Antique Easels
An easel is a frame that holds a canvas, panel or picture upright, and the antique ones run from full-height studio stands down to small brass frames with a hinged strut.
What Are Antique Easels?
The form that dominates is the large wooden artist's studio easel: an upright A- or H-frame on a tripod or box base, with a canvas tray that slides up and down. The word "artist" or "artists" appears in 111 of 268 titles, "studio" in 47 and "adjustable" in 46, and the recurring phrase is some version of "oak artist's adjustable studio easel".
Oak is the defining timber at a quarter of titles, then mahogany, with walnut, pine and the odd rosewood behind them. French easels outnumber English ones in the record, 30 titles to 16, and Scotland is the rarest named origin at two. Anglo-Indian, Chinese hardwood, North Indian teak and Japanese carved folding easels turn up thinly but steadily.
Behind the studio easels sit smaller groups. Display and gallery easels for showing a single picture account for about a fifth, some carved, gilt, ebonised or made in bamboo and faux bamboo. Folding, travelling and table-top easels are roughly one in ten, and easel-form book, music and plate stands about the same. At the bottom of the size range are easel-back photograph frames in brass, ormolu and plate.
Of the listings carrying a clean year, the range runs 1850 to 1930, with decades clustering from the 1880s to the 1930s. A good third of the record is given a broad period name instead: "19th Century" is the single largest label, with Victorian and Edwardian after it. Georgian and Regency titles are isolated, and stray earlier labels read as the dealer's own styling.
What Sets Them Apart
Mechanism is the clearest divide. Named movements - a winder that cranks the tray up on a screw, a ratchet bar, a slant mechanism, castors under the feet - cluster among the highest-priced entries, and "fully adjustable" appears in only nine titles. A plain easel described by nothing more than its timber sits lower.
Scale pulls the same way. "Large" appears in 36 titles, and "very large", "large professional" and one eight-foot easel sit near the top, while table-top and miniature easels sit at the bottom. Oak and mahogany hold the middle and upper ground; pine and stained beech sit below, though pitch pine studio easels also reach the upper range.
After that it comes down to who made it and how much cabinet work went in. Titles carrying a label, a patent, a maker's mark or a London or Hampstead maker recur among the dearer pieces. Carving appears in 15 titles, alongside inlay, fretwork, gilding and ormolu, and double-sided easels that take a picture on each face sit consistently in the upper half.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for easels, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
About thirty-two easels are listed on Sellingantiques each year, and ninety-nine different dealers have offered one.
The Antique Easels Glossary
- Studio easel
- Full-height floor-standing easel for working on large canvases. The word is used in 47 titles.
- Adjustable
- The canvas tray, the top rest, or both slide up and down to suit the size of the picture. It turns up in 46 titles, the most-cited mechanical feature in the category.
- Winder
- A crank-and-screw mechanism that raises the canvas tray, named in several French oak easels.
- Ratchet movement
- A toothed bar that holds the tray at set heights, cited as the alternative to a winder.
- H-frame
- An easel built as two uprights joined by cross-members rather than standing on a tripod.
- Chevalet
- The French word for an easel, used once in the record, on a walnut artist's easel.
Frequently Asked Questions
What wood are antique easels usually made from?
Oak is the defining timber, at a quarter of all titles on Sellingantiques, with mahogany second at around one in eight.
Walnut, pine and rosewood follow well behind. Teak, satinwood, cherrywood, kingwood, ebony and beech each appear only once or twice across the whole record.
How old are most antique easels?
Of 268 listings, 145 carry a clean year, and those run from 1850 to 1930. That eighty-year window covers almost the whole archive.
Where decades are given they gather in the 1880s through the 1930s. Pre-1850 easels are barely present, and the handful of Georgian and Regency titles are isolated entries.
Are display easels different from artist's easels?
Yes. A display or gallery easel is lighter and built to show one picture rather than to hold a canvas being worked on. They make up about a fifth of the category.
They also take decoration that working easels rarely do: carved, gilt, ebonised, and in half a dozen cases bamboo or faux bamboo, a Victorian drawing-room taste that shows up nowhere else in the record.
Do antique easels come with makers' names?
Some do. Titles mention labels, patents, makers' marks, a Hampstead makers' label and London makers, and those entries recur among the higher-priced pieces.
No single firm stands out as the standard maker across the category. One studio easel is recorded as having come from the Slade, the only institutional provenance in the archive.
What smaller items are listed under easels?
Table-top and bench easels, some with a palette, folding and travelling easels, and suitcase or field-work types.
Easel-form stands for books, music, plates and trays form a small but persistent group, along with lecterns and reading stands.
At the bottom of the size range sit easel-back photograph frames in brass, ormolu, agate, micromosaic and silver plate, plus easel mirrors and cranberry glass.
Which easels are the unusual ones?
The oddest single forms recorded are a patent combining an easel with a library step ladder, a metamorphic folding easel, a menu blackboard easel, and an easel-form brass magazine rack with three tiers.
Non-European work shows up thinly: Anglo-Indian, North Indian carved teak, Chinese hardwood, Japanese carved folding and "Eastern" easels together account for a handful of listings.