Mid-Century Marquetry Sideboard with Fish Inlay

• Maple - Maple, native to North America, is a dense heavy timber from light to yellow-brown in colour. It has very little distincive graining unless it is one of the variants such as birds-eye maple or burr maple, so was not used extensively for furniture in 18th and 19th century, where cabinetmakers and designers preferred timbers with more distinctive features such as mahogany, walnut, rosewood and oak.
  
  Birds-eye maple has a seres of small spots linked by undulating lines in the grain, is highly sough and is used as a decorative veneer. Burr maple has larger and irregular grain swirls than birds-eye maple.
• Paul Kafka (1907 - 72) -

  Paul Kafka Exclusive Furniture Pty Ltd. of Sydney. Paul Kafka was one of the most significant furniture makers working in Sydney in the immediate post war period. Born in Vienna, Kafka worked in his father's furniture factory later studying furniture design at the Academy of Arts in Vienna. This training and early practice in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s is reflected in references to the Art Deco style which continued to inform his work during the 1950s
  
  

• Fiddleback - A name given to the pattern of the grain in some timbers, where the lines of the grain are compressed and at the same time wavy. Fiddleback grain is prized as a timber for furniture and musical instruments, and is expensive becasue of its scarcity.
  
  In Australia fiddleback graining is found in blackwood. Other non-native timbers that are sometimes found with a fiddleback grain are mahogany and maple.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• Australian furniture, post 1950 - sideboards and storage cabinets 249
• Kafka, Paul (Australia) - mid-century furniture designers and makers (Australia) 13