TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT

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Cabinet, The painter's cabinet as made today is a chest of drawers, ordinarily
low and not more than two feet square, with the top free for palette, oil cups, or
other accessories. This article of furniture is largely for oil painting, tubes of color
being kept in the drawers. Water color cabinets and others made for drafting
have, however, been advertised since early in the XIX century. A small cabinet
for illumination and missal painting is mentioned in the catalogue of Winsor and
Newton for 1863 and another for heraldic blazoning in their catalogue of 1864.
A desk-like object of walnut, very small in size, is seen in the Victoria and Albert

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FIGURE 4. Burnishers. The upper row has a number of shapes for use on gold leaf. These
are adapted from drawings in Thompson3 The Practice of Tempera Painting^ p. 67.
Usually such burnishers are of agate. One (e] is represented as made of haematite, and
a is made of flint; /is a copper plate burnisher of steel; g and h are also steel and are used
for the burnishing of copper plates in the engraving process.
Museum, London, where it is described as a miniature painter's cabinet and is
believed to have been used by Richard Crosse, an English painter of 1742 to 1810.
Berger (I and II, p. 186) quotes a remark of Varro which seems to indicate that
painters of classical antiquity kept boxes or large cases in which the various colors
were arranged in compartments (see figure 15, a and £). Those representations
which remain, however, of painters' workrooms during the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance have no furniture which resembles the painter's cabinet as that is
known today. By the XVII century a few signs of it begin to appear, as in * A
Painter's Studio' by Gonzales Coques (Flemish, d. 1684), in Schwerin. Here a
large box, like a small trunk or chest, is shown open in the middle of the floor. The
upper part is divided into compartments* One of these holds brushes, another a
large flask, and another smaller, bottle-necked containers. Below these compart-
ments, the contents of some of which are not visible, is a set of drawers.