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.

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Antique Easels

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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.