Delicately ornamented and lacquered in a style called Japanning, its quiet elegance marked a departure from the baroque excesses of the time. Not too big, but large enough to accommodate a tea service, it sometimes had a scalloped or pie-crust edge or a tray-like lip to prevent the spoons and bowls and other costly paraphernalia from clattering to the floor. So called for the nifty mechanism that allowed the top to be flipped up and flattened for easy storage, it had a central column with three cabriole legs that ended in pad feet or ball-and-claw feet. Of the tea tables, the tilt-top table, was the most sought after. "But the idea of 'the tea table' as more than just a piece of furniture, but also a social event at which women and men met together for gossip and conversation, begins in Anne's reign especially." "The first tea tables (explicitly so called) were sold in the late 1690s before Queen Anne's reign," says Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at the Queen Mary University of London. Queen Anne's reign coincided with an important time for tea and the emergence of the tea table. Oliphant, for the Tatler to be "served up with the foaming chocolate or fragrant tea at every breakfast in Mayfair." What a delectable pairing it must have been, fantasized the historical writer Mrs. The first British daily, The Daily Courant, was launched the year she came to power, while the celebrated upper-class gossip sheet, The Tatler, followed seven years later. In another happy coincidence, Anne's reign witnessed the rise of that perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea: the morning newspaper. By the time she came to the throne, tea-drinking, which had been going on in England for about 40 years, had evolved into an exceedingly fashionable social ritual among the upper-classes, spurring an unquenchable demand for all kinds of accoutrements for this expensive and exotic drink - from fancy new tea equipage in silver and porcelain (that was imported from China as well as made locally) to especially designed tea furniture. As tea historian Jane Pettigrew points out, Anne's reign (1702-1714) happened to coincide with an important time for tea. But the connection between tea-drinking and Anne's reign has been widely commemorated in furniture, poetry, painting, journalism, satire and even slang. She didn't share the same relationship with tea. She liked it and drank it, of course, but her sweet tooth made her crave the other modish drink of the time, chocolate, which she savored privately in her bedchamber before taking a nap. Personally, Anne did little to promote tea. Queen Anne and tea have a curious relationship, embellished with more than one ironic twist. Immensely popular across England and the American colonies, this elegant furniture was a fixture in wealthy 18th-century parlors from London to Boston.īut why did this style of furniture, which constitutes Anne's most prominent cultural legacy, become such a rage? One of the chief reasons can be distilled into a dark and delicious word: tea. Not the queen's gout-afflicted limbs that are a focal point of this raunchy film, but the classic, S-curved, cabriole legs that are a hallmark of Queen Anne furniture. That's an operatic biography, but strangely enough, until this movie, the only popular image the words "Queen Anne" triggered was of curved brown legs. It has ignited widespread interest in the life of a corpulent, gouty, myopic, staunchly Anglican queen who allegedly had passionate relationships with two ladies of her bedchamber and who was pregnant 17 times but died childless before her 50th birthday about 300 years ago. Even if it doesn't, this comic and oddly moving film has already achieved something extraordinary. Circa 1710.Ī film about Queen Anne of Great Britain, The Favourite, by the unorthodox Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, will probably cadge a few Oscars. A satire of women's social discourse in the Queen Anne period depicts six women taking tea in a parlor, with figures on the left signifying hidden emotions and power struggles behind a genteel facade.
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