Cabinet (room) - Cabinet

Cabinet

In the cabinet as it evolved in French Baroque architecture, the last in the standardised series of rooms that constituted a Baroque apartment, the walls would be hung with rich textiles as a background for cabinet pictures, those small works, often on copper or wood panel, that required intimate study for appreciation, among which would also be devotional pictures. Especially wealthy or aristocratic people may have had a series of cabinets in a suite.

At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the architect Le Vau contrived a jewel-like private cabinet for the king's minister of finance Nicolas Fouquet that was entirely hung with panels of Venetian looking-glass; later, Louis XIV's Grand Cabinet at Versailles (swept away in 18th-century revisions in the name of even more private royal spaces) was similarly mirror-lined: "the king's self-directed gaze was at once religious and narcissistic", Orest Ranum has observed.

Versailles has a large assortment of cabinets en filade for the king located behind and adjacent to his formal bedchamber, the Petit appartement du roi. The cabinet is the male equivalent of a boudoir, and at Versailles and the baroque palaces and great country houses that echoed it, a parallel apartment would be provided for the royal or noble consort, at the Versailles the Petit appartement de la reine. Even in the cramped confines of a London house, Samuel Pepys and his wife each had a bedchamber and a "closet"; with a common sitting room, or "saloon" these were the minimum that genteel baroque arrangements required.

The meaning of "cabinet" began to be extended to the contents of the cabinet; thus we see the 16th-century cabinet of curiosities, often combined with a library. The sense of cabinet as a piece of furniture is actually older in English than the meaning as a room, but originally meant more a strong-box or jewel-chest than a display-case.