Figure 5. Carmarthenshire/Brecknockshire border, south/mid-Wales, c.1760-80.

Those who interest themselves in the academic study of such pieces tend to regard country-made furniture as somehow derivative of urban and gentry products. This is not my view, and the dresser stands witness to another approach: outside 'fashionable' contexts, furniture developed organically according to the practical requirements and cultural values of customers, and the skills and resources of local woodworkers. The Welsh dresser, with its fine polished surface and colourful display of pottery, is a specifically non-metropolitan type of furniture. The dressers found in mansions and large town houses were utilitarian structures in painted softwood kept below stairs, required merely to hold utensils. By contrast, in farmhouses and cottages the dresser was placed in the principal living room (which served as a kitchen and often a bedroom as well) on view to family, neighbours and visitors. It combined practical and decorative functions, had often been acquired at marriage or was a valued heirloom, and projected the pride the owners felt in their home.
The origins of the dresser as we know it today were in the mid-17th century, when inventories show that the better-off farmers in each district were acquiring more furniture and had access to prestigious and decorative pewterware and delftware. The forerunners were plain cupboards and side tables, wall-hanging shelves and even slatted food crates which hung from the ceiling. As a type, it emerged in various regions of Wales in different forms.
A popular misconception is that those from the north have bases with cupboards and those from the south have bases with an open 'potboard' between the legs. At best this is an oversimplification and regularly leads to mis-attributions by dealers and auction houses. All areas produced both types, often offered as alternatives by the same craftsman. A farmhouse on the island of Anglesey off the north-west coast contains two built-in dressers, one of each of those main types, and if these were to appear on the market they would almost certainly be assigned to opposite ends of Wales. It is true, however, that the prevalent style throughout most of south and mid-Wales had a potboard base, at least up to the 19th century, whereas the extreme north - the old counties of Anglesey, Caernarfonshire and Denbighshire - favoured cupboards. This probably reflected the different furniture types from which dressers had developed, which then became the established and traditional designs in those regions.
In most of the country, the dresser has the appear-ance of having evolved from a combination of a wide serving table with a plate rack fitted above and a potboard attached below. The earliest dressers we find, from the first half of the 18th century, are fully-developed forms and frequently have elaborate shaping to the rack and below the drawers (figure 1). This implies even earlier forerunners, which would have been an extremely innovative form in their day.