Directoire Style Mahogany Side Table with Marble Top, 19th Century

• Gallery - On furniture, a gallery is a small upright section, frequently pierced and decorated, around the tops of small items of furniture, such as davenports, side tables, and so forth. Galleries are made in brass or bronze,and be fretted, pierced or solid timber. A three-quarter gallery is one that surrounds three of the four sides of a table, desk or other top.
• French Directoire Style - The Directoire style is a furniture design style that was popular in France during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, during the Directoire period (1795-1799) of the French Revolution. It is characterized by simplicity, elegance, and a neoclassical influence. The style is characterized by straight lines, geometric shapes, and minimal ornamentation, often with a whitewashed finish. It is inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. Furniture pieces in the Directoire style include tables, chairs, desks, and sofas, which feature clean, simple lines and a lack of ornamentation, typically in mahogany or other dark woods.
• Mahogany - Mahogany is a dense, close grained red-coloured timber from the West Indies and Central America. It was first imported into Europe in the the early 18th century and its use continued through the 19th century. It was popular for furniture making because of its strength, the wide boards available, the distinctive grain on some boards, termed flame mahogany and the rich warm colour of the timber when it was polished.. The "flame" was produced where a limb grew out from the trunk of the tree, and this timber was usually sliced into veneers for feature panels on doors, backs and cornices.
  
  Some terms used to describe mahogany relate to the country from which it originally came, such as "Cuban" mahogany, "Honduras" mahogany etc. However unless the wood has been tested the names assigned are more a selling feature, rather than a true indication of the timber's origin.
• Pierced Decoration - Ornamental woodwork with part of the background cut through and removed to produce an open-work pattern.
• Fluting - A form of decoration found on many pieces of furniture, as well as ceramics, silver and clocks, in which round-bottomed grooves, of varying width and depth, are let into columns, pilasters, legs. As a general rule, flutes are cut in the vertical, though they may follow a turned leg in a spiral pattern. In cross-section, they may be described as a series of 'U' shapes, rising and narrowing at each end of the groove. Fluting is the opposite of reeding, with which fluting is often associated.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• tables, purpose or type - side tables 1,186
• various items - Directoire style 49