Mexican Spanish Colonial Side Table, Single Drawer, Lyre Ends, c. 1930–1940

The Piece

A small Mexican side table in the Spanish Colonial manner, built of solid hardwood in the 1930s and newly refinished to a warm, deep red-brown that brings the figure of the wood up through the surface. The top is a thick plank with a straight edge and a small overhang, its grain running the long way with the knots, checks and mineral streaks of a tree that was sawn by hand and left to show it. Below the top a single drawer runs the full width of the apron, its front raised in a wide molded panel and fitted at the center with a small hand-forged iron escutcheon in the shape of a keyhole, the only metal on the piece. The drawer is a dovetailed box with a solid bottom and runs on its own sides, and it still slides true.

The base is the part that gives the table its character. Each end is a solid lyre-shaped support, a pair of scrolled legs cut from thick stock that curve out from the apron, sweep in at the waist and flare again to scrolled feet, joined across the bottom by a shaped bar with a scalloped lower edge. A single turned-end stretcher runs between the two supports at ankle height and is pinned through, and a scalloped apron hangs below the drawer at the front. The scrolls, the scallops and the heavy sections are the vocabulary of the Spanish Baroque as it was remembered and simplified in the workshops of central Mexico, and they give a table of modest size the presence of a much larger one.

The refinishing was done by hand and stopped at the right point: the old surface was taken back, the wood was cleaned and sealed, and the dents, shrinkage checks and tool marks of ninety years were left in the top rather than planed away. The underside shows the original cleated construction, the aged color of the untouched wood and the honest shrinkage of a solid top. The table stands square and firm, the joints are tight, the drawer runs cleanly and the iron escutcheon is original.

History & Provenance

Furniture of this kind came out of the carpentry shops of Mexico in the decades after the Revolution, when the hacienda style, the Spanish Colonial Revival and the tourist trade through Taxco, Cuernavaca and Guadalajara all called for sturdy tables, chairs and chests in the old manner. The craftsmen worked in the native hardwoods, sabino, cedar and mesquite among them, with hand tools and iron fittings from the local smith, and they reproduced the forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a directness that the European revival furniture of the same years never managed. Small side tables with a single drawer and lyre or trestle ends were among the most common pieces, made for the bedside, the hall and the sala, and they crossed the border in quantity into the ranch houses and Spanish Revival homes of California, Arizona and Texas, where they have stayed in use ever since.

No maker's mark is present and the table is offered as an unattributed Mexican workshop piece. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the solid hand-sawn hardwood, the dovetailed drawer, the pinned stretcher, the hand-forged escutcheon and the shrinkage of the top are all consistent with a table made between about 1930 and 1940.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the small table that a room with character needs: low enough for the arm of a sofa or a bedside, deep enough for a lamp and a book, with a drawer for the things that should not be on top. The scrolled ends make it a piece of sculpture from any angle, and the warm red-brown finish sits as easily with the pale oak floors and linen of a modern house as with leather, iron and tile. It belongs in a Spanish Revival or hacienda interior, a mountain house, a study or a reading corner, and it holds its own beside a mid-century chair as a counterpoint. For a shop or designer client it is the solid, refinished, ready-to-place Mexican Colonial side table that photographs well and sells on the first visit.