Provenance: Binondo, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

A chest of drawers with an escritorio or fall front desk is not ordinary. Found only in houses whose owners were men of affairs, they were usually found in the cuarto mayor or master bedroom and thus served as the repository of important deeds or documents. Sometimes, the escritorio was made with secret drawers concealed among the numerous compartments to safeguard valuables and money. This chest of drawers, although simple in design, is made of narra and stands on bracket feet, jigsaw-outlined on the inner side with ogive curves and cusps that form a yoke-shaped arch in front and at the sides. A narra concave molding is appliqued around the sides and front of the carcass base, and the solid side panels are line-inlaid with a strip of kamagong to form a rectangle with quadrant corners. The fronts of the carcass and drawer supports are appliqued with kamagong with fine convex moldings at the edges. There are four drawers, each with a multi-lobed brass keyhole shield chased with leaf patterns and a pair of brass handles attached to balls and bosses. The drawer faces are line-inlaid like the sides with the addition of a semicircle below the drawer keyhole shield. The topmost drawer has a fall front that converts it into a writing desk, when the drawer is pulled out and brass buttons on the inner sides are pressed. The back of the escritoire has a tiny drawer in the middle with a wide one, double its width and slightly higher, on either side. The three drawers are provided with tiny brass drawer pulls. A tiny door above the middle drawer is line-inlaid in kamagong with a square having quadrant corners. Flanking it, the space above the wide drawers are divided into two, the halves on either side of the central door in the form of a pair of acrhed recesses, while the outer halves each have a pair of small drawers, one above the other. All the drawers and the tiny door in the middle have miniature brass pulls. The top of the escritoro consists of a narra panel, miter framed all around with kamagong, the front and side edges carved with a concave quarter-round molding with a half-round molding at the bottom. -Martin I. Tinio, Jr.