Edward William Godwin was one of the most important 19th-century British architects. Unlike the furniture designed by his contemporaries, the sideboard he created in 1867 stands out for its strictly geometric underlying shape and its immense aesthetic simplicity. The sideboard’s clean edges, the graphic impact of the black lacquer, and the use of the requisite functional details such as fittings, slit-headed screws or keyholes as decorative elements also reflect the influence of East Asian and specifically Japanese art. This style, and it was often termed Japonism, was to set the tone for the European avant-garde and comprised a clear opposite to the formal idiom typical of Historicism, which was widespread at the time. For the fine arts, as for the applied arts, Japonism can be considered the trigger which set a new artistic direction in motion. Thus, this mid-19th century sideboard embodied the birth of Modernism, but only decades later did it find worthy successors in the shape of designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Josef Hoffmann.