians often call marriage boxes tulip boxes owing to their being typically decorated with tulip designs. This was a motif borrowed from Western Europe, the tulip mania in the Netherlands, that found it's way into painting & decorative art in the Baroque period, but in the multi- ethnic outlands of the Hapsburg Empire, to decorate furniture with tulips meant you were Hungarian, it was a sign of tribal identity and solidarity.
If highly decorated painted chests are not found from the British Isles it is partly because we had different marriage traditions than many of our European neighbours but also because of the iconoclasm or anti-festive turn that our visual traditions took from the time of the English Revolution in the 17th century.
As the examples on our website show the English boxes one is likely to find are painted in plain colours - often reds and blacks, in the Victorian period browns and purples as well as black, and if you are lucky you might find some in pale colours, blue or cream, and these are likely to be Georgian.
Georgian English or British pine boxes are plain and austere much like the interiors of our churches and can be appealingly minimalist and restrained. At one time both church interiors and boxes were very colourfully painted and often with imagery - we forget this as so little now exists - and if you find any British box with decorative painting it is likely to be very early and valuable or a rare one off piece. For various British examples see this Georgian Engliah box in orginal paint and this Original Georgian Box on Chest.
The best European boxes in terms of build quality tend to German, or Swiss, Austrian, or Czech...middle European...and often the painting was done by master craftsmen - these have bold mouldings and big bun feet and you need the right space to accommodate them. See this superb Marriage Chest in Original Paint for example. Boxes from Northern Bohemia or the Pardubice have often been regarded as the amongst the finest - for example see this Floral Marbled Marriage Coffer from Pardubice,
Boxes from Eastern European can be of plainer manufacture but there are certain areas where the folk painting is exceptional and celebrated and those from eastern Central Transylvania must count amongst those. Here we have fine examples such as this Superb Folk Art Painted Marriage Chest. Sometimes the dates on boxes from here are very late (ie. even up to the 1950s or 60s) this is testimony both to the continuation of the authentic folk culture and also to the custom of re-painting boxes for subsequent family marriages.
Boxes from Scandanavia like all things Scandanavian are saught after and normally have good build quality like the German - though Swedish and Norweigan boxes are invariably with domed tops and this is often a deterrent as it limits use in the home. See this example of a Russian Folk Art Bridal Chest. Russian painted boxes (hard to find now as painted furniture in Russia only came from certain specific regions and the Russians have enough interest now to keep it all for themselves) - these also often have domed tops. A domed top would be more difficult to make as the wood had to be steamed and shaped and it is likely that these boxes were made like this for purposes of proofing against weather when travelling.
Each country has its particular styles of boxes and of painting and within each country boxes from different areas and regions can be identified by the particular styles. In peasant areas of Romania the boxes are quite different being very ancient made from slats of wood and pegged and carved and not painted with flowers at all ....and these are a subject in themselves...