Wall-Hung Glazed Curio Display Cabinet with Broken Pediment and Dentil Cornice, Mirrored Back over Two Shelves, Original Hanging Label, American, c. 1940–1970

The Piece

A shallow glazed cabinet built to hang on a wall and show small things properly.

The architecture is the point. It is crowned by a broken pediment — two raked cornice sections rising toward the centre and stopping short of meeting, leaving an open gap above a semicircular cut-out in the tympanum board, with a small moulded plinth block standing between them. Each rake carries a full run of dentil moulding, the row of small square blocks that a classical cornice takes, and terminates in a stepped block.

Below it the case front is framed by reeded pilasters at both corners, running the full height and finishing on a moulded plinth base that steps out at the bottom.

The front is a glazed door. Both sides are glazed as well, so the case is open to light from three directions, and the back is a mirror — which doubles everything set inside it and throws light forward again.

Inside, two fixed wooden shelves divide the interior into three display registers.

The finish is a warm mid-brown with the grain showing through.

History & Provenance

The vocabulary is Georgian, and it arrived here by a long route. A broken pediment over a dentil cornice, flanked by reeded pilasters, is the front elevation of an eighteenth-century English doorcase reduced to the size of a wall cabinet. American furniture makers revived that language wholesale in the Colonial Revival, and it stayed in production for decades because it reads as architecture rather than as furniture, which is exactly what a display case wants to do.

The dating does not rest on any of that, because the style gives no floor. It rests on the back of the case.

The back panel is hardboard. Masonite — the wet-process fibreboard made by exploding wood chips with high-pressure steam and pressing the fibres back together, held by nothing but the lignin already in the pulp — was invented by William H. Mason in 1924. A cabinet backed in it cannot have been made before that, and in practice cabinets like this were not being backed in hardboard until it was cheap and everywhere, which puts the real floor a good deal later.

The label was written on a typewriter. Still fixed to the back is the original printed sheet headed CABINET HANGING INSTRUCTIONS, and it was not typeset — the letterforms are struck, the underlined headings were made by backspacing and running the underscore key, and the spacing drifts. That is a manual typewriter original, reproduced in quantity for the box, and it belongs to the middle of the twentieth century rather than to either end of it.

What the label says is the interesting part, because it tells you who this was sold to.

It has two headings. The first is STORE DISPLAY, explaining that strap hooks are fitted to the rear for easy temporary hanging for store display purposes, with a warning not to put heavy items in the cabinet when hanging it that way. The second is HOME HANGING, giving screws for mounting to wall studs and noting that a strip inside the top of the cabinet carries two guide holes sixteen inches apart — standard American stud spacing.

So this was manufactured for two customers out of the same box: the shopkeeper who needed a wall-mounted case for small valuable stock, and the household that wanted somewhere to put a collection. It is a retail fixture and a domestic curio cabinet, and it always was both.

A stock number is written on the hardboard in grease pencil, in the way a warehouse marks a carton.

There is no maker's name, brand or foundry stamp anywhere on the cabinet or on the label — the sheet identifies itself only as coming from “the manufacturer” — and the cabinet is offered unattributed.

Taken together, the hardboard back, the typewritten label and the machine-run mouldings put it at c. 1940–1970.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This cabinet solves a problem that shops and collectors have in common: small valuable things need to be seen, kept together, kept clean, and kept out of reach, and a shelf does none of that.

For a shop, it is a fixture that costs no floor space. It hangs at eye level behind a counter or beside a register and holds the stock that is too small to merchandise on a table and too good to leave loose — jewellery, pocket knives, watches, pens, thimbles, small silver, perfume, coins, tins. Glass on three faces means it reads from an angle as well as head-on, and the mirrored back means a customer sees the reverse of every piece without anything being handled. The maker built it for exactly this and printed the instructions to prove it.

At home it does the same job for a collection. Miniatures, matchbox cars, shot glasses, figurines, arrowheads, fossils, medals, a set of teacups, an heirloom or two — anything that looks like clutter loose on a shelf becomes a considered display the moment it is behind glass and framed by architecture.

And it is genuinely handsome empty. The broken pediment and dentil cornice give a wall the kind of vertical accent a picture cannot: it projects, it casts a shadow line, and it reads as a piece of a building. Hung in a hallway, a study, a dining room, above a dresser, or in a shop's own dead wall space, it earns its place before anything goes inside it.

A note on hanging, and this one matters. Do not hang this cabinet by the wire currently strung across the back. The manufacturer's own label is explicit that picture wire must not be used and that each strap hook has to be supported separately, and the wire was added later by someone who did not read it. For permanent hanging, use the two guide holes in the strip inside the top of the cabinet and drive screws into wall studs at sixteen-inch centres. A loaded glass cabinet coming off a wall is not a small failure.

For care, dust the glass with a cloth sprayed away from the cabinet rather than spraying the glass directly — liquid running down into the joints will lift the finish and can get behind the mirror silvering. Use no ammonia cleaner anywhere near the mirror for the same reason. Wipe the wood dry and feed it once or twice a year with a clear paste wax buffed off thinly; nothing else, and no silicone spray. Keep it out of direct sunlight and off a bathroom wall, since the mirror backing and the hardboard both suffer in standing humidity. Carry it by the case, never by the pediment, which is applied rather than integral.