page_title: Chest of drawers
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Chest of drawers / History
caption_attribution_description: I created this picture of a nineteenth century American chest, possibly a blanket or sugar chest from a Smithfield, Rhode Island house.
context_page_description: A chest of drawers, also called a drawers table or a bureau, is a type of cabinet that has multiple parallel, horizontal drawers usually stacked one above another.
  In American English a dresser is a piece of furniture, usually waist high, that has drawers and normally room for a mirror. In British English a dresser or a Welsh dresser has shelves in the upper section for storing or displaying tableware.
  Chests of drawers have traditionally been made and used for storing clothing, especially underwear, socks, and other items not normally hung in or otherwise stored in a closet. They are usually placed in a bedroom for this purpose, but can actually be used to store anything that will fit inside and can be placed anywhere in a house or another place. Various personal sundry items are also often stored in a chest of drawers. It has a long history as one of the stand-bys of a carpenter's workshop. A typical chest is approximately rectangular in overall shape and often has short legs at the bottom corners for placement on the floor.
  Chests of drawers often come in 5-, 6-, and 7-drawer varieties, with either a single or a double top drawer.
context_section_description: In late medieval Europe the chest came into widespread use, especially in homes of the nobility. This type, also known as a coffer was more or less a simple joined wooden box with a hinged lid. It may or may not have stood on feet. An early transitional phase was the installation of one drawer beneath this main compartment.  A number of early pieces from the seventeenth century are extant of oak manufacture  from England, and corresponding seventeenth century pieces of French walnut have survived.  Some of the early surviving English specimens are from the Charles I period. Nutting ascribes the earliest piece in his  Furniture Treasury to "before 1649".
caption: A predecessor to the chest of drawers, an early 19th-century American painted pine blanket chest
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