THE: LIBRARY OF’ THE” CLEVELAND MUSEUM? OF?’ ART PRESENTED BY CARNEGIE CORPORATION OF NEW YORK te, om - even oe oe i: > >" A THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE tie ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF FURNITURE DESIGN IN EGYPT, ASSYRIA, PERSIA, GR owOME, TrALY, FRANCE, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, ENGLAND, SCANDINAVIA, SPAIN, RUSSA, AND IN DTHESNEAR AND FAR EAST UP TO THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WITH 659 ILLUSTRATIONS ARRANGED ON 320 PLATES COMPILED BY AUTHORITIES IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES UNDER THE GENERAL DIRECTION OF DR. HERMANN SCHMITZ OF THE SCHLOSS MUSEUM, BERLIN AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H. P. SHAPLAND EDITOR OF “THE CABINET MAKER” E. WEYHE, 794 LEXINGTON AVE. NEW YORK eo? - eer 2! . + eeoe% eae oe . hs 42999 “4, ¥ : é a ae am The plates bearing the inscription “Phot. Victoria : _and Albert Museum, London,” are Crown Copy right and are Ss if Eas of ithe > Sol 10), the Wallace Collection (Plates paren bce 4 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Plates 2,6, 7 and na as well as tho the Pee eas ee INTRODUCTION THE Encyclopaedia of Furniture has been compiled in order to set down as a brief, clear and continuous illustrated narrative the whole history of furniture. Students of various branches of knowledge have of late years become accustomed fo this method of treatment, to the catholic rather than the parochial outlook on the subjects in which they are more particularly interested. We have had Mr. H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, a masterpiece which set all the world thinking; this was followed by an Outline of Literature and Art, an Outline of Science, and now by a com- parable work, The Encyclopaedia of Furniture, which is in fact an outline of the history of the subject from the days of the Pharaohs to the middle of the 19th century A.D. An idea which is gaining currency is that not only the teaching of history in general, but the teach- ing of particular subjects has been restricted within too narrow limits. The Frenchman, for example, with his intense interest in the arts, studies the history of craftsmanship in his own country and thoroughly masters his theme only to discover that the variations of the Italian manner found in the Germanic countries—in Belgium, Holland, England or Scandinavia—each provide a starting- point for equally extensive courses of study. No wonder that the student is appalled by the task confronting him. Though he may have the will and energy he soon finds himself immersed in the practical affairs of life, and opportunity is lacking for an equally thorough and systematic study of the detailed histories of furniture in other countries. There are quite definite limits of time and energy set to the studies of the ordinary man or woman. On the other hand, while it is desirable for the connoisseur, the collector, the student and the craftsman to know everything about one phase of his subject, it is equally desirable that he should know something about every other phase: this is precisely the knowledge which the author of The Encyclopaedia of Furniture marshals for his readers. Following the subject not so much in respect of its intricate details, but in broad outline, the reader inevitably gains the impression that the history of furniture is one and indivisible, and that it is impossible to understand the subtle changes which took place in design in any one country without a due appreciation of what was happening in adjacent lands. A just estimate of the play and interplay of the various influences which affected furniture design is at last made possible for the reader who surveys the whole field—foreground, middle distances and far horizons in company with the author of this work. The specialized history of the furniture of any one country concerns itself with dates and styles and a wealth of local colour. This Encyclopaedia deals with ages and centuries rather than with decades; the ancestry of the tables and chairs, the beds and sideboards in use in homes in the 20th century is traced back to representations of furniture on Assyrian bas-reliefs and silhouettes of household goods on Efruscan pottery. The disparity between the wealth of furniture of Western peoples and those of the Orient is at once apparent. Differences in the mode of living and climatic influences are in the main responsible for the greater development of household equipment in the West than among Eastern peoples. It should be mentioned here too that the aim of the work is to present in orderly progression the developments of secular rather than ecclesiastical furniture. If is hardly necessary to point out that an encyclopaedia such as this will henceforward be regarded by the serious student of furniture as the starting-point of his investigation of the subject. He will be more deeply impressed than he could be in any other way, after examining the hundreds of illustrations brought together in these pages, by the abiding influence of the art of Greece and Rome. Such was the strength of that influence that not even the complete overthrow of those cultures by the pressure of barbarians could effect ifs extinction. What was the Renaissance in its various forms of expression but a tribute to the vitality, to the sense of proportion and refinement of form found in classic work? Again and again when luxury or lethargy has tended to debase . ix INTRODUCTION the arts a return has been made to the sanity and beauty of the antique. Perhaps the most notable example occurred in the 18th century in France; when the frivolity of the Louis Quinze style could go no further, man turned as to a nafural source of inspiration, to purest Greek concepfions. The gradual ousting of Gothic forms by the resuscitation of the classic mode needs no lengthy explanation, as the pictorial record unfolds itself it becomes abundantly clear how first classic detail was grafted on Gothic construction, and how finally it survived as the only method of expression for those who were engaged in the making of household furniture. Readers particularly interested in the successive developments in the design of furniture in Great Britain realize how largely her craftsmen have been influenced by fashions prevailing in European countries. The Palaces and many of the great houses of the country contain woodwork which could only have been carved by Italian or Flemish workmen.* During the age of oak wood- workers in England and Scotland were profoundly influenced by the work of the Low Countries, and in the 17th and 18th centuries much of the work done in France was either directly copied or adapted in Great Britain. The student ill acquainted with the Continental styles and fashions, as they affected and modified English furniture is really wandering in the dark, unable to apply the processes of comparison between any given mode of expression abroad and contemporary work in Great Britain, but with this concise yet complete account of the development of European furniture he can never be at a loss in relating and co-relating Italian, French, Flemish, German, and English Renaissance examples or in examining the similarities and differences of, lef us say, Louis Seize creations in France and Sheraton designs in England. So much for the value of the work of Dr. Hermann Schmitz for the serious student and collector. To the greaf mass of the reading public, the vast number of people who take an intelligent interest in the equipment and furnishing of their homes this volume will come as a revelation of the infinite variety of form and decoration which is at the disposal of the lover of fine furniture. Stage coaches, railroads, motor-cars and aeroplanes have followed each other in rapid progression. Insularity and frontiers are fast vanishing for all practical purposes, other than warfare and taxation. It is possible to breakfast in London, lunch in Paris, dine in Cologne en route for Vienna, and as a direct result there is a growing interest on the part of those who dwell in one country in the arts and manufactures of the others which are daily brought closer to them by greatly extended facilities for rapid travel. The collector of to-day only follows the collectors of the past if when travelling abroad he is attracted by and desires to possess the carved armoire, the elaborate chair, or the quaint cupboard which make an esthetic appeal to him. For this class of reader The Encyclopaedia of Furniture becomes a guide book to European furniture design. Incidentally, too, how wide a general knowledge may be obtained from such a Bey The various forms which furniture has taken direct the student not only along the highways, but into many fascinating bypaths of history. He learns of the migration of peoples, of trade and trade routes; how the Romanesque style crept over Europe from Byzantium, and of the way in which the influence of the Moors made itself felt along the northern coasts of the Mediterranean, affecting furniture design and much else in Italy and Spain. A child may be taught the dry-as-dust facts of history, the dates when Julius Cesar entered Gaul or conquered Britain, or these things may be made vital and real to him by a series of photographs showing him the kind of chair and the type of bed which the Romans popularized in this country long before William the Norman conquered if and commenced building the cathedrals. In these *T suggest that the examples illustrated on Plates 139 and 147 provide instances of this. x INTRODUCTION pages, too, there is pictorial proof of the fact that long before the generality of mankind could write or read they delighted to find the Biblical and mythical incidents with which they were conversant carved in wood on the panels of their buffets and side-tables. They indicate also how manners and morals are reflected in the work of men’s hands. The exuberance of Stuart furniture in England may be compared with the square and serious consfruction of the Puritans. But this is a digression. Though at every turn there are inevitable and illuminating sidelights on history in general, the encyclopaedia is a universal history of furniture, as scholarly as and certainly more complete than anything of the kind which has hitherto been attempted. LONDON, H. P. SHAPLAND. Feb. 26th, 1926. xi Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three. Chapter Four. Chapter Five. Chapter Six. Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine. Chapter Ten. Chapter Eleven. Chapter Twelve. Chapter Thirteen. Chapter Fourteen. Chapter Fifteen. Chapter Sixteen. Chapter Seventeen. Chapter Eighteen. Chapter Nineteen. Chapter Twenty. Chapter Twenty-one. Chapter Twenty-two. Chapter Twenty-three. Chapter Twenty-four. Chapter Twenty-five. Chapter Twenty-six. Chapter Twenty-seven. CONTENTS Introduction Analysis of Plates An Introductory Outline . : The Craftsmanship of Egypt and eer ; Greek and Roman Furniture The Middle Ages The Late Gothic Period . The Renaissance in Italy The Renaissance in France The Renaissance in South Germany The Renaissance in North Germany, Denmark and Sweden The Renaissance in England The Renaissance in the Netherlands, Flanders and Spain . The Baroque Style . Flemish and Dutch Baroque German Baroque Developments in England during the Baroque Period Italian Baroque The Louis XIV Period : The Régence Style in France and Guriany Early English Georgian Furniture and French Rococo German, Dutch, Danish and Italian Rococo : Chippendale’s Influence in England and North America The Louis Seize Style in France ; y Adam, Hepplewhite and Sheraton Furniture in Elec Late 18th-Century Furniture in Germany, Denmark and Italy The Empire Style The Last Phase of Decorative Furniture—The feats Style Eastern Furniture The Plates xiii air » re c ail Re wad os agents Na et * iia pass sie ‘a ef 2 es tie text 2 “a Bok a Shbeed ‘oak : & a — ' " neo oe U re ee M Nek 4 ba 7 ‘ rade | Ot ae wei ae ene. ath Ps PAs bk: toed sri, i sanaqatiie te re i ta @.:' +4 gevlivems mae aR ot oatt 3 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE ANALYSIS OF PLATES 1. ANTIQUITY q Egyptian Plates 1-7 q Assyrian and Persian Plates 8-11 q Greek Plates 12 and 13 q Etruscan and Roman Plates 14-21 q Near Eastern and Byzantine Plates 22-26 2. THE MIDDLE AGES q Romanesque Plates 27-38 q Early Gothic Plates 39-41 3. LATE GOTHIC q France Plates 42-49 q Flanders, Netherlands, Spain Plates 50-55 xvii ANALYSIS OF PLATES q England Plates 56-59 q North Germany (Oak Furniture) Plates 60-63 @ South Germany and the Alpine Provinces (Soft Wood Furniture) Plates 64-75 q Italy Plates 75-79 4, RENAISSANCE q Italy Plates 80-99 q France Plates 100-117 @ Germany and Switzerland Plates 118-135 Gq Denmark Plates 136, 137 q England Plates 138-148 q Netherlands Plates 149-155 q Spain Plates 156-170 Xviii ANALYSIS OF PLATES 5. BAROQUE q Spain Plates 171-177 q Flanders Plates 178 and 179 q France Plates 180-188 q Italy Plates 189-192 q Germany Plates 193-205 q Holland and Colonial Style Plates 206-209 q England Plates 210-219 6. REGENCE AND ROCOCO q England Plates 220-224 and 257 q France and Italy Plates 225-235 q Germany Plates 236-251 q Holland, Spain and Colonial Plates 252-256 xix ANALYSIS OF PLATES 7. LOUIS XVI AND CLASSIC REVIVAL q France Plates 259-267 q Germany Plates 258, 268-278 q England Plates 279-285 8. EMPIRE AND. BIEDERMEIER q France, Denmark Plates 285-293 q Germany, Russia Plates 294-306 9. THE NEAR EAST AND THE FAR EAST Plates 308-320 CHAPTER ONE An Introductory Outline WHAT we know of ancient furniture proves that some cultures possessed an exceptional wealth of such work, while others were poorly provided. Climatic conditions, which produce varied forms of dwelling and widely varying habits, explain the discrepancy. For example, Western civilization has developed the making of decorative furniture con- siderably, whereas the Islamic peoples of Asia Minor and Persia, and those of India and Eastern Asia, have little need of more than a limited supply of furniture in their houses. It will be remembered also, that all Orientals are in the habit of sitting on the ground when eafing and drinking. The stock of ancient furniture varies with different cultures, because ifs preservation has been affected by fortuitous circumstances. Owing to the custom of placing models of actual pieces of furniture in the tombs of the kings, a considerable amount of Egyptian furniture has been pre- served, and this has been enriched by the discoveries in Tutankhamen’s tomb. But the equally important furniture-making of the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans has survived only in sculptures and pictures. The art of furniture-making is connected with the dwellings and architecture of tribes and peoples finally settled in any given area or country. Therefore the history of this art begins with monu- mental architecture, and it is by no mere chance that the Egyptians led in both the former and the latter art. In this branch of human activity they also laid down the laws for other nations. Various forms of seats, such as camp-stools, stools, arm-chairs, and such things as bedsteads, coffers and wooden funeral coffers, are models as to ufility, shape, construction and the treatment of wood, when they are of Egyptian workmanship, and this is especially true of the period of the New Empire from 1500 B.c. Related in style are the restrained forms of the Assyrian Empire, in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates. But here our knowledge is limited to the representa- tions of the state furniture of the Assyrian kings reigning in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C., as depicted on the reliefs in the Mesopotamian palaces. Alike with the furniture forms of the Persian Empire, which, following in sequence, are only preserved in relief representations of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. Greek furniture, of which our knowledge is almost exclusively derived from representations on stone reliefs and vases, was in the early period—the archean epoch of the 7th and 6th centuries B.c.—akin to that of the Persians and Egyptians. With the development of the Greek genius in the 5th century, seats assume purer and more beautiful forms. The curved lines of the legs and backs seem to make for greater freedom of posture when sifting. European culture emancipates itself from that of the Orient and the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean. Wood-turning becomes more important during the last centuries before Christ. Seats made of turned wood came into fashion in addition to those of squared wood. Coffers and chests, often provided with lids sloping up to a central ridge, like a roof, and standing on legs, resemble the work of the late Egyptian epoch, only they are of finer workmanship and often richly inlaid and veneered. Some Greek sarcophagi of the 4th century before Christ have been found in Crimean tombs. Roman furniture has developed from that of the Efrurians of the 6th century B.c., forms pre- served by representations on painted vases and on stone reliefs showing, like the early Greek furniture of this period, severely straight lines. The use of furniture made partly or entirely of bronze is characteristic. This feature is common to the Efruscan as well as to late Roman decora- tive furniture. Many specimens of the last century before the Christian era have been found at B 1 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE Herculaneum and Pompeii. The legs and feet of seats, couches and fables are either turned or made fo simulate naturalistic forms. Medizval furniture begins the great development of Western craftsmanship, and claims the greatest interest in modern fimes. Turned wood was employed in the construction of arm- chairs, stools and couches in the Byzantine Empire, and in the medizeval Teutonic kingdoms from the shores of the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. That most important medizval receptacle, the coffer, is a survival of the late antique coffer in its constructional character, though heavier, as was characteristic of the Romanesque form. The early Gothic style did little to change decorative furniture. Till the end of the 14th century, tables and seats retained the traditional forms, with their turned or square legs. The construction of such receptacles as coffers and cupboards—articles that were becoming more important—stfill followed the heavy character of the early Middle Ages. But in low relief ornament the pointed arch and tracery predominated. Northern Germany, Northern France, the Netherlands, England and Scandinavia were in those days a closely related group in matters touching the arts. In the beginning of the 15th century came a change in furniture-making, actotmrinianens the development of Late Gothic, when construction consisting of a frame of mortised members with inserted panels entirely changed the appearance as well as the structure of furnifure. This change originated in the Burgundian Netherlands in the period of the brothers van Eyck. From there it spread to France, Germany, England and Scandinavia. Gothic decorative furniture deve- loped comparatively slowly in Italy and Spain; the work of Northern Italy has certain affinities with that of the Tyrol and other German Alpine countries. But about 1500 A.D., with the dawn of the Renaissance, Italian furniture craftsmanship pre- dominates, especially the work of Tuscany and Florence. Its influence directs French furniture- making info new channels, and presently it affects the furniture of the Netherlands and South Germany; the North German, Danish, English and Scandinavian craftsmen, more conservative in the matter of national traditions, followed Italian fashions somewhat later. Spanish decorative furniture of the Renaissance works out a line of its own. The old Moorish element is impressed upon it sfill. Intarsia attains a high level of development in Spain and particularly in Northern Italy, Southern Germany and in North Germany during the latter part of the 16th century. The severe division of surface obtaining in Early and High Renaissance work gave way in the last third of the 16th century to Late Renaissance art with its wealth of plastic ornament, an art which appears most pronouncedly in the Flemish Netherlands, North Germany, Scandinavia and England. During the period of the Thirty Years’ War, the craft of furniture-making assumes an entirely different character under the influence of the Baroque style. Among the changes wrought by this style are: the preference for walnut, the perfection of veneering, the development of new forms in cupboards and tables, and last, but not least, the introduction of upholstery with leather or textile coverings for seats. The social fabric of life from the second half of the 17th century bee an important bearing on furniture: in Italy, France and Spain, and partly in Germany, the position of absolute sovereigns and the nobility was exalted and unassailably established; whereas the burgher element in the German Free Towns, in Holland, and more especially in England when the Commonwealth followed the execution of Charles I, developed a powerful creative activity in furniture-making. The style variations of the Baroque period follow each other in succession, and in the great fashions cultivated by the French kings their most striking expression found an outlet, and from 2 AN INTRODUCTORY OUTLINE those fashions they have partly derived their names. But other styles are contemporary with them, as for instance a special German and English style in the 18th century. Thus Louis Quatorze (1661-1715) has its parallel in the German Baroque, and in the late Stuart, William and Mary and Queen Anne (1702-1714) styles of England. The Paris Régence style, named after the Regent, Philippe of Orleans (1714-1723), is the transitional period from Baroque to Rococo. What is known as Louis Quinze in Paris from about 1725-1765 is termed Rococo in Germany, ifs English contemporary being early and mid-Georgian. In France the Louis Seize style (about 1765-1790) follows, and is coeval in Germany with “Zopf,’ and in England with the furniture of Hepplewhite, Adam and Sheraton. The downfall of the French Monarchy is followed by the Directoire style—named after the government of the Directory—and after 1804 the Direc- toire is followed by the Empire, during the reign of Napoleon. This style has greatly influenced the courts of Europe. In Germany it develops into a mature Classicism. After the Wars of Liberation the last of the historic styles, the “Biedermeier,”’ flourished in Germany under the influence of early 19th-century English domestic furniture. The name “Biedermeier” is derived from a Philistine character in the journal Fliegende Blatter, and this style develops towards the middle of the century into the second or neo-Rococo in Germany, into Louis Philippe in France, info Early Victorian in England: it is a mode rather than a style which began with the imitation of historic forms. This imitation became particularly conspicuous in decorative furniture in the form of a neo-Renaissance style in the second half of the 19th century. Oriental furniture cannot be compared with the magnificent development of European work. Noteworthy in Eastern productions is the furniture of Islamic origin. If is conspicuous for ornamental intarsia. The most important branches are the Persian and Arabic, the furniture of Arabian craftsmen attaining its zenith of development in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in- fluencing the intarsia work of Venice and Spain. Indian furniture—mostly of a later period—is sui generis, so too is the work of China and Japan. This furniture of the Far East begins to attain its highest level in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its special feature is the perfect lacquer process, based on a tradition of many centuries, a feature that was a fruitful source of inspiration to the makers of European decorative furniture of the Baroque period at the close of the 17th century. CHAPTER TWO The Craftsmanship of Egypt and Assyria MOST Egyptian furniture of wood dates from the New Empire, which flourished when the Rameses ruled at Thebes in the second half of the second millennium before Christ. Single types, such as the folding stool, a low stool and the frame of a couch resfing on four bulls’ hoofs, can be traced as far back as the Ancient Empire, or even to prehistoric times, 4000 B.C. The folding stool is the same in its main features as the modern camp stool: the legs crossed like the blades of scissors, supporting a leather seat, and terminating in a rail that linked both feet of the front legs and both feet of the back legs, the ends of these foof-rails, as they may be termed, often being finished fo represent a duck’s beak. Among rigid seats the low stool and the low chair are the most common. Both have four square legs. The seats are either of boards or rushes, and the frame is generally mortised and fastened with a few pegs; metal nails are not used. Most of the richer chests and seats belong to the most flourishing period of the New Empire, dating about 1500 B.c, and the following centuries. There are stools with curved seats and horizontal supports; and also seats, sometimes double, borne by lions’ paws or bulls’ hoofs, having solid backs of thin, narrow vertical boards enclosed by a frame. Sometimes these backs are slightly curved to afford better support; frequently the back is sloping and is braced by vertical members fixed to the back legs; a method illustrating the carefully conceived construc- tional work of Egyptian craffsmen. On the whole their constructive instincts are admirable, as the joints of their chair frames and vertical supporting members indicate: it is characteristic that this vertical stress is expressed artistically in the form. The seats are rigid in type, which doubt- less accords with the stiff and upright sitting posture of the Egyptians, whose legs were encased in tight garments and were kept close together, like the feet. This restriction of line is naturally expressed in the bulls’ hoofs and lions’ paws of the more richly decorated seats and couches. The claws and paws are often placed on high wooden blocks. Crescent-shaped wooden supports served to raise the head during sleep. The sides of thrones are often constructed to represent the entire figure of a sfriding lion. It is characteristic of the restraint of Egyptian art forms that the four paws terminating the legs of seats and couches are always placed in one direction, parallel with one another, like the feet of striding animals. The various forms of the chest are also skilfully constructed, the frames being braced with boards inserted crosswise to prevent warping and shrinkage. There are long rectangular chests in this class of furniture, also jewel caskets and chest-like sarcophagi. The majority of seats and tables, and particularly chests and sarcophagi, were painted, the chairs often only in white. Chests and coffers are brightly decorated in colour with bands of geometrical patterns, some- times being inlaid with blue and white pieces of faience or semi-precious stones. The Egyptians usually employed hard woods which were imported from Cilicia and other parts, for there was little timber in their country except the date palm, and this could not be used for furniture- making: sycamore, olivewood, yew and cedar were among other woods used by the Egypfians. The more ornamental seats are slightly inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl, and even gold and other metals. Tutankhamen’s tomb displayed an astonishing wealth of such magnificent furniture and chariots. The style of such ornamental features as the carved wood lions, paw feet, hawks, and so forth, is similar to that of the Egyptian stone sculptures. Egyptian furniture, like Egyptian architecture, adhered strictly to tectonic laws. One is always struck by the profoundly inventive 4 THE CRAFTSMANSHIP OF EGYPT AND ASSYRIA genius developed by this people more than four thousand years ago in connection with con- struction and woodworking, and in moulding their symbols into artistic forms for seats and couches, chests and tables. Only from the sculptures in the royal palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis do we gain an idea of the furniture produced under the Assyrian and later Persian Empires; civilizations that expanded gradually from the country of the Euphrates and Tigris to Asia Minor, Syria, and, for a time, to the frontiers of Egypt. These reliefs depict the furniture of this ancient Oriental culture during the period of 1000 to 500 B.c. The pronounced dynastic character of these empires is the reason why representations of highly ornamental furniture in the royal palaces have been preserved rather than those of simple domestic furniture, as in the case of Egypt. The Assyrian Empire, which developed in the 8th century, B.C., came into contact with the Egyptian sphere of power in the 7th century, and under king Asurbanipal (Sardanapalus) in Nineveh enjoyed considerable prosperity unfil it was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus. It possessed magnificent palaces, furnished with seats, couches, credences and vessel holders, designs characterized by the same rigidity of construction as Egyptian work, and similar severe conventions of style. The square legs of Assyrian furniture usually terminate in lions’ paws, in the Egyptian fashion. A tendency towards ornate forms surpassing those of Egyptian royal furniture is only notable in the enrichment of those bases, or feet, to chairs and tables that resemble inverted pine cones, and in the supporting blocks that are sometimes inserted between the rails of the underframing. The legs are encircled with bands at intervals. The luxurious cushions on the couches, the heads of which curve forward and form a species of arm rest, are continuous. The rich decoration of the upholstery and coverings with tassels and fringe is very striking. The garments and headgear of the Assyrian kings are also conspicuous for a great wealth of ornamental textile decoration. It cannot be denied that both in ancient Assyrian and ancient Persian art, which succeeded it, the peculiar Oriental love of decorative surface ornament is more pronounced than in the tectonic art of the Egyptians. In the Assyrian Empire surface ornament with coloured glazed faience pictures developed to perfection at an early date: the excavations in Assur have recently furnished fresh proof of this. The Persians, who succeeded to the Assyrian sovereignty of Mesopotamia in the 6th century B.C., adopted many Assyrian art forms. Their furniture-making was also influenced by Assyrian prototypes; and through the medium of representations on stone reliefs we are acquainted with examples of the ornafe royal state furniture in the palaces of Persepolis. Conspicuous in Persian thrones and couches is the use of long legs composed of various members, terminating in conven- tionalized bulls’ hoofs. Turning seems to have played a great part, for legs with bulging contours are frequently found. There was an interchange of forms between the furniture of the Persian Empire dating from Cyrus to Alexander—who extended Persian power to the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor—and Greek furniture to the 6th and 5th centuries B.c. CHAPTER THREE Greek and Roman Furniture GREEK furniture of the 6th century B.C., in common with the contemporary work of Egypt and Persia, is rigidly rectangular in construction. If we look at the double chair on the stone relief _ from Laconia (6th century B.C.) we recognize its relationship to Egypto-Persian furniture, expressed not only by the stiff back and arms, and fhe severe, conventionalized bulls’ hoofs, but in the straight lines of the seated figures, their carriage and features. But with the beginning of the 5th century B.c., the rise of the Greek genius, which is most magnificently expressed in the art of the Parthenon, and the virtual emancipation of the European spirit from the lethargy and restraint of ancient Oriental conceptions, a new sense of form is expressed in furniture. The chairs, seats and stools represented on the reliefs of the Parthenon and on several Athenian tombs differ by their fundamental simplicity from the seats of the Persian epoch and the related archaic Greek period. In contradistinction to the rigid type of seat consisting of various profiles, animal motifs and ornament of the older period, the Greek types of the 5th century are composed of a few clear main mofifs. A stool with four turned legs tapering towards the foot, and a chair made of square pieces with delicately curved legs and back, are most frequently used. The free attitude in sifting in a natural position; the graceful carriage of the body; the flowing drapery, all harmonize with the natural form of these seats, in striking contrast with the Egyptians sitting rigidly on their stools and chairs. The merit of the Greeks is that they discovered a natural and graceful form for obvious requirements. The couch was formed of posts with a horizontal frame, and was painted with palmettes and meanders. The tables were low and mostly movable, credences and drinking tables being often three-legged and made of bronze. The principal receptacle, as with the Egyptians, was the chest. A number of wooden sarcophagi found in the Crimea are of an unusual shape for chests: long boxes or coffers, with roof-like lids sloping down from a cenfral ridge, and resting on elongated square posts. The panels would be joined to the framework by tongues and grooves, in the manner of the Egyptian chests. These Greek coffers and chests belonging to the time of Alexander the Great (4th century B.C.) are mosfly painfed in a vivid way; generally there is a blue ground with palmette frieze; single palmettes, meanders and similar motifs being drawn from the wealth of Greek ornament. And it is clear that this painting enlivened the character and gave greater expression to the proportions, constructional details and the technique of the craftsmanship, than was the case with the Egyptian chests which were treated as a single mass of colour. The Etrurians, predecessors of the Romans on Italian soil, developed confemporaneously with the ancient Greek tribes of the 6th century B.C. a type of furniture of their own. It shares the rigid construction in rectangular forms and the severe conventions of fhe archaic Greek work. We obfain an idea of the furniture designed for resting from a number of well-preserved fterra- cotta funeral chests, which usually represent husband and wife together on their couch. An example is the bed from Caere, an old Italic seat of culture in Abruzzo. It shows the austere line of the posts with their volute-like capitals and palmette ornament. The wealth of bronze furniture, and parts of furniture, is striking; and this also applies to Roman furniture. The domestic utensils of the Efrurians, such as tripods, kettles and pails, shields and weapons were notable for the high development of bronze work. It is regrettable that Roman furniture shared the same fate as the products of Greece, all wooden 6 GREEK AND ROMAN FURNITURE pieces having perished. But numerous pieces of bronze furniture and parts, particularly from Pompeii, have been handed down, including several examples of furniture for resting which are remarkable for their imitation in metal of the richly varied outlines of turned wood supports. In addition, low stools and tripods as well as lamp-stands, have been preserved in cast bronze— chiefly from the time of the emperors. They are decorated with plastic figures and plant orna- ment, which also characterize the crockery and other domestic ufensils of the Romans in later centuries. We may obfain an idea of the furnishing of a Roman house from pictorial and sculptural repre- sentations. Naturally the furniture is closely related in its main features to post-Alexandrian Greek work. The Roman desire for luxury is: expressed by the richer upholstery of seats and couches, in the cushions and drapery. Couches were used at meals, each accommodating three guests. The employment of richly draped textiles and carpets to cover the fables and to screen off the apart- ments was very extensive in a Roman house. The folding stool and a broad stool (the bisellium) were peculiar types of seat: the chair with curved legs crossed X-wise—similar to Greek models— was in common use as a curule in the senate and law courts, and this type was chiefly imitated in the period of the Empire. This is not the place to discuss the bronze and marble furniture which was so important in the Roman home and in social functions, furniture that was enriched with ornament, such as lions’ paws, sphinxes, hermz and acanthus; we should remember that the Empire period, which imitated the style of the Roman Empire, transferred these forms of Roman bronze and marble furniture to wooden furniture, thereby producing an absolutely wrong conception of the simple and ufilitarian household furniture of the Romans. Early Christian decorative furniture differs in no respect from that of the late Roman period. What is striking in the banquet scenes depicted in the paintings and mosaics of the early Christian churches is that the tables and couches are draped in such a manner that the details of the furniture are entirely hidden. CHAPTER FOUR The Middle Ages NORTHERN barbarians invaded the Roman Empire, which collapsed, and thereafter Roman culture retreated to the Eastern Empire (later the Byzantine Empire), and many traditions of late antique art were preserved during the following centuries, especially at the Byzantine imperial court. Decorative furniture which, in its fundamental lines, is descended from the models of the late Greek period, is enriched to accord with the luxurious and splendid mode of Byzantine life. Turned frames are used more frequently for seats and couches than was the case with the later Greek decorative furniture. Furniture embellished with ivory and intarsia is noteworthy. It will be remembered that ivory-carving and turning was an important branch of industry in Byzantium. Silk weaving, which flourished there from the 6th century, influenced the upholstery and draping of furniture as well as the textile hangings in the apartments. It is easy fo unterstand that the art of the Byzantine court was greatly influenced by that of the Near East. Thus silk-weaving, with its decorative animal patterns, was partly an outcome of that new Persian Empire of the Sassanians which was established on the foundations of the old Persian Empire in the 2nd cen- tury A.D. Naturally the Teutonic peoples needed many centuries of development before they evolved decorative furniture that approached the standard of the household equipment common in the cifies and provinces of the Roman Empire, although they were acquainted with such Roman work. The influence of antique tradition upon the beginnings of the craft of furniture-making among the Teutonic peoples of the early Middle Ages was decisive. Everything indicates that the turned work of antiquity found on chairs and couches was a pattern for the turned furniture of Teutonic tribes in early medieval times. An important piece of evidence is a sarcophagus made of turned spars belonging to an Alemanic prince of the 6th century. A number of seats, arm-chairs and benches, with legs, sides and backs entirely composed of turned spindles, have been preserved, particularly from the period of the Romanesque style, which had a peculiar character of its own, strong in its influence on the ecclesiastical and secular architecture of the Teutonic empires. This turned furniture—to which we must add a three-legged stool—was not only used in Germany, but wherever German tribes had settled. It is met with in the remote valleys of Grisons as well as in the mountains of Scandinavia, in France and in England. Specimens belonging to the Romanesque sfyle period, 12th and 13th centuries, are, of course, rare. The majority of them date from later centuries and from rural districts, some of which have refained the forms of the Middle Ages until the 18th and even the 19th centuries. These late descendants—examples of peasant art—are only distinguished from the simple, powerful creations of the Romanesque period itself (among which the finest is a bench from Alpirsbach Monastery in Stuttgart) by the details of the turned profiles, and the extreme delicacy of the grooves and curves. It may be said, parenthetically, that medizval furniture was painted in bright colours. This tradition has been fostered amongst the peasantry until the 19th century. The folding chair of antiquity continued to be made in the Middle Ages. The terminations offered opportunities for introducing heads of animals and claws, in the manner of the Romanesque style. Chairs with square legs, or made of boards are rarer. Of the latfer a number of chairs with rich open-work carving have been preserved in Scandinavia. The low-relief carvings, consisting of dragons and intertwined floral decoration, favoured by Scandinavian wood carvers, are peculiar northern modifications of the Byzantine, Langobard and Celto-Germanic low relief carvings. Such carvings are also found on Norwegian wooden churches. 8 THE MIDDLE AGES Among the receptacles of the early Middle Ages, the coffer is the most important. The old dug-out coffers, made from a single free trunk and often bound with iron, date from the oldest period of Germanic culture. They are found in remote districts of Germany, France and particu- larly of England. But the most distinguished form of receptacle is the chest raised on high legs with a sloping lid like a gable roof, and which is doubflessly a descendant of the wooden sarco- phagi, medizval roofed coffers and chests. This is proved by the addition of gable panels, the upper nofched ends of which are reminiscent of the roof acroteria of the late Greek sarcophagi. Even the method of constructing these Romanesque roof-coffers is akin fo that adopted for the late Greek wooden chests. The side panels are joined to their frames with groove and tongue, and the rails are morfised to the vertical members, a few wooden pegs being used. It is true the heavy shape of the chests, the clumsy sloping posts and the massive lids, express an awkward, heavy-handed craftsmanship, typical of Romanesque architecture. Economical embellishment of carving in low relief is to be found on the front of these chests; chiefly rosettes of chip carving and curved lines which indicate the influence of the low-relief ornament characteristic of the furniture and carvings of the period identified with the migration of the peoples and the Byzantine Empire. These roofed chests, as well as Romanesque turned chairs, are found all the way from the Alps to Scandinavia and England. In the Alps they are mostly made of soft woods such as fir, whereas in Low Germany, England and Scandinavia oak predominates. The most common chests, long rectangular boxes with or without legs, are richly ornamented with iron bands in France and Western Germany. Besides chests there are also smaller boxes, eifher carved or ornamented with inlaid work. Cupboards are very rare. The earliest are quite plain receptacles made of heavy boards, high and rectangular in form. They were first used to store mass books, sacred vessels, and garments. The stiff form of the rectangular cupboard is relieved by a gable-roof top. Early forms of such cupboards have been found chiefly in Alpine and neighbouring countries, especially in the Tyrol and Austria. The general conclusion we arrive at after this survey is that the main feature of Romanesque furniture is unadorned straightforwardness expressed in the work of the carpenter and joiner. The scanty low-relief and chip-carving ornament is of secondary importance. Architectural motifs, such as round arches and so forth—as on the chests in S. Valeria ob Sitten in Switzerland —are rare. Our present conception of Romanesque decorative furniture, widened by the investi- gations of Otto von Falke, is quite different from that expressed in the sideboards of the smoking and drinking rooms and studies in “Romanesque style.” This rendering of the “style” was the work of the cabinet-makers of the last generation in their unsuccessful efforts to copy previous styles. Medizeval furniture was the outcome of utilitarian requirements and the technique of craffsmen. This is demonstrated by the fact that Gothic architecture, which spread from France over Christian Europe in the second half of the 13th century, hardly influenced the construction and form of domestic furniture during several centuries; whereas ecclesiastical furniture, choir stalls, lecterns and so forth, received the impress of church architecture in the shape of buttress and pointed arch and richly carved plastic ornament; chests, coffers and cupboards retained the solid, simple Romanesque plan. Seats are still made of turned wood. Gothic ornament only begins to play a modest réle in household furniture during the 14th century. The artists were first tempted to decorate the fronts with Gothic pointed arches in low relief. The largest group of this class is that of the Low Saxon chests of the 14th and 15th centuries. They are made according to the old fashion of thick oak planks with corner posts and cross-boards, mortised and tenoned. The sides are fastened to a strong frame, and the heavy lids 9 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE are mosfly incised with flat quatrefoils. The immediate connection with the Romanesque style is shown by the carved ornament on the fronts, which are partly decorated with grotesque animals in circular patterns, derived from the motifs of Romanesque weaving and embroidery. In the later pieces of furniture we find pointed arches and tracery with early Gothic grotesque animal figures. These chests are found in the district between the Weser and the Elbe in the heart of Low Saxony, above all in Liineburg, Brunswick, and in the surroundings of the Hartz Mountains; but the same type is also met with in Holstein as far north as Jutland, though the Gothic tracery and animal ornament are coarse and more stereotyped. Similar chests, from the disfrict of Osna- briick, with narrow carved pointed arches and figures form a class of their own. The Early Gothic oak chest with carved fracery has spread along the north coast of Germany to Flanders, Northern France and England. The only differences are in the tracery. Taken as a whole, we may say that the decorative furniture of the Teutonic peoples, particularly those of Low Germany, the Netherlands, Northern France, England and Scandinavia, forms a single group until the end of the 14th century. 10 CHAPTER FIVE The Late Gothic Period AT the beginning of the 15th century a step was taken which rovolutionized the craft of furniture- making. The development of new constructional methods began in Flanders, then known as the Burgundian Netherlands, and affected that disfrict and also those districts that had shared in the development, including England and Scandinavia. The substantially constructed chests made of thick boards and planks—work that was simple joinery—are superseded by framework, stiles and rails fitted with thin panels. It is certainly no mere chance that this change took place coevally with the sudden development of luxury in the homes of the Flemish townsfolk of the cities which flourished through their international trade and the wealth of the Burgundian Dukes. Strange to say, the first evidences of such furniture construction is seen in representations of interiors in pictures by the brothers van Eyck in Ghent and Bruges. The transition to perspective painting in northern art—of which the van Eycks were the forerunners—was a period accompanied by new departures in furnifure-making. The cupboard begins to compete with the chest, which until then had been almost completely in possession of the field. The dressoir appears. To a certain extent this article is a chest with doors, raised on high, square upright members, and providing accommodation for silver vessels. The top of the chest and the plinth shelf between the uprights provided places for bright brass vessels. In representations of rich banquets at the Burgundian and French courts, these dressoirs are often depicted as credences, with back panels and a canopy supported by corbels. The upper part of the piece recedes, forming a series of step-like shelves, whereon vessels and other utensils are placed. It is true that only very few credences of this kind have been preserved in the Copenhagen, Paris and Antwerp museums. The Oressoir is a piece of furniture that has been frequently imitated by the cabinet-makers of the second half of the 19th century, who catered for the romantic ideas of their period by repro- ducing old styles. It has also been faked by the inclusion of old parts. We should note here that Gothic dressoirs are very scarce. The majority come from the district of the Lower Rhine, which was then a cultural unit with Flanders. It is just this type that has been faked so often in the 19th century by the addition of Gothic architectural motifs and by adding to the carved ornamenta- tion. The wrong-headedness of the last generation in its conception of the essence, as it were, of medizval decorative furniture is demonstrated by their grafting on carpenter’s work fragments of ornament borrowed from church architecture. During the 15th century, large closed cupboards increased in number in the Lower Rhine district. Some had two doors, others four; and some- times there would be several small lockers above and below, with drawers and flaps in between, like the Liineburg “Schenkscheiben.” The framework of the cupboard rendered many variations possible. The coffer, which also adopted the frame with inserted panels, was offen developed as a bench, with arms and back of the same style. Single seats with drawers or lockers underneath are also met with. A favourite piece of furniture in France was a coffer-bench with a movable back, enabling one to sit on either side. It is remarkable that the invention of new methods of construction should be accompanied by a peculiar flat form of ornament, the linenfold, which makes ifs appearance on the panels of North European furniture. This ornament was produced by means of moulding planes, and resembles folded parchment or linen, being skilfully hollowed out at the ends. The majority of chests and chest seats in oak are decorated in this manner on the panels. The linenfold is found in the north of France, Flanders, in Low Germany up to the Baltic, in Scandinavia and England. Besides this, diapered ornament, especially X-shaped forms, is employed. The linenfold and its related flat ornament were developed with the greatest 11 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE beauty on the chests and cupboards made on the Lower Rhine, and in Cologne, Flanders and Ghent. Furniture with linenfold ornament is associated with Northern France as far as the Seine and Loire. French furniture is distinguished by the austerity and regularity of ifs linenfold. The variations of the chest, the chest seat, the chest with flap seat, and high-backed single chairs with box-seats were particularly well developed in France. In this period the pomp and position of royal and princely courts begin to be expressed in terms of decorafive furniture, which boasted magnificent forms and more refined work. Decorative carving acquires a richer and more important character, with foliated ornamentation and animal motifs playing a larger part in the design of the finer French furniture. The Late Gothic furniture of England is characterized by sparse ornament and heavy consfruc- tion. A low, wide type of Oressoir with three broad doors was used as a credence or cupboard, and is peculiar to England. The contours of English Late Gothic oak furniture are also heavy and simple. The peculiar rigid, simple line of later English furniture is already foreshadowed in the Late Gothic work. Towards the end of the 15th century the flamboyant tracery ornamentf, belonging to the last phases of Late Gothic, as well as the Tudor ornamental forms in England, are transferred to the panels of furniture. Such ornament found ifs most beautiful and purest expression on the panels of the French chests dating from about 1500. At this period heraldic emblems, the coat-of-arms of the owner of the piece of furniture, were inserted between the tracery and linenfold panels, especially on bridal coffers which were favoured as wedding presents. The folding chair, consisting of a number of intersecfing straight or curved square-sectioned supports which carried the seat, originated in Italy, and is a new type which, fogether with the Late Gothic chest furniture, travelled from Flanders. In the 15th century the decorative furniture of Southern Germany and the Alpine countries was no longer made in the substantial and honest fashion of the Romanesque and Early Gothic pieces: with the dawn of domestic comfort and luxury it became lighter and more finely balanced. Furniture-making in the Late Gothic period was forced into new channels in these districts by the employment of soft woods, such as fir and pine, which had always been favoured there. Soff- wood furniture differed considerably in its development from the oak furniture of Northern Germany and Flanders. South German furniture attained to ifs highest development in the Alpine countries—German Switzerland, Southern Bavaria, the Tyrol, Styria, Carinthia and Upper Austria. There are various points of relationship between decorative furniture of the northern slopes of the Alps and that of the southern as far as the North Italian, Lombardic and Venetian spheres of art influence. Late Gothic furniture in Southern Germany and fhe Alpine countries develops in conjunction with the rich wainscofing in fir and pine that appears in apartments, many examples of which are to be found in Swiss, Bavarian and Austrian museums. The chest, which had hitherto known no competitor in the way of receptacles for storing various articles, was superseded by the cupboard in the Late Gothic period. The new manner of con- structing the chest of a solid frame with inserted panels had a great effect on Late Gothic furniture in this district foo. Chest and cupboard were raised on a high frame with legs. The chest itself was offen enclosed in a frame. The frame, which at an early date was joined by doveftailing, was ornamented mostly with flat carving. The most important type of cupboard is formed by join- ing two chests, separated by a broad frame often containing drawers. The top is crowned by a 12 THE LATE GOTHIC PERIOD broad frieze decorated with tracery and a castellated cornice. The most elaborate of these cup- boards (with four doors) are found in the Tyrol, Carinthia and Upper Austria. The plinth frame, cornice and side pilasters of the better pieces are of limewood, and have pierced ornamental details representing tracery and interlaced thistle convolutions. The vigorous naturalism of the Southern German Late Gothic carving, which produced such admirable work on wooden altars and choir stalls, is also found in the ornament of these cupboards. One of the most noteworthy pieces, a cupboard with the coats-of-arms of Gieng and Lupin, is signed by the famous Swabian wood-carver, Jérg Syrlin. The cupboard was made in Ulm about 1465, and was an early work of the master who later on rose from a carpenter to be a sculptor, and who created the choir stalls of Ulm Minster, the most celebrated masterpiece of this class. A late example of a South German cupboard with four doors and carved ornament (now in the Wartburg and made in Nuremberg about 1510) betrays the influence of Diirer’s decorative art in the rich convolutions of its thistle patterns. The panels of most of these cupboards are veneered with rarer woods, such as grained ash and maple. The veneering of the doors is mitred, that is, cut at an angle of forty-five degrees. When the piece is made of solid fir, considerable scope is afforded for flat carving. Coffers, cupboards and panelling, which are completely covered with carving, particularly those from the Tyrol and Carinthia, have been preserved. Difficulties presented by the grain of fir necessitated the flat carved ornament, and it consists chiefly of interlaced Late Gothic thistle foliage pattern- ings, the darker ground being tinted with colour. The principal colours are green for the pattern and red for the ground. Late Gothic flat carving was continued as an ornamental form on the softwood southern furniture until the first decades of the Renaissance; alike with the linenfold pattern of northern oak furniture. As a matter of fact, several new furniture types were made in the southern Late Gothic period, the box-settle, for instance. Then in addition to the older double-doored cupboards and those of a later date with four doors, there was the vestry cupboard with large drawers in the lower part. Of these cupboards there are two examples with coloured flat carving from Feldkirchen in Carinthia. One is a double hutch in the Figdor collection dated 1521, and the other is in the Berlin Schloss Museum dated 1539. A piece that is closely con- nected with the wainscoting of South German living rooms is the narrow washstand with a place for a tin jug and bowl in the middle. Fortunately a number of South German bedsteads dating from the Late Gothic period have been preserved. They have square posts and side pieces, and at the head there is a form of wooden canopy. There are better specimens of Late Gothic tables in the south than the north. The most common is the trestle table with a heavy top, the trestles being affixed to members that resembled sledge- runners in form, connected by cross bars. A special type of table is fitted with a drawer below the top, and in the more elaborate specimens this drawer has minor divisions, and very often has another slanting drawer under it. Late Gothic tables with polygonal tops supported by a multangular central post are seldom met with. A characteristic example is the table with a round stone top and artistically carved Late Gothic supporting arches, the frame of which was made by Tilmann Riemenschneider in Wiirzburg about 1500. Among South German Late Gothic chairs, the turned and four-legged varieties were clearly superseded by folding types introduced from Italy. They have either straight or curved legs, and are often depicted in South German Late Gothic pictures of interiors. The design of Italian decorative furniture of the early Middle Ages, especially in the northern 13 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE part of the country, followed the same path as that north of the Alps, the origin and conditions of development of both being the same. But the Italian chests and coffers and turned chairs adhered to the simplicity of their form and solidity of consfrucfion much longer than those of the north. Italian Late Gothic decorative furniture was only partly influenced by the more vigorous methods of framing, and only partly adopted such methods and the panelling and plastic orna- mentation which had become common aft the beginning of the 15th century in furniture made north of the Alps. These features were restricted to districts such as Vienna, Verona and Lom- bardy, which were in touch with the north. It is astonishing to see the heavy, clumsy chests and chairs which were still used in Tuscany and the Marches in the beginning of the 15th century. In these localities the chief decoration of the furniture, which was made of heavy planks and boards, was painting and stucco. A number of Tuscan chests with figure and ornamental painting, as well as some with gilt stucco decoration in imitation of Late Gothic textile patterns, bear witness to this. Besides Florence, Siena was a centre for stuccoed and painted chests about 1400. The Italian craftsmen began to inlay their furniture with wood, bone and ivory at an early date. At first this work was limited fo narrow friezes and small pieces of inlay. Cosmatesque work in geometrical patterns of multi-coloured mosaic and marble which enriched Italian Gothic edifices has ifs counterpart in geometrical inlays of ivory and bone. This so-called certosina work seems to have been inspired by Persian and other Near East designs for furniture inlays; and the cenfres for its production appear to have been Venice and Milan. Pierced tracery carving, which as a rule was foreign to Italian Gothic furniture, flourished in Venice and its district; it would seem that the majority of chests that displayed a wealth of such carving, offen with the frame enriched with inlay, originated in Venice. Their tracery points fo connections with the carved furniture of the Alpine countries. In the district around Verona, along the valley of the Adige, chests and coffers dating from the second half of the 15th century are found; the fronts of these having flat carved or embossed figures and leafage in finely drawn lines, partly characteristic of the Early Renaissance style. Italian furniture like Italian architecture was only superficially influenced by the Gothic. And it should be remembered that in Italy itself the development of domestic comfort and luxury lagged far behind that of the countries north of the Alps, as climatic conditions and the requirements and habits of life were dissimilar. One should not look fo Italy, especially in Italy beyond the Apennines, for the wainscoted, low apartments of the northern castles and burghers’ homes, with their woven and embroidered multi-hued carpets, their cosiness and warmth. 14 CHAPTER SIX The Renaissance in Italy DURING the first half of the 15th century the Renaissance flowered in Italy; it was the awaken- ing of understanding and sympathy with the tectonic art of antiquity, and during the last quarter of the 15th century it greatly inspired the making of decorative furniture. The Italian direction of furniture craftsmanship as a result of the Renaissance, gradually gave a new phase of beauty to furniture in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, England and Spain in the first half of the 16th century. Renaissance style prevailed in Europe for more than a century, till well into the fimes of the Thirty Years’ War, alfhough there was a departure from the austere forms of the early period. The vital difference between Renaissance furniture in vogue in Italy during the last quarter of the 15th century and that of the later Middle Ages, is that the cornices, pilasters and profiles of architecture, with its new interpretation of anfique forms, are transplanted fo furniture. In contradistinction to a Gothic chest, which was simply a piece of joinery consisting of a frame and boards, the Italian Renaissance chest appears as a single constructional unit with a surface decoration of cornice, plinth and pilasters. The profile now begins to have an important rdéle in the shape of furniture. Indeed, the beauty of an Early Renaissance Italian chest lies in the fine grading of the profiles of plinth, cornice and lid, and furthermore in the fine proportions of the relief of frame and vertical members, which divide the surface into rectangular spaces and panels. The tectonic principle, based on harmonious proportions of elevation and plastic treatment of the surface, that has made the facades of Italian Early Renaissance palaces examples for European architects since the 16th century, also applies to Italian Early Renaissance work: but if is well to remember that the forms and ornament grafted from architecture and sculpture on to wooden furniture of the Italian Renaissance did not exceed the limitations imposed by the craft of the joiner or the carver’s arf. Herein lies the superiority of Italian furniture fo much of the work produced during the German High and Late Renaissance, and especially to the “ New Renais- sance” imitations in which the architectural fagade seems to be stuck like a mask on to the front of furniture. The vivid profile, moulding and carving of Italian Renaissance furniture require careful study as to details, in order to recognize how far the imitations of “New Renaissance” during the latter part of the 19th century lag behind the originals. The chief wood used in Italian Renaissance furniture is walnut, which by the application of varnish and staining acquires a dark, warm brown hue. The soft luminosity of walnut favours the development of that delicate relief so peculiar to Italian furniture. There is no doubt that Tuscany led in furniture-making. Florence, the capital of Tuscany, is the centre of the craft at the end of the 16th century; and for quality and output she retains the first place during the whole of that century. Florentine cabinet-making enjoyed an uninterrupted development from the Early Renaissance period in the last quarter of the 15th century—when Florentine sculptors, architects and painters laid the foundation of a new development—until the Late Renaissance period under the Grand Dukes. Particularly did the austere and restrained Early Renaissance style of about 1500 find unique expression in Florentine furniture. The finest walnut chests, unsurpassed in profile and construction, were made in Florence. Such a chest would have a high, receding plinth with steep contours, and flat carved grooves and profiles of vertical reeding; the chest carried by this plinth would be framed with corner pilasters or con- soles: the slanting top would consist of a lid with cornices and ovolo mouldings, in perfect harmony with the gracious proportions of the whole piece. In many cases the long front panel is painted 15 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE with views of towns, pageants, scenes from sacred legends, and above all from Italian amatory and epic poetry of the 15th century. The panels were inlaid as early as 1470, whereas stucco ornament—much favoured by Late Gothic style—plays a secondary part in Florence in the 16th century. During the course of this century plastic ornament predominates on the chests. The front is divided into panels, and in the period of High Renaissance figures in relief, cartouches and trophies are much favoured. In addition to chests, the box-settle has a place in Florentine Early Renaissance. It is usually long and with rounded corners, generally placed against a wall; if is raised on a plinth, sometimes having a high back ornamented with pilasters, occasionally serving as a seigneurial chair. The state seats of Giuliano dei Medici and Philippus Strozzi are two celebrated pieces. The arms of these two noble families, whose palaces belong to the chief works of the Early Renaissance, are those most frequently found on the furniture of this period. The arms on one of the most beautiful Florentine chests in the Berlin Schloss Museum also points to a union of these families in 1507. Figures of angels, in the style of Mino da Fiesole, support the arms of the Sfrozzi and Medici. As a matter of fact, the fine contours and relief ornament of Florentine furniture of about the year 1500 are distinctly connected with those of the marble sarcophagi and frames of the Florentine sculptors, such as Mino, Rosselino and Benedetto da Majano and their followers. A special piece of Florentine Renaissance furniture is the “cassapanca,” the box-settle with back and sides, the latter mostly ornamented with masks, palmettes or angels’ heads. In the Early Renaissance period the most common form of seat, apart from the box-settle placed along the walls, was a narrow stool; usually with an octagonal seat and supported by two boards with a back narrowing towards the seat. But the folding chair and stool, mentioned in con- necfion with Northern Gothic, were also much used. The typical centre table was oblong, sup- ported by two sfrong consoles, connected by a strefcher. The masks and paws of the consoles are reminiscent of Roman marble tables. Another piece was a polygonal, usually octagonal, table supported by four volute-shaped legs. As old Florentine pictures indicate, the Early Renaissance apartments, in the great palaces built round open courts, were bare and sparsely furnished accord- ing to our conceptions. Other pieces are cradles, pedestals, reading desks, and such things as picture frames and bellows. The chief ornament of a room was the marble chimney-piece. During the time of the High Renaissance (circa 1550) a novel piece of furniture, the credence, was introduced. It was ornamented mostly with pilasters and rosettes and was shaped like a low cupboard with two doors. Usually drawers were fitted under the fop. Then a writing bureau developed, the base of which is a kind of credence, whereas the upper part consists of a cabinet with several drawers and a middle niche. It was only in the 14th century that cupboards with four doors became popular. They are found chiefly in the north part of the country, in Lombardy and especially in Liguria, where the influence of northern, particularly of French furniture was felf. Since the High Renaissance the arm-chair covered with velvet or leather, with four square legs and a richly carved apron, was the favourite seat. In general, since the middle of fhe century, greater elegance and an increasing wealth of forms are noficeable. Pilasters with flat consoles and hermz; panels with oval or round rosettes; cartouche and volute frames come into fashion, the latter being surmounted with broken pediments occasionally. Scrollwork ornament is used more and more on pedestals and stools. But Tuscan Renaissance was always endowed with a sense of simplicity and restraint, by reason of which if takes a special place in Italian art. Besides Florence, Siena is notable in the 15th century for painted, ‘gilt and stuccoed coffers and 16 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY jewel caskets, and in the first half of the 16th century for furniture of fine profile, delicately carved —Barile was one of the chief masters of this art—and finally, in the latter part of that century, for richly painted furniture. Bolognese furniture is related to that of Tuscany. In the second half of the 16th century, large credences and rectangular tables of simple forms were made in Bologna, as well as round tables with baluster legs. Some of the credences were studded with brass nails. During the High Renaissance, Rome also became a centre for the making of decorative furniture. From the middle of the century, chests richly ornamented with figures and cartouches were made there, also long rectangular and octagonal tables with paw feet of vigorous design, and in the last half of the 16th century writing cabinets were also produced with similar heavy, ponderous defails. Among the latter was the famous writing cabinet belonging to Pope Paul III. There is no hiding the fact that Roman furniture borrowed its design from the ancient marbles and reliefs excavated by the Popes, and which were a centre of interest at the time. We even find copies from original Roman marble groups on the ornate walnut chests; as the Niobe chests in Berlin prove. The entire shape of the High Renaissance Roman chests differs from that of the Early Renaissance Tuscan types: the latter are governed by the limitations of construction and material, while the former strive to imitafe the Roman stone sarcophagi. The decorative element in Late Renaissance furniture predominated in Venice, as it did in the Late Gothic period. The convoluted tracery is often combined with Renaissance ornament on late 15th-century Venetian chests. If was in Venice in particular that stucco ornament was extensively used on chests and coffers of the Renaissance; such ornament often being gilded and combined with painted panels. Painting and gilt work, especially painted figures surrounded by arabesque ornament, were the favourite decorative treatments for Late Renaissance Venetian furniture. Besides chests, there were jewel-caskets, organ cases and so forth. Carving, which was similar to the Roman, was applied to large tables and chairs, with leather and velvet coverings, in the High Renaissance. But in Venice and Lombardy, bone and ivory intarsia in geometrical patterns (the cerfosina mosaic referred to in the latter part of Chapter Five) flourished during the whole of the 16th century. Intarsia work of light and dark woods also reached ifs culminating point (Pantaleone de Marchis) in about 1500. Genoa together with Liguria played a special part among the other furniture centres during the second half of the 16th century, because of the rich development of the four-doored cupboard, so rarely found in the rest of Italy. The four doors are carved in flat relief, and drawers are often inserted in the ornamental banding between them, and flanked by pilasters. These cupboards and credences, as well as writing cabinets of similar character with flaps, point to connections with the neighbouring French furniture centres, especially those of Provence and Lyons. Of Italian furniture in general, we may say that it remained restrained and simple, in spite of ornament, fill after the 16th century, and that the Late Renaissance style is not so sfrong an influence upon Italian furniture as upon designs produced north of the Alps. CHAPTER SEVEN The Renaissance in France NORTH of the Alps, France absorbed the influences of the Renaissance, and led in apply- ing them to furniture-making. The impulse came from her political connections with Italy under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, strengthened later by the queens of the House of Medici. However, the common ground of the relationship of Romance races paved the way for a speedy acceptance of the Renaissance. It first appears in south-western French furniture, but from the middle of the 16th century it is the purest and most French in its interpretation in the furniture of the centre of the French kingdom; in Touraine, and above all in the Ile-de-France with Paris. The northern and north-eastern provinces, Brittany, Normandy, efc., were generally reluctant to adopt the Renaissance style, as was the case with the Flemish Lower Rhenish districts. The use of walnut in furniture-making gained ground from the south and spread to the centre of Renaissance culture on the banks of-the Loire and the Seine; whereas the northern districts long retained the oak they were accustomed fo, as they belonged to the same furniture group as Flanders and north-west Germany during the Late Gothic period. In this case it will be noted that vast districts of the same country continued to work along the old tradifional lines laid down by their cabinet-makers, and were uninfluenced by the style development of centres of culture. This explains why the most elegant furniture was made in the Renaissance style in Paris, whereas in Brittany oak cupboards and chests with flat carving indicate a connection with 15th~century craftsmanship until far into the 17th century. In Germany the case was similar; in the costal districts of the Weser and Elbe, in Dithmarschen and other conservative rural districts where local furniture-making traditions persisted for centuries. The French Early Renaissance, the time of Francis I (Francois Premier, 1515—1547), is the period when Italian ornament was grafted on to French decorative furniture. This furniture—chests, credences, Oressoirs, high-backed box-seftles, and so forth—mosfly retained the Late Gothic constructional methods, and was made of oak. The panels were offen headed by a depressed ogee arch. The pilasters and cornices, as well as the panels with arabesques, heads in profile set in medallions and modelled heads, bear witness to the speedy acceptance of Italian motifs in which the Lombardic ornament is preferred. The oak choir stalls constructed about 1510 for the casfle of Cardinal Amboise in Gaillon indicate the beginning of the Renaissance. It is characteristic and typical of the racial kinship that the Italian motifs were amalgamated with the French furniture forms. Thus the transition from Late Gothic to Renaissance is hardly perceptible. The finest Early Renaissance furniture, remarkable for delicately carved acanthus pafterns and heads en profil, came from Touraine, Auvergne, Normandy and the neighbourhood of Lyons and Liége. In the meantime, the pure Italian High Renaissance began fo gain ground in about 1530, when the Florentine Rosso and the Bolognese Primaticcio began to decorate the palace of Fontainebleau for Francis I. It asserts itself under Henry II (about the middle of the 16th century), and merges under Henry III, in about 1580, into Late Renaissance, which, under Henry IV, attains its culminating point and ends under Louis XIII The High Renaissance furniture made in Paris is the purest embodiment of the character of this epoch. The national characteristic is manifested in the predominance of the four-doored cup- board with slightly receding superstructure. Apparently this piece is a development of the double hutch, the armoire a deux corps, already met with in the Late Gothic. It is divided up by pilasters of austere line, or columns, and is often crowned with a broken pediment and projecting centre. The banded supports and cornices of beautiful profile, usually with gabled niches in 18 THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE between and pendant flat masses of fruit and cartouche frames, betoken the influence of these French architects of the High Renaissance, Delorme and Du Cerceau. The latter published engravings of furniture designs. The allegorical figures in flat carving on the doors illustrate the elegant and delicate plastic style introduced by Jean Goujon, the sculptor of Henry IJ, and Diana of Poitiers. These cupboards of the High Renaissance—made after 1560—of which many have been preserved, are beautiful in oufline, with their flat carving, and the fine profile of the frame- work for the doors and the drawers beneath the top. The simplicity and purity of line already expressed in the best of the French Gothic furniture is still more pronounced in High Renaissance work. These dark-stained walnut cupboards of the second half of the 16th century are often enriched by marble insertions and gilded arabesques of stucco. In addition to the Parisian cupboards, a deux corps, mention should be made of the Lyons cup- boards, characterized by simpler forms and flat pilasters. There is a connection between this type, and those made farther south, with the cupboards of Genoa and Liguria. The traditional shape of the dressoir was retained in the High Renaissance. This piece was made in Paris as well as in other furniture centres. The French High Renaissance, which favoured an harmonious association of column, cartouche, scroll and herme, developed very highly ornamented tables. Long tables, supported at each end by fluted columns and with a colonnade mounted on a strong cenfral stretcher as an intermediate support, offered an opportunity for the development of Du Cerceau’s schemes of composition, both in Paris and Lyons. The outstanding characteristics of French Renaissance furniture, severity and restraint, are also expressed in seats. Chairs with four legs, and benches with simple round columns, chiefly of Tuscan order, arm-chairs with narrow vertical backs and narrow seats, seem to point fo a stiff bearing as required by the etiquette of the times. The high-backed locker chair, developed during the Late Gothic period, was used until High Renaissance times. In the districts just mentioned, the backs and panels are ornamented chiefly with flat strapwork carving. During the last quarter of the 16th century (circa 1570-1580 under Henry III) plastic ornament on decorative furniture is enriched; and caryatides and herme as consoles, ornamental and figure relief on panels, preponderate over purely architectural details; and even such details, cornices and so forth, assume more ornate and lively outlines. The Lyons cupboards, a deux corps, and sideboards, as well as those of Bourgogne, developed the profuse carving of the Late Renais- sance, reaching a high degree of perfection about 1600. The dates on such pieces range from 1580 to 1619. In many ways these gaudy French cupboards of the Late Renaissance are akin fo their Swiss and Rhenish contemporaries. It is clear that the modern furniture-maker must be very careful when studying this type of furniture. The Queen Mother, Maria de Medici, Regent for Louis XIII, from 1610, was connected with the Florentine Ducal court, and that influence encouraged the manufacture of magnificent inlaid ebony cabinets to flourish in Paris from about 1620 to 1630. A group of closely related Louis XIII ebony cabinets with flat reliefs, incised flowers and twisted pilasters, seems to have been inspired by Augsburg cabinets introduced into France under the name of cabinets 0’Allemagne. These ebony pieces are important because they helped in the transition from the exuberant carved work in oak and walnut that characterized the Late Renaissance, to the decorative cabinet-making of the Baroque period. The ébéniste now leads in decorative furniture. The engravings of Abraham Bosse provide an instructive representation of Parisian furniture and furnishing in the period of Louis XII. 19 CHAPTER EIGHT The Renaissance in South Germany THE line of division obtaining in the Middle Ages between Northern and Southern German decorative furniture was also continued during the Renaissance. Southern Germany accepted the Renaissance style earlier than German districts north of the Main, owing to the close commercial connections between the great German Free Towns and Upper Italy. Nuremberg was the centre of Early Renaissance work in Germany. In about 1542 Peter Flétner, the designer and carver, transplanted the ornamental forms of the Italian Renaissance for the enrichment of the panels of chests and cupboards. The four-doored cupboard which, as will be remembered, shared the place of honour with the chest in Southern Germany in the last part of the 15th century, begins to take precedence in furniture~-making. Nuremberg cupboards in the style of Peter Flétner consisted generally of two coffer-like boxes; a broad intermediate piece with drawers in it; a plinth also fitted with drawers; and a top piece, ornamented with a frieze and a cornice. Gothic tracery is replaced by flat pilasters and friezes with fine, symmetrical acanthus patterns and vase ornaments; while the top has triglyphs, the skulls of animals and similar decorative details; the cornice having dentals and ovolo mouldings; in short, a decorative composition appears on the front of such pieces on the lines of the Italian Early Renaissance. The ornament, the graceful, grotesque figures, the medallions with heads en profil, have been borrowed chiefly from the Lombardic Early Renaissance cupboards made between 1530 and 1550. The wood used for these cupboards is fir, which was also employed for their Late Gothic forerunners: fhe unornamented surfaces are veneered with grained ash, the flat carving being in lime or oak. Peter Flétner’s woodcuts of furniture, with their clearly defined Renaissance forms, had a fruitful influence on the decorative furniture of South Germany. By 1550 Early Renaissance details and ornament had been introduced in most of the furniture workshops, also in those of Middle Germany. North-eastern Switzerland, with her kindred race, keeps pace with Germany. It was there that the artist-craffsman, “H.S.,” worked along the same lines as Peter Flétner. It was he who constructed the wainscoting in Schloss Haldenstein, near Chur, in the year 1548 (now in the Berlin Schloss Museum). He also helped the spread of the Renaissance style by his woodcuts of furniture. The wainscoting, cupboards, credences and chests, in addition to being decorated with carved foliage patterns, have also excellent inlaid pictures in light, dark, yellow and brown woods, depicting in perspective details of Renaissance architecture, as well as panels with arabesques, either dark on a light ground or vice versa. There is an evident connection between this inlaid woodwork, the Lombardic intarsia furniture already mentioned, and the choir stalls of the Early Renaissance. The austere arrangement of the pilasters and columns of this period is characteristic of South German furniture until 1570 to 1580: Nuremberg cupboards consisting of one, two, or three parts are good examples of this. But in Southern Germany, about 1580, the plastic architectural details preponderate as in the case of French furniture. The columns and pilasters become heavier; the cornices more projecting, and banding more frequent. Small niches crowned with a pediment are developed on the door panels and between twin columns. About 1600, South German Late Renaissance work becomes mature. The wainscoting in the Nuremberg Peller House, dating from 1605, proves that this stage has been reached. The frame- work of the niches is ornamented with pilasters, tapering towards the base, projecting consoles, swan-neck pediments, lozenges, lions’ heads, and similar motifs. In the following decades, scrollwork is introduced, and (from about 1630) ear-shaped ornaments. 20 THE RENAISSANCE IN SOUTH GERMANY Apart from Nuremberg—Ulm, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Augsburg and Bale were centres of wood- carving and cabinet-making which produced wainscoting, huge ornamental cupboards, credences, chests and tables in the ornate style of the South German Late Renaissance. Strange fo say, in Swiss wainscofed rooms, credences and narrow washstands lingered on into the Renaissance. In Bale there is noticeable relationship with the elaborate Late Renaissance furniture of the neighbouring French provinces of Lyonnais and Bourgogne, already described; and as instances of this, mention need only be made of the wainscoting in the Barenfelserhof (dating from 1607) and the extravagantly ornamented cupboard (1619) from Franz Pergo’s workshop. About 1600 walnut begins fo replace grained ash as veneer in Bale and other towns, such as Augsburg and Nuremberg; and thus the way is cleared for a free development of relief carving. But intarsia is not neglected in the Alpine countries. In Switzerland, the Tyrol and Salzburg, dating from the first decades of the 17th century, wainscoting, cupboards and coffers are made, ornamented with pilasters and arabesque panels, light on a dark ground, and vice versa. Cabinets are the favourite field for inlay work. Both the interior and exterior of their doors, lids and drawers are inlaid with delicate arabesques, flowers and architectural details. The cabinets, with flaps and small drawers inside, are chiefly made for keeping collections of precious stones. Apparently, they have been inspired by Venefian and Florentine models which, like the Spanish cabinets, may be traced back to Oriental caskets of this type. The cabinet cupboard—a combination of a cabinet on a box base or stand—also developed in Southern Germany after the designs of the Northern Italian writing cabinets of the second half of the 16th century, especially those of Florence and Mantua. Augsburg was the cenfre of a flourishing industry producing decorative cupboards; an industry which thrived until the time of the Thirty Years’ War. But this is not the place to trace the development of this industry, because these cabinets and ornamental cupboards belong to the class of decorative court furniture. The earliest piece, and a very remarkable one, is the cabinet made in Augsburg for the Emperor Charles V, in 1555, with its carved figures on the base supporting beautiful columnar architectural details. The entire cabinet is covered with fine boxwood carving and inlay, especially on the numerous drawers. The decorative cupboards were not only of the greatest importance for the development of fine cabinet-making, but particularly for the treatment of ebony, for delicate carving in boxwood and lime, and for intarsia as well as for ivory, marble and mefal inlay, for the employment of silver and gold-plated copper reliefs and figures, for silver-plating and painting behind glass, and for various other branches of the Augsburg arts and crafts. The first Augsburg arfists—above all the silversmith Matthzeus Wallbaum—united their talents in producing these cabinets. Two of the most magnificent examples were made at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War under the direction of Hainhofer in Augsburg: the Pomeranian ornamental cupboard in Berlin, and the cupboard in Upsala, presented to Gustavus Adolphus by the city of Augsburg during his stay there in 1632. The ebony cabinet (recently purchased by the Berlin Schloss Museum), with gilt copper reliefs in Wallbaum’s style and drawers with paintings behind glass from Wallenstein’s palace in Prague, shows that Augsburg was also of influence in ebony cabinet-making, which became the fashion in Paris during the reign of Louis XIII. We cannot discuss here a number of similar pieces of furniture de /uxe related to the ornamental cupboard—jewel caskets, state tables, state beds, chairs made of precious woods inlaid with ivory and silver, and so forth. The court of Dresden under the Elector Christian favoured these cabinets as well as the Munich court under the Elector Maximilian, and both the Dresden collection and the Munich National Museum contain numerous specimens. Nuremberg also produced decorative cabinets in the 17th century. 21 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE The more delicate technical details of joinery which supersede carving, influencing the Baroque period because they mark the dawn of a new epoch, are first developed on the Augsburg decora- tive cupboards, with their skilfully made frames with “broken corners,” the fine mitreing, and the subtle undulations of wave mouldings. According to Neudorfer, Hans Schwankard is said to have invented the making of undulating mouldings in 1620. His son-in-law, Heppner, brought the arf to Nuremberg. The South German tables of about 1600 also prove this: they are long and rectangular with four legs, or multi-angular as well as circular on beautifully made central posts and feet. The chief seat forms belonging to the South German Renaissance were the four- legged board chairs with carved and pierced backs, revolving chairs with square or semicircular seats and backs with balusters, and folding chairs, the backs and seats of which were upholstered in leather or velvet. As in ofher countries, the arm-chair with square legs, usually with upholstered seat and back and carved apron, became popular during the Late Renaissance. Towards the end of this period turned forms, such as the baluster legs of arm-chairs, gain ground. In the first third of the 17th century, German Late Renaissance was at its zenith, for then if stood for the most magnificent expression of wealth and home culture, particularly that of the rich burghers in the great Free Cities of the Empire, until 1630, when the Thirty Years’ War entered into a critical phase. But another generation passed before the forms of the Lafe Renaissance were left behind, as is proved by the Swabian and Tyrolese ornamental cupboards, with their delicate architectural details and ornament, dating from 1660 to 1670. 22 CHAPTER NINE The Renaissance in North Germany, Denmark and Sweden OAK remained the favourite furniture wood in North Germany during the Renaissance. The use of this material and the retention of constructional methods and shapes characteristic of the Late Gothic chests and cupboards, stamps North German decorative furniture with a stronger national character than that of South Germany which was influenced by Italy. Lower Saxony in particular proves this by the Liineburg coffers which were still made as late as the middle of the 16th century, of solid oak boards, framed with vertical members on the sides to strengthen them. This constructional method was typical of 14th and 15th-century Lower Saxon chests. It is true that figures, often covering the whole of the front and usually depicting scenes from the Old Testament, are carved under the influence of the Renaissance. The Lower Rhenish and Westphalian dressoirs and cupboards with several doors and drawers, as well as the chest, proved the direct connection with Late Gothic framed furniture with carved panels. The whole decorative wealth of the Early Renaissance—the fine, flat convolutions of foliated ornament, round medallions with heads en profil, vases and figure reliefs—was first popularized by the engraver Aldegrever in Soest, who also introduced beautifully carved armorial shields on the panels of chests, an heraldic indication of the ownership. Late Gothic linenfold pattern was only gradually superseded, and not wholly replaced until the middle of the century. Besides Cologne, Muenster was a centre of Early Renaissance cabinet-making and carving. It was there, between 1544 and 1552, that the first piece of Low German Early Renaissance wain- scoting was made for the chapter hall of the cathedral. It was carved in oak by John Kupfer from Cologne. Other centres were Liineburg and particularly Schleswig-Holstein. A cupboard from Buxtehude (circa 1544) and some cupboards and chests from Dithmarshen are characterized by fine, flat ornament, and are specimens of Early Renaissance work in the middle of the century. In the sixties, North German furniture carving was turned into a new path by the Late Renais-~- sance ornament of the Flemish Netherlands, created by Cornelis Floris of Antwerp and his school. Superimposed hermz and caryatides enliven framework; figure reliefs surrounded by scrollwork decorate panels. An early example is Marc Swyn’s room from Lehe in Dithmarshen (circa 1568) with two four-posters and a cupboard ornamented with Biblical scenes. In Schleswig-Holstein the impression made by Floris’ ornament was considerable, because some of the chief works, such as the tomb of the Danish king, Frederick I, were placed in the Schleswig cathedral. Marc Swyn was a high official in the service of the king in Dithmarshen. The “Susan” cupboard (circa 1580) is one of the chief examples of Late Renaissance in this district. The oak wainscoting in the Friedensaal of the Miinster town hall with the ornament crowning the door frames and benches by Albert of Soest, the Fredenhagen room by Hans Drege in the Haus der Kaufmann- schaft (Liibeck), were all made at about the same fime. Preference for the chest itself even in the Late Renaissance is characteristic of the traditional element in Low German decorative furniture. Its front is richly carved. In Bremen taste was given to a consecutive representation of the story of Esther as being particularly rich in figures. In Schleswig-Holstein the divisions are usually marked by herme, with single framed pictures between. The exuberant development of metal ornament and scrollwork is typical of the latter district. The Flensburg carver, Heinrich Ringelink, and Hans Gudewert from Eckernférde, made the most beautiful chests of this period. Cupboards made of a frame with doors and drawers in Late Gothic style, covered completely with Late Renaissance ornament, sfill predominate. The corner cupboard (Aérnsqiapp) is in a class by itself. A three-tiered corner cupboard with 23 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE one axis, sometimes with an additional superstructure, was very popular in the wainscoted rooms of the Dithmarshen. Generally, Low German furniture has a decorative tendency towards 1600. The doors and wain- scoting by Ténnies Evers the Younger in the “Kriegsstube” of the Liibeck town hall and by Melchior Rheydt in the Senate Room of the Cologne town hall (both distinguished by Corinthian columns and figure carving) compete with the masterpieces of South German carving as found in the Nuremberg Peller House (circa 1600). A peculiarity of both is the rich intarsia on the panels, chiefly convolutions and arabesques or sometimes figures. A considerable amount of furniture was produced in Melchior Rheydt’s workshop, especially sideboards and credence cup- boards with superstructures supported by caryatides. These pieces are covered all over with similar intarsia, chiefly in light yellowish wood. Inlay work in the style of Ténnies Evers is found on furniture made on the shores of the Baltic. Danzig in particular produced cupboards and chests with light and dark intarsia arabesques. These arabesques are light on a dark ground, and vice versa as they repeat the same pattern: an ornamental technique also found in Schleswig furniture made about 1600. One of the early and magnificent monuments of Late Renaissance intarsia in Schleswig-Holstein is the prie-dieu in the chapel of the ducal castle of Gottorp. Decorative furniture flourished once more in Cologne (circa 1620-1650), its expression being in carved oak credences, with upper parts supported by caryatides. Their vigorous lines, bulbous features, lions’ heads and lozenge ornamentation were influenced by the Antwerp Late Renaissance although the exuberance of decorative carving is alien to Antwerp furniture itself. During the whole of the 17th century, and partly as late as the 18th century, the extensive territory of the coastal countries between Friesland and Jutland clung tenaciously to Late Renais- sance forms and ornament. The wainscoting, the mulfi-doored cupboards, credences and chests of the peasantry in these districts were ornamented for generations with sfrapwork and scroll- work, though, of course, in very low relief. North German Renaissance furniture included chairs with four legs—each leg being a small turned baluster with square pieces linked by rails—and pierced and carved backs; types pre- dominating since the end of the 16th century. Seats demonstrate the tenacious adherence to old traditions: this is illustrated by the old-fashioned stools, chairs and arm-chairs, preserved in the houses of Westphalian and Friesian peasants. During the whole of the Middle Ages, the modest decorative furniture of the northern Germanic countries of Denmark and Scandinavia was connected with that of the Low German-Flemish spheres of artistic influence. It is in those countries that similar oak chests, turned chairs and early medizval seats are frequently found. Flat carved, Early Gothic pointed arches and animal patterns are common fo the oak chests of Denmark, Gothland and Sweden, as well as to those of Lower Saxony, from Liineburg to Liibeck. Special features of the Norwegian-Islandic districts are the arm-chairs and box-seats made of fine boards with incised convolutions, animals, dragons and figures. But nearly all these pieces originate from the time of the Renaissance and the periods following, just as the chip-carved furniture of Norway and Sweden does. The connections with the flourishing Scandinavian Romanesque wood-carving (i.e. with the reliefs on the timbered churches characterized by their band ornament) are more racial than direct. Furniture of a kindred nature with flat carved ornament and chip carving survived until the 19th century in the peasant art of the Esthonian and Latvian peoples; and even Slavic peasant art may be considered as related. Naturally vivid colouring played a great part in such furniture. About 1500, the makers of oak furniture in the few towns and seats of the Scandinavian nobility 24 THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTH GERMANY adopted the frame and carved panel construction from Dutch-Low German furniture. The linen- fold motif was also the favourite on Danish-Swedish wainscoting, chests, cupboards and credences. The linenfold ornament was often transformed into a flat, conventionalized form and interwoven with flat tracery and flower pafferns. There are but few chests and cupboards belonging to the Danish Early Renaissance. With their circular medallions with heads en profil and acanthus scrolls, they are related to the Schleswig furniture of the mid-16th century, only they are flatter and simpler. It was not before the Late Renaissance that Danish decorative furniture became more important, particularly in Kronborg Casfle, which was built for Frederick II, by Dutch artists in the style of Vredemann de Vries, and in the castles of Rosenborg and Christiansborg built in 1600 under Christian IV, Tilly’s opponent in the Thirty Years’ War. These works were the culminating point of Danish Renaissance. Inspired by the carved oak furniture made by Ringelink in Flensburg and Gudewerth in Eckernférde, some cabinet-makers in Copenhagen and Zealand started to make chests, cupboards with superstructures (so-called Skaenks), and corner cupboards (hAjérnskaps), with exuberant oak carving. Other workshops are those of Peter Jensen Kolding, the designer of the rich four-poster from Klausholm, in the Copenhagen National Museum, and Abel Schréder in Naestved. Interlaced ear-shaped ornament with herme is characteristic of this class of carved Danish furniture; but despite its apparent vividness, the ornament is restrained and stiff. Occa- sionally intarsia in dark wood on a light ground, or vice versa, is found. The patterns are mostly ear-like arabesques, similar in outline and technique to the Danzig inlay work of the first third of the 17th century. The Danish Late Renaissance style of these highly skilled schools of carving only decays after 1650. Late Renaissance still lives on as a rustic and commonplace ornament in the Danish parts of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland, as well as in Norway and Sweden—then belonging to Denmark. The main features of this ornament are also found on Friesian peasant furniture of the 17th century. CHAPTER TEN The Renaissance in England ENGLAND during the whole of the Middle Ages was also a part of that furniture-making area of which Flanders and North Germany formed the centre. There, too, oak furniture of the framed construction, with Late Gothic linenfold and tracery panels, predominated about 1500. Under Henry VIII, Early Renaissance ornament was introduced after about 1520 on chests, wainscoting and so forth. The foliated panel ornament of the Renaissance and the circular medallions with carved heads, from France and the Netherlands, assume in English furniture an individual strength and clarity of form, even as the Late Gothic linenfold and tracery did. English furniture retains its natural and somewhat rough character longer than French furniture. It was only under Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) that the Renaissance completely penetrated England and superseded the depressed arch and the linenfold of Late Tudor Gothic. English decorative furniture shares this delayed development with that of North Germany. Renaissance forms only developed there at a fime when Early and High Renaissance already merge into Late Renaissance in Paris and the south. The strong national element in English furniture expresses itself by translating the exuberant and vivid Late Renaissance forms into staid and simple ones. The oak panelling in the Elizabethan royal palaces and the great houses of the nobility shows a regular arrangement of pilasters and cornices, with symmetrical rows of rectangular panels in the lower part and arcaded panels above. Ornament is sparse, consisting later of inlaid arabesques, and it is always subsidiary to the good proportions of the well-constructed framework. The English national style is expressed still more characteristically by the four-poster with a canopy, or tester, the much favoured credence (court cupboard, almery), cupboard and long table of the Elizabethan and JamesI period (1603-1625). The credence is descended from the Late Renaissance Dutch cupboard with recessed upper division after the designs of Vredemann de Vries, already met with in connection with the development of the Cologne cupboard with a superstructure. Table and bed forms, with columns and balusters resting on square pedestals were also inspired by the Flemish High Renaissance; for example the long table with its legs crowned by Ionic capitals and vertical fluting on the under frame, a type that supplanted the Gothic trestle fables in the halls of the nobility and in colleges. Sometimes these were draw-top tables, made with two leaves sliding under the central part of the top, allowing it to fall into place on the same level with them when they were drawn out. The clumsy, vase~shaped baluster form, narrowed in places by the lathe so as to be nearly cut in two, ornamented with fluting and acanthus leaves, is common fo Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture. Another characteristic is the very flat and purely ornamental carving on cornices and panels. A peculiar feature of English furniture is the combination of simple and restrained construction with flat ornament, such as sfrapwork, which is purely linear. One is also struck by the rough shape of Elizabethan and Jacobean seats, with their Late Renaissance flat carved ornament. There are long benches with backs composed of a frame enclosing panels, and arm- chairs with coarse square and furned legs and high backs richly ornamented with flat carving. A type resembling these arm-chairs is somefimes called a Shakespeare chair, and it has a seat narrowing behind, a narrow back and curved arms. But particularly in England, among the middle classes, turned chairs and arm-chairs were preserved fill this period and longer, especially those with rush bottoms and with high backs formed of three cross-bars. This domestic and country-made furniture of the time of James I, forms the foundation of the old Colonial type of the American Colonies, brought into being about 1630 by the emigration of the Puritans during 26 THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND the reign of Charles I; Boston being their first large town. Simple chests and credences with flat carving, long tables and turned oak and walnut chairs, of the kind just described, are the first milestones in the development of Anglo-American decorative furniture of about 1650. Naturally the utilitarian and simple forms peculiar to English furniture are still more emphatic in Puritan furniture. Oak remained the principal wood used by English furniture-makers during the first half of the 17th century. In the meantime, walnut from the south began to grow in popularity, especially for turned furniture and sometimes for veneering. It was only about the middle of the century that the walnut trees planted in Elizabeth’s reign began to supersede oak. The difference between the traditional furniture of the home and court furniture favoured by the Stuarts, especially by Charles I, is greater in England than in any other northern country. Cabinets made of precious woods and inftarsia, as well as arm-chairs upholstered in velvet and studded with nails and edged with fringes, are found in the palaces and great houses built by Inigo Jones in the style of Palladio, together with Genoese velvet, tapestries and canopies, as well as Parisian and Mortlake tapestries. But the art of the period of Charles I—the patron of Rubens and van Dyke—already merges into the Baroque. 27 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Renaissance in the Netherlands, Flanders and Spain LATE Gothic furniture, with its framework construction and linenfold panels, originated in the Southern Netherlands, Flanders and Brabant. That locality preceded the Lower Rhenish districts and Northern Germany in the development of the Early Renaissance ornament. Brussels, Antwerp and Liége were centres for oak furniture with delicate Early Renaissance foliated ornament, distinguished by carving of elegance and richness. The carvers who embellished this furniture adopted the grotesque ornament of the engravers Pieter Cocke von Aelst, Cornelis Bos and Cornelis Floris in Antwerp, the most prolific of the designers of ornament as early as the first half of the 16th century. This grotesque scrollwork influenced furniture profoundly in North Germany, and other districts, from the sixties of the century. But the influence of another master, namely Vredemann de Vries, who flourished in Antwerp so after Floris, was still more important for the development along Late Renaissance lines. Differents Pourtraicts de Menuiserie, published by this master, turned furniture-making into new channels in the Netherlands, and all those places where furniture of a kindred type was made. It was only owing to Vredemann that an architecturally perfect composition with pilasters, bases and cornices replaced the Late Gothic method of constructing a frame with panels in the Nether- lands and neighbouring districts. His court cupboards and credences, beds, tables and chairs are ornamented with severe pilasters and columns in the style of the Italian High Renaissance, adapted to Dutch taste by rich scrollwork ornament, mountings, lozenges, pyramid ornament and carved consoles. The most pure expression of Vredemann’s style is in Antwerp decorative furniture made about 1600. It appears that the best credences and four-doored cupboards were made there. They are divided by enriched pilasters, consoles and herme, having bases mounted on bun feef, and such features as fluted friezes and heavy cornices supported by consoles are found. Drops and mouldings, offen made of ebony and applied to the furnifure, are also characteristic features. The distinctive feature of the Flemish Late Renaissance cupboards is the skilfully joined frame of the square door panels, usually enriched in the middle by square ornamental moulding. Four- post beds are preserved with testers having similar designs. Vredemann’s style also influenced the long Flemish tables, with legs composed of balusters, having cubes and fluted intersections, linked below by stretchers and resting on bun feet. Antwerp is the home of the Late Renaissance arm-chair which was so popular in the north. The legs of this chair were composed of alternating furned balusters and cubes, the latter being connected by rails. The straight back has a pierced carved panel; and seat and back are often upholstered in leather, two carved and gilded lions being frequently placed on the back as a crowning ornament. The spread of Flemish Renaissance style in Cologne, along the shores of the North Sea, and in England during the first third of the 17th century, has already been menfioned. The pro- gressive element in Flemish Late Renaissance decorative furniture does not lie in the construction alone, but in the pure and simple employment of the craftsman’s methods. For example, orna- mental carving predominates on the Cologne court cupboards (descended from the Flemish) and on the English Jacobean cupboards; whereas in the best Flemish cupboards the flat fluted pilaster, the cornice, and above all the regular, vigorously moulded framework of the panels with their lozenges and raised portions, are the really prominent features. The inlaying and application of black ebony, yacca and such decorative materials, greatly assisted 28 x THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NETHERLANDS cabinet-making, as was also the case in Augsburg Late Renaissance. Thus Antwerp Late Renais- sance points the way to the new and great period of Baroque furniture. And, indeed, it is difficult to say when Late Renaissance merges into Baroque in Antwerp and Brussels. The furniture of the house which Rubens—the pioneer of Baroque north of the Alps—built in 1620 in Antwerp, may be considered as a milestone in the development of Baroque decorative furniture. In the northern part of Spain, the country furniture followed the example of the French Gothic in the Late Middle Ages. In the second half of the 15th century, connection with Flanders influenced furniture and other branches of art. In the southern part of the country Moorish influence predominated, as Hispano-Moresque carpets, faience and files prove. Cabinets are a special feature of Southern Spanish decorative furniture. Their date of origin is chiefly the 16th century. They consist of a box with a flap in front, which can be let down for writing purposes, mounted on a stand from which supports are drawn ouf for the flap. Grace- fully designed metalwork, iron or copper, is applied to the exterior of this writing flap, which is also enriched by handles and escutcheons in which the Gothic “plateresque” style survives. The exterior of the cabinet itself has star patterns of broken inlay band work, reminiscent of the Moresque style. The drawers are most delicately inlaid with ivory and wood in patterns that also indicate the vitality of the Moresque element. It is true that with the dawn of the Renais- sance towards the middle of the 16th century, box and lime wood carving in Romayne work often replace inftarsia, though the decorative colour and surface character still retain an Oriental trait peculiar fo Southern Spanish furniture. The stands of Spanish cabinets consist of two supports of three columns each, and a colonnade with round arches between, similar to those on tables of the French High Renaissance. The cabinets with inlay and carved work, coloured woods, ivory, amber and gilt copper mountings, were still manufactured in the 17th century in Seville and Salamanca. They are much influenced by Nuremberg and Augsburg cabinets; and this is indicated by a regulation of Philip II (1603), forbidding the import of Nuremberg cabinets in order to protect home industry. In the 19th century this industry was started again. Portugal also had workshops where inlaid cabinets with metal mountings were made. The Indo- Portuguese cabinets made in the East Indian colonies and imported from Macao in the second half of the 16th century are variants of these. They were ornamented with delicate ebony and ivory foliage patterns inlaid in solid wood of reddish hue, and with pierced gilded copper mounts. It is here that European furniture craffsmanship has points of contact with that of the Far East. And the predilection of Spanish and Portuguese cabinet-makers for bedsteads and tables made of fine turned uprights, placed closely together, seems to point to Indian influence. Apart from inlaid work, turning, and the use of gilded copper and wrought iron, a fourth peculi- arity of Hispano-Portuguese furniture is the covering of pieces such as chests and coffers and seats with embossed, carved, coloured and gilded leathers. Cordovan leather was celebrated for furniture coverings and leather tapestry in the 17th century. For the rest, the furniture of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Mexico and South America in the 17th and 18th centuries were similar to those of the mother country—chests with flat carving, brass bound, and covered with leather, turnery, and so forth. In Spain and the other European countries, the state furni- ture of the court and of the rich grandees developed along lines remote from the native art of the country. And in Spain, naturally, connections with Italian work, especially Northern Italian 29 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE Renaissance, were noticeable owing to the Influence of Charles V, and Philip II. Famous carving workshops were founded in Toledo under Italian and French influence, and the work they turned out belongs to the most magnificent monuments of High Renaissance in Spain; but it is chiefly confined to Church furniture. The covering of furniture with velvet enriched with highly orna- mental brass nails and rich gold fringe at a very early date is remarkable; and this applies also to the table covers and draping of interiors with fringed tapestries having cord and braid ornament. There are also Spanish Late Renaissance chests completely covered with velvet and embroidery. The portraits of Philip II and his court, by Velasquez, give us the best idea of the generous use of gold and silver, ornamental velvet upholstery and draping at the Spanish court during the first half of the 17th century. And thus again we reach the transitional period from Late Renaissance to Baroque furniture. CHAPTER TWELVE The Baroque Style WITH the advent of the Baroque style European furniture enters upon a new phase. What new forms did Baroque introduce in furniture? Where is it first met with? In answering such questions it may be repeated that changes in furniture style are not neces- sarily coeval with those of architecture, but follow laws of their own. This applies in the first part to domestic furniture, which is the chief subject of this work. The cabinet-maker and amateur of the last generation, when speaking of Flemish Baroque, thought of cupboards with heavy twisted columns and broken pediments; of sideboards with projecting cornices, exuberantly carved with fruif ornament and cherubs’ heads; of chairs with bulbous baluster legs, carved backs, and covered with dark velvet.... To a certain extent, this conception obtains to-day. The imitator of furniture styles in the late 19th century thought that it was possible to graft on to middle-class furniture architectural forms fostered under the influence of Rubens and echoed by the stately choir stalls and pulpits of the Antwerp churches. But one is surprised to see the austere forms of the furniture that is used so sparingly in the interiors depicted by the old pictures of Antwerp dwellings by Rubens, Jordaens, Gonzales Coques, and Teniers in Plantin Moretus’ and other houses. The novelty in Baroque furniture does not lie in a greater wealth of plastic ornament and carved detail. On the contrary, Late Renaissance furniture of the first third of the 17th century is over- loaded with architectural details and carving, such as the Cologne court cupboards, the South German ornamental cupboards, the gorgeous French columned cupboards of Burgundy and Lyonaise, the Schleswig and Danish oak credences faced with caryatides, as well as the English Jacobean cupboards, chests and arm-chairs decorated with flat carved ornament—all these Late Renaissance specimens are more richly embellished than the Flemish and Dutch cupboards which are contemporaries or forerunners of the Baroque, or belong fo that period altogether. With Italian furniture, the round tables on turned balusters and the large studded credences of smooth walnut from Bologna, as well as the austere Florentine ebony cabinets with pietra dura inlay of the early 17th century, all show a more developed Baroque than the Roman and Florentine Late Renaissance furniture, richly carved with cartouches and scrollwork, of the later part of the 16th century. It is the Augsburg and Paris ebony cabinets dating from the first third of the 17th century, rather than the richly carved Late Renaissance furniture, that show characteristics which point to the coming forms. The hard ebony favoured smooth, workman-like forms; mitred frames; undulating mouldings, and a certain angularity—details which pave the way for the new epoch. The Flemish and Dutch cabinet-makers were the most steadfast in constructing cupboards and credences with moulded frames and raised panels during the transition from Late Renaissance to Baroque. The importation of foreign woods, such as ebony, encouraged the skilful treatment of wood. It was not long before walnut was the wood most favoured for veneering, being glued on to an oak background as a smooth surfaced veneer. Flemish decorative furniture, and soon afterwards the new Dutch styles, had a revolutionary effect upon the furniture-making of Northern Europe. What is striking is the sudden appearance of Dutch cupboards with Baroque frames and banding in the middle of the 17th century, wherever the traditional carved oak style lingered— in the Friesian districts, in Denmark, along the Baltic and in England; the second phase of the Colonial style in the English settlements of North America in the latter half of the 17th century is also influenced. 31 THE ENCYCLOPAEDTA OF FURNITURE This important phenomenon should not therefore be connected with the Baroque style in archi- tecture. A formative element is active within this style which—in a wider sense—may be recog- nized as specifically Baroque: the formation of the whole piece by concentrating expressive details. Instead of breaking up the piece into a framework of small surfaces, Baroque has a few main divisions which alone are emphasized. Instead of many flamboyant surfaces there is an harmonious movement of the whole. Similarly we find that seats no longer have legs with alter- nating angular and round sections, but are made with baluster legs having a single motif prevail- ing. Another feature is the fixed upholstery on the seats, arms and backs, and later on cane instead of rush bottoms. These are some of the important points that assert themselves in Baroque decorative furniture. There are ofhers; for instance, the development of new cupboard and table types required by the changed manner of living. Without entering into details, it will be sufficient to state that the great change that took place in Baroque, turned furniture craftsmanship info those channels which decided its development unfil the present day. It is only when we see the furniture and household equipment of the Baroque period that we feel an echoing chord has been struck. It is only when we enter a Baroque apartment that we literally sense the spirit of those who once dwelt therein: it is only Baroque—and later—furniture that is directly connected by an unbroken thread with the present time. From what has been said, it will be clearly realized that the time limit of change varies in the different countries. As to furniture of the burgher class, the limit was first passed in Antwerp about 1620; soon afterwards (1630—1640) in Holland. Italy, the original home of Baroque in architecture, sculpture and painting, renounced her leading position in domestic furniture. After the Thirty Years’ War (circa 1660), Germany begins to participate in Baroque development. German furniture in the coasfal districts was decidedly influenced by the Netherlands. Together with the Restoration in England, English Baroque furniture begins to develop; it was also strongly influenced by Holland, and reaches a culminating point under William and Mary for the first time. The same applied to Scandinavia. During the same period Paris, a centre of meubles de luxe under Louis XIV, excels all others in the making of inlaid, bronze-mounted, gilded and caned sfate furniture. The patterns of such furniture, both for the varied kinds of inlaid work and the gilded Baroque carving, are to be found partly in the Florentine, Roman and Venetian meubles de luxe. The political and social power of the princes and nobility in the century following the Thirty Years’ War led fo the special development of meubles de luxe, which had already started in various places and which gave Parisian cabinet-making ifs peculiar character from the time of Louis XIV, till the Empire. But the decorative furniture and household equipment of the palaces and great houses of kings and nobles followed different lines from the middle-class furniture in Germany, England and other European countries. Naturally there was a great interchange both of forms and technique between state furniture and that used by the burghers. German meubles de luxe were particularly influenced by Italy, and later by France. . 32 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Flemish and Dutch Baroque I T was in the Flemish Netherlands that a revolutionary change in taste in the Baroque sense first took place. The outstanding monument of this change was Rubens’ mansion in Antwerp, built on his return from Italy after 1613. This master’s paintings, the interiors by Hecht, Jordans—whose Antwerp house was completed in 1641—Gonzales Coques, Teniers and others, provide an idea of Flemish Baroque interiors about the middle of the 17th century. In Flemish Baroque the remodelling power of the new style is chiefly evident in the conception and treatment of rooms, for it was in Antwerp that the interior was first conceived as a picturesque whole. There would be tall windows, divided into several sections, diamond-paned, shaded by shutters, and spreading a soft light; embossed leather tapestry, gilded and coloured with brown as the keynofe, having large patterns, or red Genoese velvet hangings also with large patterns, perhaps richly hued Brussels tapestry would cover the walls as well as panelling of stained oak. Vast chimney-pieces with black, white or red marble columns dominate the main wall, their fire- places furnished with brass fire-dogs of vigorous pattern, while above they are panelled with pictures in the style of Rubens, enclosed in black frames. In the houses of the nobility and the wealthy the doors of the halls are flanked by coloured marble columns, surmounted by pediments and surrounded by masses of pendant fruit, shell ornaments, antique statues and busts in niches and on consoles. Rubens introduced this style of door in Antwerp and Brussels by his engravings of Genoese Baroque portals (1622). The powerful Italian character of Rubens’ Baroque house in Antwerp was 'more pronounced on the facade, in the hall, colonnade and staircase, as well as in the garden with its ornamental statues. The decorative furniture of the Flemish Baroque interiors of this period (second quarter of the 17th century) is at first but slightly modified as compared with that of the Late Renaissance. Types that predominate are the four-doored oak cupboards and two-doored credences, divided by pilaster and console, with bombé bulbous pillars, lions’ heads and bun feet. Tables with bulb legs and chairs with oval baluster legs are not greatly modified at first; but the generous use of textiles, such as ample fringed velvet tablecloths, as well as velvet and leather chair-covers nailed to the seats and backs, and often hiding the frames (a touch of Spanish influence), promoted the development of the Baroque style. In this connection aftention may be drawn to the change in costume which adopted the wealth of folds in garments, typical of the period. This change first took place in Antwerp after 1610, and it contributed to the widening of seats and chairs. Together with four-doored credences, low cupboards with single doors are a peculiarity of this time. Oak remains the most important material. Panels and pediments are made of ebony; palisander and other stained exotic woods enliven the stiles and rails and the repeat panels. Painted spinets and globe stands of finely turned black wood are common. The construction and proportion of fur- niture remain rectangular, with sharp-cut lines in accordance with Late Renaissance tradition until the middle of the century. It is only in the Baroque period that the banding, notching and chamfering of the frames, and the acanthus and cartouche ornamentation of the carved friezes acquire a more vivid character. A turning point in the development of church furniture along these lines is reached by the fine oak confessionals and panelling in St. Paul’s, Antwerp, the frames and embellishment of which indicate relationship with the Antwerp cupboards of the period. They were made about 1645 under the influence of the sculptor Artus Quellinus the Elder, who, together with Duquesnay, is the leader of Baroque in Flemish sculpture. Both transplanted Bernini’s style to the Netherlands. Quellinus also helped to develop Dutch decorative D 33 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE sculpture and carving along Baroque lines by his plastic ornament on the town hall of Amsterdam, dating from the middle of the century. Flemish Baroque decorative furniture rests on the foundation of pure Late Renaissance. The difficulty in studying it lies in the limited number of rooms which have been preserved infact in their original state and surroundings, and the scarcity of the furniture still extant. This is explained by the many wars that have been fought on Belgian soil. It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Flemish Baroque because ifs importance lies in the fact that it was a pioneer of the new taste in decorative furniture. Holland, together with the Southern Netherlands, was also a cabinef-making centre fill the first third of the 17th century. Vredemann de Vries, who introduced Dutch Late Renaissance furniture in Antwerp in the last third of the 16th century, was a Dutchman, a Friesian, as his name shows. And the sharply defined pilasters, the framework and plastic details of Late Renais- sance prevail on Dutch as well as on Flemish furniture fill 1630-1640. It is only then that a peculiar national style developed in Dutch furniture side by side with the rise of the Dutch genius in painting and architecture. The extraordinary development of middle-class decorative furniture in Holland can only be understood when it is considered in connection with the sudden change of taste and the ideas relating to rooms and their furnishing. The wealth of representa- tions of living-rooms, bedrooms, music-rooms, drawing-rooms, halls, kitchens and closets, prove that such apartments were themselves appreciated as works of art. The number of such inferiors has never been exceeded by any other country or epoch. The apex of Dutch home culfure and furniture craftsmanship was reached a little lafer than in Belgium: it is contemporary with the generation living from 1640-1670. In confradistinction fo Belgian interiors we should nofe the greater height of the apartments, the taller and narrower windows and doors, the preference for bare whitewashed walls, the greater emptiness, but also the greater airiness and more generous lighting. The marble chimney-piece with a wooden overmantel is the chief embellishment of the wall in Holland. The pictures hang singly on the light walls and are usually set in broad, plain black or gilt carved frames. From the middle of the century painted Delft faience files played a part in decorating fire-places and walls. In Dutch furniture, which developed differently from Flemish after the forties, the distinction lies in the greater simplicity of forms, the restrained ouflines, and the suppression of ornamental carving in favour of frames with planed surfaces, mould- ings and raised panels. A kind of wardrobe only made in the southern province of Utrecht having two solid doors and round arches with dentals, is the one piece of furniture that is akin to Late Renaissance. In Holland oak also predominates at first, though panels are enriched with polished ebony, palisander and similar exotic woods. In 1660 walnut is equally important. At this period the austere constructional features of the four-doored cupboards, with panels in square and octagonal frames, are prominent. The more elaborate pieces are inlaid with star ornament in ivory or coloured wood. Chairs now have twisted baluster legs, and tables assume a vigorous oufline by reason of their oval bulb legs. Writing-bureaux and cabinets with several doors and mounted on turned legs gain increasing importance in the last half of the century, together with cupboards having two and four doors. The chief merit of Dutch Early Baroque furniture lies in the purity of its design, and the rigid 34 FLEMISH AND DUTCH BAROQUE strength of its construction and turned details. The furniture of this most brilliant phase of Dutch culture in the time of Rembrandt was decisive in its influence upon the domestic furniture of England, Germany and Scandinavia; an influence also wielded by Dutch domestic architecture. Towards the end of the 17th century, heavy hall cupboards with copiously carved projecting cornices and banded mouldings are made in Friesland. Low seats, folding chairs, made of ebony or palisander, with arcaded backs, developed under the influence of Dutch colonial carvers and turners in India; developments already noficeable in the Late Renaissance Portuguese turned furniture. Another striking innovation in the first half of the 17th century was the introduction of hand-made Persian rugs, which were used as tablecloths, drapery and furniture coverings according to old Dutch pictures of interiors. But in the last quarter of the 17th century a new influence comes from the East—from China—which was of lasting importance for the future of decorative furniture. Between 1680 and 1690 Chinese lacquer furniture and wainscofing appear in Holland at the same time as Chinese porcelain. Strange fo say, the two-doored cupboard with many drawers inside is the chief piece of this class. Probably the majority of these cabinets dating from the end of the 17th century were ordered by the Dutch in China. The frames are exclusively native work, and are either of turned columns adopted from European cabinets and tables, or they are curved in the manner developed in Chinese tables, bases for vases and stools of the Ming period. The introduction of Chinese cabriole legs for cabinets and tables was the cause of a further development from severe Baroque forms fo more lively lines. But it was in England and not in Holland that this change bore fruit at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. 35 CHAPTER FOURTEEN German Baroque GERMAN cabinet-makers were several decades behind the Dutch in accepting the Baroque style: it was only in 1660, twelve years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, that Baroque was completely adopted by them. The differences in the character and design of the furniture made in South Germany and the Alpine countries and that produced in Low Germany were partly effaced by the introduction of Baroque. But still there are differences: decorative furniture in the Free Towns of Franconia and Swabia, in Nuremberg and Augsburg, besides in Frankfort- on-the-Main, or in Bale also, is different from that of the Hanse Towns of Hamburg, Liibeck or Danzig. The replacement of superimposed minute architectural details and scroll ornament by large columns and pilasters and fielded and banded frames, in connection with the general use of walnut veneer, is common to German furniture during the period 1660—1670. The effective inspiration gained by German cabinet-making—especially north of the Main—from the austere Early Baroque art of Holland is easily recognized. But the main line of German art, tending towards a more plastic and picturesque mode of expression, may be observed in the modification of the restrained, severe forms of Dutch Early Baroque by more pronounced curves. German Baroque furniture of the burgher type in the last quarter of the 17th century and in the beginning of the 18th century differs from that of the Dutch and English middle-class furniture in boldness of profile. | In South Germany, Nuremberg is a centre of Baroque decorative furniture. The Nuremberg two-doored wardrobes (circa 1660—1680) combine the carved ear-shaped and elaborate foliated ornament of Early Baroque (spread by the engravings of the cabinet-makers Untentsch and Erasmus) with the turned columns, the notched and mitred banded frame, and the wave mould- ings which were already used on the Augsburg and Nuremberg decorative cupboards at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. In Switzerland, Bale is a centre of Early Baroque owing to the work of Johann Heinrich Keller, the maker of the walnut credence with vigorous, twisted posts, completed in 1663; now in the Berlin Schloss Museum. The taste for credences and sideboards—among them also tripartite designs with superstructures—is shared by the Swiss Baroque and Late Renaissance. The heavy columns and the carved ear-shaped ornament are connected with Late Renaissance Bale furniture. Pieces of furniture with coloured relief mosaic work made of various kinds of wood and manufactured chiefly in Eger about 1660, form a type of the Early Baroque indicative of the desire for plastic enrichment. This Eger furniture con- sisted mainly of little cabinets with two doors and many drawers framed in black pear wood waved mouldings. By about the year 1700 South German craftsmanship had reached its zenith in the making of planed and veneered mouldings. The most magnificent examples are the so-called Frankfort cupboards, with their curves, and the wonderful play of light on the high polish of their mouldings and mirror-like surfaces. The Baroque bed of the South German burghers retains the form of the four-poster with a tester supported by the turned columns that were so popular in the Late Renaissance period; only at fhe head, foot and sides the framework is notched. Tables and chairs are usually supported by turned or twisted posts; Renaissance four-legged seats with carved backs continue in use. The furniture of the Hanse Towns during the period from 1660—1680 is immediately connected with its Dutch forerunners. Together with the last Low German carved oak cupboards, Dutch cupboards appear in the Hamburg district and in Schleswig in about the middle of the century. 36 GERMAN BAROQUE The earliest four-doored Hamburg and Danzig walnut cupboards dating from 1680 are charac- terized by a comparatively severe treatment of the columns and framework. In about 1700 the projection of the cornices and raised panel surface of the enormous two-doored cupboards (shapps) culminate in Hamburg. The upper frieze, capitals, pilasters and spandrel pieces of the pointed oval raised panels, and the bases with drawers and heavy bun feef, are copiously orna- mented with carved acanthus, flowers, fruit and so forth, The Hamburg smapps of the best quality usually have a continuous horizontal upper cornice crowned centrally by a modelled pediment. The pediments of the Danzig cupboards are mostly broken. The carvings on Hanse furniture have developed from the decorative sculpture of the Dutch school founded by Quellinus about 1680. In addition to: hall cupboards with two doors, single-doored narrow cupboards, also cabinets on twisted posts (often designed for use in corners) were made in Danzig. To these must be added linen presses, chests and Danzig flap tables, characterized by heavy spiral legs and moulded stretchers. The spiral leg also predominates in seats until about 1700. The heavy hall cupboard is found east as far as Elbing and K6nigsberg; west as far as Friesland, Westphalia and Hanover, and south to the Mark Brandenburg. In 1700 the beautifully figured brown walnut is offen decorated with plain inlaid ornament of other woods and ivory, star patterns being frequently used. In 1690 there is a new piece, the writing-bureau on a lower part with drawers resting on eight twisted legs terminating in bun feet linked by stretchers. Anofher type of writing-desk has an upper part containing drawers as a modification of the cabinet. These writing-bureaux—proofs of awakening mental activity—are copies of Dutch patterns which again have been inspired by the Parisian bureaux. They are first met with in the furnishing of castles and palaces. Towards the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, an important innovation in German decorative furniture becomes outstandingly conspicuous, at first in the equipment of castles. The curved cabriole leg replaces the vertical twisted legs of cabinets, tables and chairs, introduced, as in the case of Dutch and English furniture, under the Chinese influence. Lacquer furniture and carved chairs of the new shape are first found at the court of Frederick I, in Berlin, closely connected with English and Dutch models. Only a brief mention of the German Baroque meubles de luxe is possible. They first appear at the Imperial court of Vienna and at the Elector’s court in Bavaria under the influence of Italian Baroque furniture. It is from those courts that the most magnificent Baroque decorations and state furniture of Germany spread in about 1700, work imitated by Andreas Schliiter and Eosander von Goethe for the Prussian court. But this furniture partly suggests the penetration of Parisian, Louis XIV, ideas. The decorations and furniture designed by Tessin for the Swedish court in Stockholm are similar. 37 CHAPTER FIFTEEN Developments in England during the Baroque Period BAROQUE developments in decorative furniture begin in England (as in Germany), about the year 1600, when Late Renaissance finally disappears. The flat-carved, usually somewhat coarse country-~made Jacobean furniture in oak, gives place to simple walnut furniture, the product of craftsmen inspired by Holland. This happens in the Restoration period. The influence of the Italian and French courts mark the luxurious furnishing favoured by the reinstated monarchy and the nobility. Proof of this is provided by the state beds in the palaces and great country houses, four-posters ornamented with over-elaborate embroidery, woven draperies and rich fringes. Several of these beds are fradifionally connected with Henrietta Maria, fhe Queen of Charles I, who returned in 1660, and with Charles II. There were also state seats with gilded and richly carved backs and frames, upholstered with velvet and “petit point,’ high-backed seats; openwork, gilt flower and festoon carvings by Grinling Gibbons in London, as well as decorative cupboards in choice woods. But the strength of the special character of English decorative furniture in the last third of the 17th century does not lie in this ornate expression, but in the development of domestic walnut furniture along Dutch lines. English furniture goes a step further in its utilitarian forms than the Dutch. Walnut cupboards and credences with flat raised panels in the doors and applied moundings on the pilasters were made after about 1675. The inner panels of the door were some- times inlaid with star and flower ornament of ivory, bone and mother-of-pearl. The Englishman’s appreciation of pracfical needs is already noticeable in his furniture types, particularly in the placing of drawers one above the other. Thus the cabinet becomes the high, narrow fallboy. The English also made a combination of a chest-like base on turned legs with a cabinet super- structure. Porcelain and china were kept in cupboards with glazed doors, mounted on stands. The restrained mouldings and entire absence of projecting cornices are common fo all English furniture of this period, as well as the elimination of all architectural features by flat, regular division of the surface, either by means of projecting bordering mouldings, or by rows of drawers one above the other. The escufcheons are also smooth, cut in flat, decorative shapes, with drop handles. The tables, like those of Holland, have twisted legs, but are fitted with drawers and distinguished by carefully turned stretchers between the square sections of the legs. There are round flap tables, with four pairs of movable supports, used as dining-tables, and eight-legged gate tables after 1688, as well as long side tables for dishes. Single and arm-chairs resemble those of Holland. Arm-chairs with high backs and caned oval openings, surrounded by pierced, foliated ornament appear. The curved arms and legs as well as the front rail are carved. The caned day-bed with six legs and slanting headpiece is popular in England and Holland. The simple cane chair is composed of spindles, decorated with lattice ornament, and stretchers, forms inherited from old English pre-Revolutionary chairs. Other pieces of furniture include stools and bedsteads. The material used is almost exclusively walnut, and for this reason MacQuoid classifies the period as “The Age of Walnut.” This decorative English furniture is also the basis of American furniture of the second Colonial style period in New York (taken by the English from the Dutch in 1664) as well as in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, founded by the English Puritans who emigrated during the reign of William of Orange. Some furniture was taken over by the emigrants, who included some English cabinef- makers in their number. The simplification of forms is characteristic of the Colonial style. The important feature of this furniture is its domesticated, utilitarian and straightforward character, in the best sense of those terms. 38 ’ : DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE BAROQUE PERIOD Under William and Mary (1689-1702), English Baroque furniture continued to develop its peculiar characteristics, culminating under Queen Anne (1702-1714). Three special features are noticeable. There was skilful marquetery work, which was a wood mosaic let info a veneer and not inlaid in solid wood: marquetery developed in conjunction with veneering. Black and red lacquer furniture was made in the Chinese manner, and finally, affer 1700, curved supports under seats, tables, cabinets and cupboards were introduced. Two groups of inlaid work may be distinguished. One, the softer variety, may be connected with the wood marquefery of early Boulle work. The chief motifs are flower vases, bouquets, acanthus leaves and birds, executed in yellow and brown woods and green ivory on a black ground. The older pieces clearly indicate their origin, namely the Florentine inlay known as pietra dura, imitated by Boulle. Writing-cabinets on turned legs, cupboards with four doors, commodes and table tops are inlaid in this manner. The second group has round and oval panels, or whole surfaces, covered with delicate, closely inferwoven arabesques—the so-called “seaweed” mar- quetery—mostly dark brown on a yellowish ground. This class of intarsia was used chiefly on commodes, cabinets and the narrow, long-case hall clocks, introduced about 1700. The single as well as the double chest of drawers is important in Queen Anne furnishing. The commode, which seems fo have come from France, replaced the chest and coffer in middle-class homes at the beginning of the 18th century, relegating the latter to the cottages of the peasantry. A characfer- istic of English inlaid furniture about 1700 is the complete smoothness of surface with a nearly complete lack of all projecting mouldings. Another piece of furniture peculiar to the Queen Anne period is the lacquer cabinet which makes its appearance at the end of the 17th century. It proves that outstanding Chinese motifs were applied by English cabinet-makers to established English forms. In construction, with ifs numerous drawers and ifs stand, it is the same as the inlaid cabinet. England and not Holland should be regarded as the centre of production both for inlaid and lacquer cabinets. As a rule, English lacquer furniture is distinguished from the original Chinese work, dating from the end of the 17th century, by coarser and more powerful reliefs of the gilded and silver-gilt decorative surface, and by the failure to achieve the immaculate, brilliant coating of the surfaces. Furniture is found with gold and silver or black, red and even green and white groundwork. In England, Holland and Berlin, stands and cases—pianofortes for instance—were decorated in the Chinese manner by means of oil painting and varnishing. The third peculiarity of Queen Anne furniture, doubtlessly connected with Chinese influence, is the substitution at first of the vertical supports of chairs and tables by curved forms. Thus the first step is taken which leads from the plain and restrained conceptions of Baroque to the Rococo period. 39 CHAPTER SIXTEEN Italian Baroque IN the 17th century Italy is no longer able to compete with the Northern European countries in the making of domestic furniture: creative power wanes, and with it the harmonious develop- ment of the craft. Florentine and Bolognese furniture in the first third of the 17th century is not greatly different in type and form from the work of the Late Renaissance. But Italy, the original home of Baroque, successfully influenced other countries in the design of court furniture and state apartments. It was Italy that first created those forms of Baroque ornament—cartouche, rich acanthus scrollwork, and so forth—which lafer on impressed their characteristic features on carving, especially that of the court furniture of the second half of the 17th century. Federigo Zuccaro’s ornamental engravings and those after Agostino Carracci (about 1600) started the movement which Stefano della Bella and Pietro da Cortona led to its goal. The work of both these artists inspired the Baroque style in Paris. It would be beyond the scope of this work to deal with the ornamental treatment of Italian apartments about the middle of the 17th century; although if might be desirable to do so, because this Italian art is the groundwork for the decorative treatment of apartments and meubles de luxe of the royal castles north of the Alps in the late 17th century. The first to decorate apartments in Rome about 1600—a gallery in the Palazzo Farnese—in the Baroque style were the Carracci from Bologna. The works of Pietro da Cortona in the Florentine Palazzo Pitti and the Roman palaces of Barberini and Doria-Pamfili, carried out between 1630 and 1660, are the last of the Baroque period. It is there that a harmonious treatment of halls, apartments and wide galleries develops according to a decorative principle, which has for its main feature the accumulation of ornamental detail in the upper parts of a room, on the over- doors, cornices, and particularly on the ceiling. The rich furniture, console tables, seats placed along the walls, and cabinets, are designed to accord with the wall decoration. The plastic motifs of the painted and stuccoed ornament are graffed on to the furniture. We find cabinets and tables supported by heavy, carved, painted and gilded underframing, in which naked figures, such as naiads, amorini and negroes, and eagles and lions, are associated with scrolls, shells and luxuriant acanthus ornament. The table tops are made of coloured marble slabs, marble mosaic work, piefra dura and scagliola inlaid with stucco. Richly carved and gilded arm-chairs, single chairs and stools upholstered in large patterned velvet complete the furnishing. Mirrors and picture frames with their vigorous pierced gilt carvings, vie with the furniture. The court Baroque style of the Italian apartments and furniture, which attained its culminating point in Rome about 1650, is of universal import as if is the forerunner of the Louis XIV style in Paris. In the second half of the 17th century the exuberant manner of Baroque carving in Italy is applied to walnut furniture. Together with northern Baroque, Italian Baroque shares the sturdy characteristics of good, honest craftsmanship, and expresses them in the construction of furniture; in the walnut veneer of the surfaces, and the division of surfaces by means of planed frames, mouldings and raised panels. The carved plastic ornament is concentrated chiefly on the pedi- ment, headings, supports and sides, as indicated by the Italian Baroque cupboards of the latter half of the 17th century, when cupboards with two or four doors supplant chests and credences. The main centre of this development is in Northern Italy. Excellent specimens of Baroque furniture were made in Parma, Genoa, Turin and Venice. Seats are also richly embellished with walnut cartouches, scrolls and even figures. Two important artists in the 17th century, famous for their carving, are Andrea Brustolone in Venice and Filippo Parodi in Genoa. A peculiarity 40 ITALIAN BAROQUE of Venetian furniture is the stool with scroll feet, as well as the arm-chair with low back and curved arms, the feet and legs of which are offen ornamented with carved figures. The Italian tables of mature Baroque in the second half of the 17th century often have unrestrained volute ornament with carvings and cartouches on underframe and plinth, as well as heavy balusters. But it was church furniture, the prie-dieu and chairs, lecterns, confessionals, efc., that were the most richly decorated with pierced volutes and cartouche ornament. In Italian Baroque the enrichment of walnut furniture by partial gilding is preferred. The inclination for coloured and brilliant decoration is expressed by furniture that is painted all over. Especially is this the case in Venice, where, by the way, Chinese lacquer work was introduced at the end of the 17th century. This taste for colour is also met by the insertion of cut or painted glass facets for the enlivening of furniture, a form of decoration particularly associated with Venice and the surrounding district. 41 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Louis XIV Period WHEN Baroque middle-class decorative furniture begins to be made in the Netherlands, Germany and England about 1660, meubles de luxe begin to develop at the court of Louis XIV, in such a manner that they are not only supreme amongst the court furniture of the period, but are enormously important in the whole history of cabineft-making during the following century and a half. An exhaustive description of the French kings’ styles would take us beyond the limits of this book. Only some of the main feafures can be dealt with, principally those which are important in the development of furniture-making and the creation of new fypes and ornament. The meubles de luxe in the palaces of Louis XIV, and of the Parisian aristocracy develop chiefly from Italian state furniture about 1660. Thus the most important of the cupboards, the ebony cabinet with stone, wood and metal inlay, is a development of the Florentine Late Renaissance and Baroque cabinet. One of the ébénistes whom Charles Le Brun (the King’s Art Director) called to the Manufacture Royale des Meubles de la Couronne in Paris 1660, was the Italian Cucci. The stone workers, that is fo say, the marble inlayers, were also mostly Italians—Giacetti, Branchi, for instance—and one of the king’s woodcarvers was an Italian, the scu/pteur ordinaire des Meubles de la Couronne, Philipp Caffieri, who came from Rome from the court of Pope Alexander VII. His task was to make gilded carved wood furniture for the state apartments and galleries, among them “scabellons” and “guéridons” as well as- chairs and table supports. But the leading French Baroque artists followed closely the patterns of Roman and Florentine Baroque court furniture. Charles Le Brun, the head of the Parisian colony of artists, had studied in Rome from 1642 to 1645 before he began to decorate the royal palaces and the houses of the nobility in Paris about 1660. Jean le Paufre, who together with Le Brun was the most influential master amongst French decorafors, and was originally a joiner who had designed richly carved wainscotings and furniture, continued to develop in France the heavy Roman Baroque ornament of the 17th century. Jean le Pautre and Le Brun exercised an influence of the greatest importance on Louis XIV ornament. From the beginning, the chief pieces of furniture among Louis XIV cupboards and chests were the cabinets, buffets and cabinets de /Juxe, medal and coin cabinets and low ebony cupboards with rich marquefery of multi-hued woods, and particularly of torfoiseshell and gilt brass. The furniture is enriched chiefly by fire-gilt bronze mounts along the edges and corners; required partly for protecting the fine veneer work. But on the more elaborate pieces we find figure reliefs and even cast bronze plastic groups. The leading artist in the true sense of the word is the ébéniste (maitre ébeniste) who, together with the marqueteur and the broncier, gave to French sfate furniture ifs special character. During the first period the three types of craftsmen are offen united in one person, as was the case with the Italian Cucci (1664-1673) and with André Charles Boulle. Boulle’s workshop, especially in ifs later days under his four sons, developed into an industrial concern with carefully apportioned division of labour. The same development obtained again and again with the great Parisian cabinet-making artists. Even a century later, David Réntgen in Neuwied, who was in connection with Paris, was with his hundred employees— including locksmiths, mechanics and bronze-casters—a manufacturer in the sense of the great Parisian furniture-makers, of whom Boulle was the first. Boulle’s earliest furniture—some coin and other cabinets—has marquetery inlay of coloured woods with flower and bird patterns after the model of the Florentine cabinets inlaid with piefra Oura. Bronze only plays a secondary part 42 THE LOUIS XIV PERIOD at first, as was also the case with Augsburg and Parisian ebony furniture in the first quarter of the 17th century. About 1680 fortoiseshell, brass or tin marquetery predominates. The patterns are cut out of two superimposed sheets so that two exact replicas are formed, the one in metal and the other tortoiseshell (premiére partie and contre partie). This is the Boulle process, which has made that craffsman’s name famous until the present day. The process was transferred from Boulle’s workshops to many others, and was also copied in Germany. It thrived during the whole of the 18th century, and was adopted again in the 19th century by the Parisian furniture industry. Furniture ornamented with metal marquetery and connected with Boulle himself consists of cabinets, coin cabinets and two-doored low cabinets of heavy build, with straight lines, and square tapering legs, made in the first part of the Louis XIV style period (till 1700). The ornament consists of large, symmetrical convoluted patterns. The bronze mountings and reliefs complete an impression of severity and magnificence. The carved and gilt stands of early Boulle furniture, like the gilt console tables of Early Louis XIV type, developed from the gorgeous Baroque forms of Roman and Florentine state furniture. Hermze, amorini, fauns and nymphs, volute-like consoles, interlaced ribbons and florid acanthus convolutions are the basic decorative elements of the carved furniture with which we must imagine the Galérie d’Apollon and the other state rooms were furnished by Le Brun for Louis XIV. Ofher pieces were arm-chairs of semi-circular form with cane seats and backs, or covered with petit point needlework or gobelin covers. Parisian Baroque textiles, especially appliqué work, aftain their highest development in the great lits de parade covered with their high canopies and flanked with elaborate hangings. Towards the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th there was a tendency to lighten the Louis XIV style. And it was this tendency that originated the chest of drawers, which became so important in the 18th century. It is first met with in the work of Jean Bérain, whose engraved designs of furniture, dating about 1700, paved the way in many respects for a new development. A new and important furniture type, first seen in Bérain’s engravings, is the bureau. An older type is the writing-table with drawers, having an upper part fitted with more drawers; that is to say, a development from the Late Renaissance writing-cabinet. The other type of bureau which becomes popular about 1700 has drawers on both sides in the lower part. Generally if is supported by eight legs, of which each group of four are joined by stretchers over the feet. Both types may be found in the furniture made by Boulle. The tortoiseshell and brass ornament on Boulle furniture assumes a new form about 1700 in the shape of a closer and finer ribbon-work. The greatest designers of this style of ornament are Bérain and Daniel Marot. Besides commodes, cabinets, and bureaux, long-case clocks with rich bronze ornamentation, bracket clocks and consoles, jewel-cases and barometers were made round about the year 1700 by Boulle and his companions. The really inventive mind, the form-creating artist inspiring Boulle and the whole of the Parisian makers of decorative furniture at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, is Bérain. The development of Parisian meubles de luxe in the later part of the Louis XIV period had a decisive influence on the neighbouring countries, as well as on furniture in the homes of the middle classes. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Régence Style in France and Germany DURING the last years of Louis XIV’s reign (circa 1710 fill about 17355), the style of French furniture is known by the name of Régence, after the regency. of Philip, Duke of Orleans. This phase of decorative furniture-making, marking the fransition from Baroque to Rococo, is equally noticeable in the neighbouring countries, especially in Germany, and, in a different manner, in England also. The characteristic feature of Régence is the modifying of the plainness of Louis XIV forms during the later years of their development at the end of the 17th century. This change is noticed most in ornament. For this reason the Régence style may be best studied in the flat carved panelling that became the fashion in Paris in 1715, particularly in the salons and smaller apart- ments of the Regent, and in those of the hétels of the nobility. From there it spread everywhere to the palaces of the princes and aristocracy, and also to Germany, and even fo the Russian court af St. Petersburg. The leading features of Parisian Régence panelling—first developed and popularized after 1715 by the intendant of the royal edifices, Robert de Cotte, 1708—1735—can only be touched on here in so far as its forms are connected with the furniture of the period. The decorative characteristics are the curve at the corners and the foliage and ribbon ornament which encircle the inner edge in a continuous line. This ornament consists of curved and angulated ribbons with volute. scrolls, shells and acanthus leaves in severely symmetrical grouping. The beginnings are in the grotesques of Bérain and Marot, the two Parisian artists who also relaxed the severity of the heavy Louis XIV style of about 1700. Foliage and ribbon ornament also pre- dominated on Parisian furniture about 1720. The gilded, pierced and carved console tables, mirror frames, state chairs and fabourets; the inlay work of Boulle furniture, writing-tables, long-case clocks, commodes, of which several were made for German royal casfles after de Cofte’s designs about 1720, prove this predominance. In those days the furniture forms themselves changed fundamentally. Instead of the straight legs for the support of cupboards, tables and chairs, the curve is now introduced. It is very pronounced in Boulle’s later writing-tables, and sfill more so in the writing-tables representing the early style of Charles Cressent (circa 1725). With these Régence writing-tables in Cressent’s style, the upper curve of the leg passes without interruption into the adjoining underframe, which is likewise curved. The curve in Régence furniture is but slight and has the contour of a cross-bow (contour a larbaléte). This also applies to the upper members of the bookcase, which was then a newly introduced piece of furniture. Other character- istics are the thin bronze mouldings and frames enclosing the drawers, panels, edges and corners, as well as the legs of the furniture, and following the gentle curves and contours of the designs. The fire-gilf, modelled bronze ornament is concentrated at single points in contradistinction to the heavy mounts of Louis XIV furniture. Particularly characteristic of these concentrations of ornament are the female busts which terminate the volutes of the upper curves; these being called espagnolettes. Chairs and seats are also provided with curved legs, rails and arms. Their backs offer an opportunity for developing pierced carving consisting of foliage and ribbons. Among receptacles, the commode is by far the most popular. The name first appears in 1708, and it is certain that its invention was not much earlier. Probably it was invented by someone in close connection with that ingenious designer, Bérain. In about 1720 the commodes are slightly bombé and the legs curved. Commodes with Boulle marquetery, with foliage and ribbon ornament are very numerous. 44 THE REGENCE STYLE IN FRANCE AND GERMANY In Parisian Régence decorative furniture, ebony veneer is superseded delicately striped, light, polished walnut and rosewood veneers, and sometimes by mahogany. The high artistic value of Régence furniture and carving lies in its blending of austere restraint with delicate movement. An important factor about the Parisian decorative furniture of the Régence period is that it exercised a greatly modifying influence on that of the neighbouring countries. Actually, the term “Régence” is only suitable for the contemporary decoration of state apart- ments, and for the state furniture of the various grades of the German nobility. These meubles de luxe developed in close connection with the Paris Régence, either by the direct agency of French master decorators, such as de Cotte who furnished the castles of the Rhenish electors, or by the studies of German architects and decorators in Paris (Balthasar Neumann of Wiirzburs). The German Régence began to blossom about 1720. Its most brilliant monuments are Effner’s decorations and furniture in the Elector’s castle in Munich and in Schloss Schleisheim, as well as the contemporary decorations and furniture in Count Schénborn’s castle Pommersfelden near Bamberg. The celebrated Favourite Schloss in Mayence, furnished and decorated by the orders of the same Elector, has perished. Another monument of Régence style is the Belvedere castle of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna; but this has been changed. Wherever a direct influence of Parisian Régence style can be traced (for instance, in the castles of Bonn, Ansbach and Schleisheim) the gilt carvings on a white ground are akin to the modest Paris Régence panelling. The German element is recognizable in the rich decoration of the walls and ceilings with foliage and ribbon pattern. The state furniture, matching such decoration, is often more lively than that of the Paris Régence by reason of its plastic motifs, figures, masks of fauns, birds, Chinese dragons and so forth. Austrian meubles de luxe indicate a preference for heavy curved, volute legs, showing a closer connection with the work of Northern Italy, especially that of Venice, as Lucas von Hildebrandt, the chief master decorator of the Viennese Régence, was in touch with Northern Italy. For the rest, decorative furniture with Boulle marquetery was made in Augsburg and Munich. German burgher furniture proves ifs national tendency by developing an individual style, based on the inspiration received from the Paris Régence about 1720. The centres of German decorative furniture were then in South Germany; the chief ones were in the capitals of the ecclesiastical electors in Bamberg, Wiirzburg and Mayence. The association of the writing-table with drawers and a superimposed cabinet produced the writing-cabinet about 1720, which was an important sfep in cabinet-making. The association of a commode with a tall double-doored cupboard and sloping central portion closed by a flap, formed the bureau about 1730, and was sfill more noteworthy. In 1720 the commode was in general use. The surface of the drawers was slightly serpentine. The pronounced fielded panels of the Baroque cupboard doors lose their emphatic differentiation of surface, and decoration relies on ribbon ornament in grained walnut marquetery; and this also applies to drawer fronts. Inlaid work in various woods, ivory, brass and particularly tin, develops from Boulle marquefery. Pommersfelden castle contains masterpieces of German wrifing-cabinets and bureaux with inlay work. The china cupboards from the Brunswick castle of Salzdahlum belong to the front rank of German Régence cabinet-making, about 1720. They are distinguished by the slightly curved pediments, ribbon intarsia of grained walnut, and pierced and incised trellis work. These cup- boards show the German ribbon pattern at its best, and deserve to be matched with Cressent’s 45 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE bookcases made about 1725. The Augsburg engravers modified foliage and ribbon ornament e according to French patterns and made it popular in Germany. The furniture designs a of the ‘silversmith eaapp in Augsburg helped the introduction of the new cupboatdy type : with curved underframes and legs. ‘High chair backs with smooth wooden splats begin predominate. CHAPTER NINETEEN English Early Georgian Furniture and French Rococo GEORGE ], ascended the English throne in 1714, and from that time the decorative furni- ture of the court and the aristocracy follows closely the lines of Parisian meubles de luxe, occasion- ally outstripping them in ornate carved ornamentation. After Wren and Vanbrugh (Marlborough’s architect), William Kent follows as the chief architect of great country houses in this period. Designs for elaborate carved furniture are also ascribed to him. But the chief activity of English cabinet-makers of the period was devoted to domestic furniture, the production of which had begun fo flourish in the times of William and Mary and Queen Anne. The tallboys, china cabinets, chests of drawers, tables and chairs are recognizable by the pronounced curve of the legs, which thicken towards the upper part and have hoof-shaped feet. The delicate contours of these legs, which indicate their reception of elastic pressure from above and the firmness of their hold upon the ground, show the tendency in English cabinet- making fo combine the useful with the ornamental. In about 1725 the feet are of the claw-and- ball type, a feature also transferred to American Colonial furniture and which survives in Chippen- dale chairs. The chair backs are high and slender with solid curved splats; the carving is limited to single sections, for example, to the knees of legs. Pierced splats are met with af an early date, especially in seftees. The influence of the Chinese curved leg is quite evident in England, and the flourishing period of lacquer furniture is also due to Chinese influence. About 1720 flower and foliage marquetery, which had attained to a high development in the Queen Anne period, begins slowly to disappear. About this date walnut also begins to be replaced by mahogany. Anew type of furniture is the four-cornered card table with curved edges and rounded corners; a type that is depicted in Hogarth’s pictures, together with the chairs just described. English furniture of the period of George I and George II shows a development of ifs own in a sfill more pronounced manner than does that of Queen Anne. This development is totally different from that of the Low Dutch furniture to which it is related, and was brought to per- fection by Chippendale, whose work first appears about 1735. What strikes one about English furniture is the great quantity of lacquer pieces. The connection with China dating back to the reign of Queen Anne led to a veritable passion for lacquer cabinets, bureaux, painted lacquer pieces, tables and even rooms in the great houses of the nobility completely covered with lacquer panelling: especially was this the case between 1725 and 1750. Lacquer painting on furniture and boxes became a favourite pastime of ladies in society. The modification of French Baroque decorative furniture which began with the Régence is completed during the reign of Louis XV, in Louis Quinze or Rococo style. This most brilliant period of French decorative furnifure, indeed of all decorative furniture, covers the generation of about 1735 to 1765. In the carved panelling of the early thirties of the century, in the decora- tions by Pineau, Leroux, Germain Boffrand, Verberckt and others, if is frue that the austerity and restraint of Régence carving (introduced by Cotte) is retained. At first it is only Parisian Rococo furniture, bronzes and silver work that are liberated from the restraint of Régence, and tend towards greater vivacity of contour and relief. The French master cabinef-makers, the ébénistes, the bronze workers, marqueteurs and sculptors were carried forward along the path of style development by Juste Auréle Meissonier of Turin who worked in Paris from 1723 as goldsmith, architect, sculptor and ornament designer. He is the father of Rococo. His numerous 47 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE engraved designs for wall decoration, furniture and smaller household requirements, china brackets and candelabra, first introduced the irregular rocaille or shell motif into the ribbon and foliage pattern of the Régence. Thus a movement was started which finally supplanted the restrained character of the Régence by a receding and swelling play of lines and contours. This new departure was coeval with a growing refinement of taste which had ifs inception when Louis XV ascended the throne. This refinement of taste, home culture and decorative furniture was due to the feminine influence that obtained a dominating posifion at the court of Louis XV. Not only are the more delicate contours of the furniture proofs of this, but also the appearance of a number of new and comfortable types of furniture, such as the lady’s high-legged writing- desk with sloping lid and drawers inside, the carftonnier, a cabinet fitted with drawers for letters and with a clock on a high stand. Beyond these there were corner commodes (encoignure), small writing-tables for ladies (bonheur Ou jour), a small dressing-table (poudreuse) with hinged looking- glass, round and square work tables, and tables de nuit, etc. The greatest comfort is combined with extreme elegance in seats and couches, the canapés, chaise-longues, fauteuils, bergéres, and so forth. The graceful undulations of the delicately carved supports and backs are associated with light and charming colourings in the silk, tapestry and embroidery covers. Much importance is attached to matching the furniture with the wall panels and hangings. Chests of drawers, writing-tables, bureaux, and so forth, are not only enlivened by the lines of the curved legs, but surfaces are also bombé and undulating. The light veneering of precious woods, which is often enlivened by curved ribbon, leafage and flower ornament, or by square and diamond pattern in multi-coloured marquetery, is in beautiful harmony with the lines of the surface. The most complete plastic expression is given to the furniture by the fire-gilt bronze ornament. As the originals of these bronze ornaments were modelled in clay, the lively spirit of the Parisian Rococo could be most vividly expressed in them. This type of ornament reached its culminating point about the middle of the century. The austere mountings and ribbon ornament of the Régence are now completely superseded by the broad or narrow rocaille scrolls with flowing curves, leaves and denficulations on all sides, and which also rise and fall in reliefs and augment the light effects by maft and highly polished gilding. Jacques Caffieri (died 1755) is considered to be the greatest sculptor in bronze. His workshop was kept on by his son Philip until 1774. Not only commodes, writing-tables and so forth, were made by him, but also bronze candelabra and mounts for Chinese and Meissen porcelain. His name is connected with the best Parisian Louis XV bronze-mounted furniture (although it must be remembered that he was only a craftsman in bronze) just as the best bronze Régence furniture is ascribed to Charles Cressent, who, however, was only a sculptor in bronze in his youth. Cres- sent’s workshop was active well into the Rococo period, although the best work was done before. Furniture, particularly commodes, encoignures, bedside tables, etc., of black lacquer with gilt- coloured relief and fire-gilt bronze mounts, was made by those families of lacquer craftsmen, Martin (vernis Martin) and Chevalier, and was put on the market by Boudin. Towards 1760 the curved profile of furnifure is no longer so pronounced; bronze ornament becomes more restrained and is limited to the legs, edges and frames. The cylinder bureau becomes an important item in the output of Parisian cabinet-makers. The chief master of this last Rococo phase in which the first signs of Louis XVI style appear is Jean Francois Oeben—of German origin—the creator of the celebrated Bureau de Roi, begun in 1760. This piece of decorative furniture was completed by Jean Henri Riesener—also a German—the master who finally moulded Louis XV style into Louis XVI. He married Oeben’s widow in 1767, and continued the business. 48 CHAPTER TWENTY German, Dutch, Danish and Italian Rococo THE dominating position which French decoration and furniture of the Régence style acquired, chiefly at the German courts and also at those of the other European monarchs as far as St. Peters- burg and Stockholm soon after the end of the Spanish War of Succession, was retained in the period of Louis XV. And it was from Paris that the Rococo style penetrated to the state apart- ments and other dwellings of the court and the aristocracy. It bore its most beautiful fruit on German soil. The decorative furniture and wall decoration of the German Rococo castles developed after German artists had again got into touch with Paris and those countries and cities influenced by Paris, such as Belgium, Lorraine and Strasbourg. Such artists were the architects Francois Cuvilliés, Knobelsdorff, Couven of Aix-la~Chapelle and Johann August Nahl, the decorative sculptor of Frederick the Great. The Bavarian architect Cuvilliés, who decorated the magnificent apartments in the Munich casfle and that of Amalienburg about 1730, was the pioneer of Rococo in South Germany. With these richly gilded decorations, as well as with the richly carved mirror consoles, tables de luxe and seats, Cuvilliés belongs half to the Régence style of his predecessor Effner. By his copper plate engravings of wall decorations and furniture he accelerated the spread of Rococo in South Germany. In the decoration of the castles of Frederick the Great in Northern Germany, a cenfre of German Rococo decoration and decorative furniture is formed which can vie with Munich. Next to Nahl the Elder, Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt is the strongest creative spirit among the decorators, sculptors and wood-carvers of the early Frederician Rococo style. The mirror frames, consoles, chairs de luxe and canapés after Hoppenhaupt’s designs are, like the wall decoration forming the background, characterized by a delicate enrichment of French Louis XV Rococo plastic mofifs, naturalistic decoration that employs flowers, fruit and birds for its effects as well as garden tools, musical instruments, and so forth. Towards the middle of the century the fantastic forms of Rococo decoration increase to extreme limits. In Wiirzburg, Bruchsal and the group of castles built in the same Frankish Baroque manner, the work of the stucco craffsmen and sculptors coming from Bavaria, Swabia and Fran- conia is a brilliant example of this lavish Rocaille style. At the same time the Augsburg engravers, Habermann, Nielson and their fellow-craftsmen, indulge in a further extravagant development of the scroll ornament, and inspire the mid-18th century burgher decorative furniture of South Germany by their designs. German Rococo begins to be more restrained, less unbridled, in the decade between 1760 and 1770. A northern example is the furnishing and decorating of the New Palace in Potsdam by Frederick the Great after the Seven Years’ War, and a southern one is found in the Solitude near Stuttgart. It should be noted here that the Rococo meubles de luxe namely the fine bronze-mounted cabinets inlaid with marquetery, the commodes, writing-tables, secrétaires, cartonniers, long-case clocks, and so forth, nearly all came from Paris, including those in Munich, Potsdam, Wilhelmsthal and in the electors’ castles on the Rhine and Main. German domestic cabinet-making—in accordance with its principles—completely absorbed the inspirations of the French decorative furniture industry. A proof of this is given by the type of the bureaux, which now became the chief examples of the cabinet-maker’s craft. This com- bination of chest of drawers with a cabinet upper part had been modified at the beginning of the Rococo period by a recessed intermediate piece having drawers and pigeon-holes inside, and a sloping writing flap. The creative mastery of form is vividly expressed by the German Rococo cabinet-makers in their skilful fusion of these three parts of the bureau by means of a unifying E 49 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE continuity of plastic ornament. The surfaces are now bombé, and in particular the commode-like base is bulged, the corners chamfered, and even the cornice participates in the graceful play of the lines. Marquetery patterns, lozenge and cube, increase the light effect, and carved rocaille ornament, generally of restrained character, save for a certain lavishness on the pediment and curved legs, completes the artistic effect of the whole design. A china cabinet with glazed doors in the upper part is similar in shape. The finest pieces of this sort were made in Wiirzburg and Mayence. The large heavy hall cupboard of the coastal towns was much slower in its develop- ment. The Rococo features of this piece of furniture are limited to the pediment and sparse, carved ornament. The oak furniture of Liége and Aix-la-Chapelle, with its fine relief carving, belongs to a special group. The chief pieces are cupboards with two and three doors and glazed upper parts, narrow corner cabinets, hall clocks, tables, chairs, and chests of drawers. Seats of the middle class type do not differ much from Dutch and the simpler English types. Bavaria and Austria favour brightly coloured carved furniture. Dutch Rococo furniture is distinguished by more restrained lines and greater compactness; the large combined cupboards and trellis patterned glazed upper part, and bold walnut or mahogany veneered curved pediments and contours are characteristic. Danish Rococo is similar, only the lines are more restrained, and English forms were an early source of inspiration. To a certain extent, Italian Rococo holds a place of its own. It attained its greatest beauty in Vienna. The lavish gilt carving of the vigorous volutes and cartouches, which had become popular in Late Baroque, is interlaced with foliage and blowing ribbons, and later with irregular rocaille work. In addition to gilding, painting and the enrichment of ornament by means of cut and painted mirrors, play a part in wall decoration and furniture. In the first third of the 18th century an extensive lacquer furniture industry developed in Venice. During the Rococo period Chinese patterns are superseded by painted flower ornament, landscapes and figures in the native style on light blue and other coloured grounds, framed by gilded scroll ornament in high relief. Bombé commodes, curved tripods, and double-doored Venetian cupboards were made until about 1770. Italian Rococo is characterized by its pronounced decorative and picturesque tendencies. | | CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Chippendale’s Influence in England and North America ENGLISH cabinet-making in the Rococo period is distinguished from that of the Continent by ifs intensely individual character. And it acquires its character very largely from the work of Thomas Chippendale. This craftsman was originally a carver who turned to cabinef-making in 1735 and exercised a great influence on English, American, Colonial and Dutch furniture, as well as on the work of the countries on the North Sea and the Baltic; an influence spread largely by his book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director, which was published in 1754. In studying the general connections of furniture styles, the fact cannot be overlooked that Chippen- dale, however intimately he is connected with English tradition of the Georgian period, nevertheless keeps abreast of the general Rococo movement. His oldest chairs (1735) have the same claw- and-ball feet and cabriole legs as those of the transitional Queen Anne types, but the influence of French rocaille is not to be mistaken in the pierced arms and backs. Chippendale produced masterly blendings of the French Rococo shell and scroll ornament with the peculiar and capricious play of line that distinguished his own furniture. Besides chairs, presenting an almost endless variety of patterns in the lattice detail of the backs, he designed seftees, canapés with curved backs and legs, grandfather clock-cases, canopied bedsteads, china cases and glazed cabinets with delicate lattice work; writing-tables, and also dressing chests and tallboys. The main features of the furniture are at first hardly different from those of the first half of the 18th century, with the exception of the Rococo ornament on the edges, the bend of the legs and the curved pediments. Chippendale furniture—of which but a limited amount originated in his workshops, the rest being copied from his designs—is nearly always made of mahogany, and nearly exclusively of solid mahogany. The most striking ornamental motifs, together with those of the Rococo, are Gothic and Chinese. These details, chiefly employed as lattice and trellis work, are connected with the aftempts made by English artists to introduce Gothic and Chinese motifs into archi- tecture. Batty and Thomas Langly’s work (1742) is the first example of the Gothic pattern; that of William and John Halfpenny (1750-1752) of the Chinese patterns. The furniture designs of the cabinet-maker Lock (1748) already show Rococo scrollwork intermingled with Chinese frellis work. Chippendale’s example was followed by publications devoted to designs by the furniture firm of Ince and Mayhew, who published a Universal System of Household Furniture, 1762: the sale catalogue of the Society of Upholsterers and Cabinet-makers also appeared (1763), and finally The Real Friend, published by the cabinet-maker Manwaring. In North America, cabinet-makers also follow Chippendale—for instance, Thomas and the cabinet and glass-maker John Elliot in Philadelphia, circa 1760-1770. Chippendale’s later works have straight contours. The tables and sideboards have square legs that do not taper at the bottom, and have Chinese lattice work in the brackets. A new type of Chinese furniture with patterns of round lattices in the fashion of Chinese cane furniture was introduced by the architect Chambers in 1770 and became very popular. 51 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Louis Seize Style in France LOUIS XV Parisian furniture, with its curved forms and lively decorations, was simplified about 1765, shortly after the Seven Years’ War. It was soon superseded by furniture with straight lines and sections, which represented the beginning of the style of Louis Seize, which matures in the reign of Louis XVI, 1774-1789. The characteristic feature of the furniture of this style is the pronounced constructional element, the emphasis laid on vertical and horizontal members. For example, the legs of a commode, a writing-table or a chair of Louis XV style are curved, and where the legs are joined to the body of a piece the curve is continued in the under frame; there is no division, but a continuity of line; the piece is a harmonious whole: but the Louis XVI cabinet-maker considers that if is important to recognize the function of supports. Legs are either round or square and tapering towards the foot, emphasizing their support of the piece of furniture at the upper part by a cornice, capital or cube, while the feet, which are distinct in profile from the legs, serve to express the grip of the piece on the floor. Fluting and grooving frequently assist in emphasizing the vertical line of the support. The idea is continued in the pilasters and framework. The right angle now dominates. The panels and drawers on the fronts of commodes and writing-cabinets are enclosed by rectangular frames. This modification of taste is connected with the return of architecture and inferior decoration to the tectonic laws of antique construction, and with the desire to regain clear, linear spacing after the undisciplined play of the capricious Rococo line. Therefore this style is also called Classicism. But this phase of Early Classicism is in many ways akin to the preceding Louis XV work in feeling and treatment. Till the close of the 18th century decorative furniture remains connected with the best arfistic traditions of the preceding generations. Riesener’s early works (1770) are the best illustration of the transition from the latest phase of Rococo to Louis XVI in Paris. The mahogany cylinder bureaux and the marquetery commodes of Riesener’s first manner still have the slightly curved legs and underframes met with in the bureau du roi begun by Oben in 1760 and completed by his successor, 1763-1769. The undulating line and plastic movement of Late Louis Quinze style still lingers, albeit modified, in the bronze mounts on the legs and edges of furniture. The flat, or only slightly curved, surfaces of the furniture and some straight mounts and friezes, as well as torsades (twisted rope or cord deco- ration) already point to an emancipation from the tendencies of Louis XV. In the middle of the seventies, at the time of Louis XVI’s ascension to the throne, the principles of the new style alone predominate, as shown by the furniture of Riesener’s second manner. The commodes, writing-tables, ladies’ bureaux and secrétaires are bounded by level surfaces; cornices, mounts on the side, and feet, are all straight; the bronze mounts are limited to the supports and prominent divisional features and frames, and their contours accord with antique patterns. The ornamental motifs include festoons, staffs entwined with laurel, acanthus leaves, bows and rosettes. On the richer pieces are found square or oval plaques in relief of fire-gilt bronze, suspended by ribbons in the middle of the panels. Mahogany becomes the favourite veneer, and is often ornamented with marquetery of rosewood, tulipwood and other rare exotic woods, arranged as lozenge and diamond patterns on the panels. The edges are often veneered with cedar, palisander and ebony. Flower marquetery patterns of light and dark woods are frequently a distinguishing feature of Riesener’s furniture. During the Louis Seize period, black and gold lacquer furniture with gilt bronze ornament was also made. During the last period of Louis Seize style, the graceful furniture designed for 22 THE LOUIS SEIZE STYLE IN FRANCE the use of ladies was ornamented with painted Sévres china plaques, with Sévres bisque reliefs— white on a blue ground—or Wedgewood plaques. During the later part of the Louis Seize period, Boulle marquetery of tortoiseshell and brass with ebony veneering came into fashion again for the more richly decorated commodes and cabinets. It is sometimes very difficult to distinguish whether a piece of Boulle furniture belongs to the Louis Seize or Louis Quatorze period. The number of individual master craftsmen in the Louis Seize period is greater than ever. The chief besides Riesener were Benenmann, Leleu, Roussel, Weissweiler, Dubois, Schwerdfeger, Bondin and Jacob. The activity of the latter continued long after the period. The great masters were often also great entrepreneurs and owners of furnishing and decorating establishments. The stamps on the furniture do not always denote the originator. They were often affixed by the dealer over stamps already put on by the masters. The most prominent of the bronze casters in the Late Louis Seize period was Gouthiére. The style displayed in plastic relief was influenced by Clodion. The connection with Louis Quinze is also expressed in the numerous small furnishings for ladies’ boudoirs; and among these great ladies, Marie Antoinette herself was the most refined and elegant. The chief of these pieces was the high rectangular secrétaire. The commode is enlarged to a commode éfagére by adding rounded shelves to the sides. The writing-table for ladies, known as the bonheur du jour, receives a rectangular upper part, the panels of which imitate book backs. The greatest delicacy of form is expressed in the little round work tables, usually three-legged, having shelves between the legs. Different forms of rectangular tables with shelves are also common. The carved tables and seats harmonize with the carved Louis Seize panels. The flat carved ornament is gilded or lacquered white. The upholstery is covered with Gobelins or Beauvais tapestries, silk needle-work and fabrics in delicate patterns with light coloured floral devices. 53 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Adam, Hepplewhite and Sheraton Furniture in England ENGLAND reached the zenith of her national furniture style during the last third of the 18th century. Robert Adam, an architect, is the pioneer of Classicism in about 1770. The work of this designer replaced the Rococo of Chippendale—if it may be referred to in this manner—and his decorative treatment of interiors, and his engravings of wall decoration and furniture, in- dicated a more logical employment of the classic straight line than is found in the work of contemporary Continental architects. Furniture designed by Adam was made for the great houses of the aristocracy and the wealthy commercial classes. It is distinguished by delicate carving. Gilded and painted console tables, side tables, sofas and arm-chairs, as well as painted chests of drawers and cabinets, were made after Adam’s designs. No other English designer expressed the specifically English features better than he did in the clarity of outline, the tapering legs, the flat carved festoons, oval rosettes, floral devices, and especially in the rows of vertical palm-leaf ornament and fluting in the Louis Seize style. Adam’s painted furniture forms a particularly beautiful group of its own. The first to introduce paintings on English furniture were Italians: Pergolesi, whom Adam brought back with him from Italy, Cipriani, Zucchi, and Angelica Kaufmann, who left Rome in 1765 and settled in England, where she painted walls and furniture for Adam. But these clearly drawn, delicately lined, round and oval medallions, these fine trophies and festoons on the slightly curved, semi-circular com- modes and sideboards by Adam, are, nevertheless, very English in appearance. Strange to say, Chippendale made furniture after designs by Adam in Louis Seize style towards the end of his life (circa 1768) for Osterley and Harewood, for instance. Adam and his brother founded a sort of furniture establishment which enabled them to under- take the complete furnishing and decorating of houses. Those cabinet-makers who enabled the trade to adopt Adam’s style were George Hepplewhite—who flourished 1775-1786—and Thomas Sheraton, whose chief period of activity lay between 1790 and 1804. These two masters exercised great influence by their designs, especially on the forms of English domestic furniture. Hence their names are associated with the furniture styles following that of Chippendale. Hepplewhite’s style follows Chippendale’s about 1775 and corresponds with Louis Seize. In 1790 Sheraton’s style succeeds and stands for pure Classicism. Of course, such style designations are only appro- ximate: in the rarest cases only will it be found that pieces known as Hepplewhite and Sheraton actually came from their workshops. Hepplewhite has given expression to his ideas in his book, The Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, which was published in 1788, after his death. Hepple- white furniture, in contrast to Adam’s severely Classical forms, is more akin to that of Chippen- dale which preceded it, by virtue of the curved lines of the various parts, such as the curved feet of the commodes, wardrobes, cabinets and the curved chair backs. The chairs have either square or round tapering legs, whereas the backs are made of bent bars, chiefly in oval or heart-shaped curves. A popular pattern consists of three interlaced ovals; another is three feathers (Prince of Wales feathers) in an oval frame. During the Hepplewhite period, English decorative furniture attains its culminating point in inventiveness in producing new designs for cupboards, tables and commodes. At this time wardrobes and book-cases consisting of two or three parts were made, as well as wardrobes with three or more drawers of the same length below and a cupboard above, and commodes with two doors in the middle and drawers at the sides. The delight of English cabinet-makers in delicate lattice and trellis work of rectangular and curved patterns is particularly 34 es eS a ae 2S ADAM, HEPPLEWHITE AND SHERATON noticeable in the glazed upper parts of the numerous book-cases consisting of one or several sections. The pediments of the writing bureaux, as compared with those of Chippendale, are flatter and ornamented with egg-shaped vases. Solid, dark, polished mahogany is the principal wood used. The doors of commodes and cupboards are often enriched with light inlay work of finely figured wood; chiefly satinwood. Large oval panels with ray patterns are usually inserted in the doors. Sheraton’s style is characterized by an absence of curved lines and the predominance of perfectly clear and constructional forms and details. The Cabinet Maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book, by Thomas Sheraton, published in 1791, had a decisive influence. Sheraton stands for extreme refinement, and this is indicated by his graceful cylinder writing-tables for ladies, dressing-tables, work-tables, card-tables and é¢fagéres. Much of the furniture made in those days became a per- manent feature in the middle-class houses of the 19th century. Sheraton furniture is in many ways exemplary to-day by reason of its utilitarian and straightforward construction. Smooth mahogany enlivened only by light inlaid banding determines the form fo a certain extent. Simple escutcheons cut out of metal sheets ornament the drawers. In 1802—1803 Sheraton published his work, The Cabinet Directory, containing an Explanation of all the Terms used in the Cabinet, Chair and Upholstery Branches. ... Sheraton, who devoted the last years of his life to writing books on furniture, died in 1804. For about twenty years after his death English domestic furniture drew its inspiration from the work done in the time of Adam, Hepplewhite and Sheraton. The last output of Sheraton’s work begins to show curved forms instead of straight lines, and this is still more the case with the furniture patterns of about 1810. The way is being prepared for the Early Victorian style. Decorative furniture was chiefly affected by the Empire style which had come from Paris in the meantime. 55 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Late 18th-Century Furniture in Germany, Denmark and Italy — GERMAN decorative furniture was turned into the new channel of Early Classicism about 1770 by Parisian and English influence. Furniture for the court adopted the straight lines and the expressive ornament of the Louis Seize style, together with the carved and stucco panelling. The castle of Benrath on the Rhine and the decoration and furniture in Bamberg Castle contain early examples. In addition to the French style, the ideas of Chambers and Adam obtained a footing in the Prince of Anhalt’s castles, built by Erdmannsdorf, an architect who had spent several years in England. The German cabinet-makers copied Louis Seize according to their own interpretation, as indicated by the South Germany veneered writing-cabinets, and the large double-doored hall cupboards, often ornamented with Louis Seize details and pediments. They are firmly established types, merely modified to suit the needs of the new style. The more elaborate pieces point to pronounced French influence. The best proofs of this influence are David Réntgen’s cupboards and tables made in Neuwied, and remarkable for their beautiful marquetery picture designs and light mahogany veneering with ormolu mounts. Réntgen’s writing-cabinets of the seventies are akin to those of the late Rococo period. Hereafter cylinder bureaux become popular. They were also made by Riesener and his Parisian contemporaries; but Réntgen’s work is superior because of the clearness of ifs plan, and the restraint that characterizes the supports and details of his pieces. He made writing-tables with tops, long-case clocks, tables, commodes and seats. His extensive influence and the number of his assistants— many of whom left him later to work independently—enabled Louis Seize forms to be spread in German cabinet-making as far as Berlin and Vienna. Berlin and Vienna were the outposts of classic decorative furniture in Germany at the end of the 18th century. About 1800, cabinet-makers became adepts in making household furniture of simple lines in mahogany, pear, ash and poplar. The influence of Hepplewhite and Sheraton on the middle-class furniture of Germany is undeniable. Ufilitarian and unornamented furniture with smooth veneering is now to be found in royal apartments, and also in the houses of merchants and traders, together with painted—and later, printed—wallpaper, calico, cretonne and horsehair coverings. Danish Louis Seize household furniture develops along similar lines. There, as in the Hanse Towns and Schleswig, the cupboards with upper parts and the chairs are marked by English features. In Sweden, Iversson’s furniture with its marquetery and bronze mountings may be regarded as a branch of the Parisian Louis Seize. In Italy, decorative furniture still retains ornamental tendencies. There Louis Seize appeared at an early date in the engraved designs of decoration and furniture by Piranesi and Guiseppe Soli. In the designs of Pergolesi and Abortolli it is found in a more mature phase. Italian craftsmen still give bolder contours to seats. Painting and gilding are sfill popular. Lacquered commodes were made in Northern Italy after about 1770. Italian Louis Seize in about 1800 has an individual expression in the commodes with inlays of light wood, made by Borabigio in Milan. Together with Venice, Milan is the centre of the Italian furniture industry at the end of the 18th century. . : E . CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Empire Style BY Empire is understood, in the narrow sense of the word, that phase in household equipment and decorative furniture which began in Paris after the Revolution under the Directoire about 1795, which developed under the Consulate, reached its culminating point under the First Empire of Napoleon (1804—1813), and lingered for at least another decade in the state apartments of the European courts. Empire style is at first and most perfectly expressed in the decoration and furnishing of the court apartments created in Paris for the First Consul who was afterwards Emperor. The designers of this furnishing were the architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine. They may be regarded as the founders of the Empire style. Their decoration and furnishing were enthusiastically imitated by the artists of all countries who had gathered in Paris at the beginning of the century, where life had become more brilliant than ever. Strangely enough, the European courts which had formerly imitated the styles of the French kings in their furniture, now copied the rooms and the decorative furniture of the great Corsican. Percier and Fontaine accelerated the spread of the new fashion by their book of engraved designs, Recueil de Oécorations interieures, published in 1801 and again in 1812. In Vienna, Berlin, Windsor, Madrid, Turin, Rome and St. Petersburg most of the castles and palaces were decorated soon after in Empire style. In Germany the most important examples of Empire work are in the castles of Stuttgart, Wiirzburg and Cassel, where Napoleon’s brother, Jéréme, introduced this style of furniture and decoration. The difference between Empire and Louis Seize decorative furniture is that the former trans- plants antique forms, particularly those of Rome, on to furniture without any modification. The columns, pilasters, consoles, cornices and friezes of antique architecture are employed for orna- menting the fronts of cupboards and commodes. And classic columns and such ornamental features as sphinxes, griffins and lions’ paws are used on chairs and tables. The empire cabinet- makers graft the carved and bronze moulded architectural details and plastic ornament on to their furniture without connecting them structurally, organically as if were, with the body and surface of the furniture. In this respect Empire is a retrogressive movement as compared with Louis Seize. Regarded superficially, it appears more harmonious than any other style because it transfers the Roman patterns to all branches of furnishing, even fo the silk coverings of the chairs, the silk panels of the walls, and the curtains and coverlets of beds. But this superficial harmony does not accord with the inspiration that moulded forms fo such gracious purpose in the styles obtaining fill the end of the 18th century. Commodes and cupboards now become rectangular; the surfaces are smooth and embellished with fire-gilt bronze decoration, severely symmetrical in ifs distribution. Instead of lively and graceful contours, furniture acquired per- fectly straight ouflines. The veneering of dark red polished mahogany, in striking contrast with the fire-gilt bronze ornament and gilt carvings, provides the keynote of the heavy, solemn colour- scheme which imposes its sombre character on the silk panelling and wallpaper of the Empire period. Inlay work begins to disappear, though the cabinet-makers take delight in using various coloured, grained and figured woods for the inner fitting of the writing-bureaux which were particularly popular in Germany. Court furniture, like the styles of the French kings, is mainly of a decorative nature. Even the royal bedrooms with their draperies and the high canopies of the monumental beds, gold inter- woven silk panelling, the pedestal bedside cupboards and the tripod washstands—based on antique models—and impressive cheval glasses and fire screens all look as if they were more for 37 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE show than comfort—a characteristic of all royal apartments since the time of Louis XIV. But in the Empire style, with its almost pathetic and wholly theatrical apeing of Roman culture, the taste of the parvenu is proclaimed, which was something foreign to the spirit of 18th-century taste, but matched the ideas of those who creafed and imitated the style. From the cabinet-maker’s point of view the fechnique of the veneering and the treatment of the mahogany are admirable. In Paris and elsewhere it is easy to trace a direct connection between the tradition of the cabinef- makers of the Empire period and that of Louis Seize times. The most important proof of this is the firm of the cabinef-maker, Jacob Desmalter, which already existed in the Late Louis Seize period, and carried out the orders of Percier and Fontaine for the First Consul and later for the Emperor; a firm which also did work for foreign potentates as far as St. Petersburg. Another indication of the uninterrupted line of tradition is the work of the celebrated ciseleur, Thomire, who embellished furniture for Napoleon in Malmaison, Fontainebleau and Compiégne. The imposition of antique forms at the command of fashion does not curb the inventiveness of the cabinet-maker, who creates a number of new furniture types fo meet the practical require- ments of the age. Thus the Empire period produces new forms for broken-fronted book-cases with lattice work, and for glazed china cabinets. The narrow, open stands for china and port- folios of engravings, efc., narrow glass cabinets and round dumb-waiters, flower tables, and a variety of stands on which cups of tea or coffee might be set down, were introduced at this time: and if antique architectural forms are repeated almost ad nauseam in the console tables, mirror frames, and state and dining-tables, nevertheless the common sense of the cabinet-maker domi- nates in these utilitarian pieces. Together with the writing-bureau it is characteristic of the times that the piece to which special attention is devoted should be the pianoforte. Besides London, Vienna was a centre for piano-making since 1790, and competed with the former city in the pro- duction of decorative pianofortes. By its whole nature, Empire style is a fashion which undergoes little modification in any Euro- pean country. The difference between the court Empire furniture of Madrid or St. Petersburg is hardly noficeable. It is true that some traditional native peculiarities of 18th-century decoration and furniture were carried on into the Empire period. Thus Italian Empire, as represented in the designs of Guiseppe Soli and Giocondo Alberftolli, differs by virtue of its greater devotion to antique ornamental details from the English Empire as depicted in the designs of Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture (1807), and George Smith’s Collection of Designs for Furniture and Interior Decoration, which maintained a connection—if a somewhat loose one—with Late Sheraton style. Empire still lingers on in the royal palaces and castles after the fall of Napoleon, until as late as 1830. It is sufficient to mention the works of Schinkel in Berlin, Klenze in Munich, and the furniture in the castles of Cassel and St. Petersburg as monuments of Late Court Empire. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The Last Phase of Decorative Furniture—The Biedermeier Style BIEDERMEIER, which is the last phase in the history of decorative furniture styles, lasts from after the Wars of Liberation (1815) till about the Revolution in 1848. This style received its most characteristic features in Germany and Austria. Household furniture of this period also developed to a certain degree of perfection in England, Denmark and Russia. The name Biedermeier was transferred from a political caricature in Fliegende Blatter to the household furniture of the Philistine middle-classes of the period of the Restoration, Reaction and the Holy Alliance. The sources of Biedermeier furniture may be found in the domestic furniture of the beginning of the 19th century, as it was developed in London, Berlin and Vienna. In those cities, domestic cabinet-making followed its own path through the storm and sfress of the Revolution and Wars of Liberation, independent of Court Empire. The distinguishing feature of Biedermeier, as compared with the Early Classic style (1800), is the preference for curved supports and chair backs, curved table legs, and turned supports in general, especially after 1830. Receptacles, such as cupboards and chests of drawers, are as plain as possible. The veneers most favoured apart from mahogany are light birch, grained ash, pear and cherry. The upholstery consists of horsehair, flowered calico and rep. The love of comfort is expressed in the sofa and couch, in the carved and rolled sides of which Biedermeier developed its ornament in ever- changing variations. Some of the most popular of these ornamental forms, which were mostly gilded, were swans with curved necks, cornucopie, $riffins and foliage. In the matter of gilded and carved ornament, Biedermeier shows itself to be influenced by Empire, which lingers on in court furniture till as late as 1830. The Biedermeier cabinet-makers were just as inventive where new types of furniture were con- cerned as their predecessors of the last quarter of the 18th century. England is the country where the growth of Biedermeier style from the previous period (circa 1800) may best be traced. Indeed, English middle-class domestic furniture, which was not directly affected by the upheavals of Napoleonic times, continued its course uninterrupted. The furniture designs in the most im- portant publication, The Repository of Arts, which appeared in London from 1808, are a con- tinuation of Sheraton’s later designs, as well as those of Hope and George Smith, and they show as the years go by the increased preference for the curved and turned forms of the Biedermeier period. English cabinef-makers revive Gothic earlier than any others, as, indeed, Chippendale and Sir William Chambers had already done in the 18th century; but the mahogany furniture of about 1820, often over-elaborated with carved decoration, such as bookcases, sofas and pianofortes in neo-Gothic style, prove the decadence of taste when compared with the Gothic or Chinese furni- ture of Chippendale. Neo-Gothic furniture also appears early in Vienna, where Schloss Laxen- burg was furnished in this style. But what is admirable in Gothic Biedermeier is its delicate joinery and mahogany veneer, which distinguish it from the Gothic furniture of the second half of the 19th century with its hard, carved ornament glued on to the surfaces. The main features of the furnishing and decorating of a Biedermeier room are, first the wall- paper, introduced practically everywhere and either plain or printed with flower and festoon patterns, and then the draped curtains, the multi-coloured table-cloths and carpets. The love of flowers and plants is striking, and all sorts of stands, baskets and vases are made to accommo- date them. In Germany especially the writing-table and rectangular secrétaire were particularly prominent in the furnishing of an age that had a sentimental love of writing lengthy letters. 59 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE Waste-paper baskets, glass cabinets, shelves and stands, work-tables, pier glasses, linen cupboards and wardrobes were made in those days on the plans that have been handed down fo our own times. The praiseworthy points about this household furniture of the first half of the 19th century are its utilitarian form, and its straightforward honest simplicity rather than the romantic and sentimental idea with which it is associated to-day. This explains the reawakened interest of our generation for this type of furniture which has been neglected and almost despised for two generations. Indeed, it has been condemned, for the term Biedermeier was one of mockery given to it by the following generation. In the Late Biedermeier period, there is a tendency fo enliven the plain furniture by richer ornament and more mobile contours. For this reason, nafuralistic flower patterns are introduced into the textiles that cover furniture, and Rococo scrollwork is introduced in the carving. The frames begin fo be more pronouncedly curved; the turned legs and profiles become more bombé. This tendency begins to show itself about 1830 in its early stages after the July Revolution in Paris. It becomes quite emphatic about 1840 and assumes much of the character of Rococo style and dominates decorative furniture until after the middle of the century. This is the Second Rococo period, the Neo-Rococo which is called Louis Philippe in France after the “Citizen King,” and in England, Early Victorian, after the young Queen. About the middle of the century the lavish and picturesque effect of the home is augmented by richly carved ornament, legs more pronounced in their curves, and above all by luxuriant velvet and plush upholstery for seats, together with flowered carpets, table-covers, curtains and dark-hued wallpaper. This style, which the French termed Second Empire or Napoleon III, in its last phase (as Napoleon, or rather the Empress Eugénie fostered it) practically disappears in 1870. It merged into the Neo-Renaissance which endeavoured to imitate the styles of the Renaissance epoch. A characteristic trait of the weakening of a genuine feeling for style, which began about 1830 in the Late Biedermeier period, is the partial introduction of Oriental furniture and textiles. In those days, so-called Turkish rooms appeared: divans, carpets, and later Persian and Indian harems as smoking-rooms; nor were Chinese and Japanese rooms lacking eventually. It is true that in former centuries European decorative furniture was offen subjected to Oriental influence. Thus Italian and Spanish Renaissance inlay work was influenced by the Islamic sphere of art; Portuguese and Dutch furniture by India in the 17th century, and English in the first half of the 18th century by China. But the essential fact is that these impressions were always assimilated by arfists possessed of a creative style, whereas the “Oriental” furnishing, decoration and ornament of the late 19th century, slavishly imitated the Oriental taste. The result was that they not only conveyed a wrong idea of Oriental culture, but encouraged Oriental craffsmen to manufacture bazaar rubbish. | | : CHAPTER TWENTY- SEVEN Eastern Furniture COMPARED with European decorative furniture of the past, that of the East falls far behind. The development of European home culture and decorative furniture, which advances uninterruptedly from the simplest forms to an ever-extending comprehensiveness and richness, cannot be expected with the peoples of Asia in view of their vastly different manner of living and divergent art concep- tions. This is not the place to discuss the customs which determine the household requirements and the furnishing needs of these peoples. Mention has already been made in Chapter One of their habit of sitting on the floor at meals and in company, a habit common to the whole of the eastern continent. Further important factors are the preference, owing to climatic conditions, for living out of doors, in the courts and gardens and in front of the houses; the lack of family life among the Islamic peoples; and then the attitude towards architecture, which differs fundamentally from the conceptions of Western civilization. Finally Oriental art differs from Western art by the predominating lack of perspective conception in decoration. Therefore Oriental furniture has always lacked the tectonic structure that is characteristic of European work. The dwellings of the Islamic peoples are so greatly dominated by fabric hangings and carpets that wooden furnifure is of little account. Certainly Persia, which since the Middle Ages was the leading country from an artistic point of view, has rich specimens of faience panellings and carpets dating as late as the 18th century, but the furniture that has been preserved is but scanty. The Persian miniatures depicting scenes of contemporary life explain this, for they show interiors which are only furnished with carpets, people sit on carpets at low, plain tables with food and drink. Such seats as there are consist of low flat socles. Only the divans (usually placed along the walls) and the beds rise a little higher over the floor. The Persian and Turkish furniture which mostly dates from the 17th and 18th centuries consists of low, polygonal little tables, boxes, small chests, writing boxes and cabinets, chiefly of hard wood and inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl in geometrical patterns. The Orient is the source of the ivory inlays of the North Italian and Spanish 16th-century cabinets and other pieces of furniture. Indian furniture is connected with Persian, and until the 18th century there was very little. There, too, ivory and mother-of-pearl inlay was popular. During the Baroque period, ornamental flat carving in ivory and ebony flourished as well as turning. The influence of Indian furniture is met with in Portugal and Holland. In those days European furniture influenced that of India through the Dutch and Portuguese colonies, as was the case in Persia: Indo-Chinese furni- ture is an example of this. It consists chiefly of cabinets and chests, made of a frame with drawers and doors of hard, light wood inlaid with Chinese mother-of-pearl patterns. Later Indian decorative art, which is characterized by rich Baroque openwork carving, gives the impression of a style that has become rigid in a meaningless play of ornament. In the 19th century Indian decorative furniture is enlivened by English influence, of which the furniture in so-called “Bombay mosaic” geometrical star patterns is an example. The technique of working sandalwood, ebony, stained ivory and fin was introduced in the late 18th century from Shiraz in Persia to Sindh, and from there to Bombay, where it is still practised, especially for Europe. In Persia as well as in India boxes and other receptacles with lacquer painting were made at a later period. They were mostly made of papier-m&ché and cardboard. In Persia they were painted with figures and in India chiefly with flowers, in the manner of those on Cashmere shawls. Cashmere together with Sindh were the chief centres of this industry. 61 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FURNITURE Furniture-making developed to an art of some importance in Asia Minor and Egypt after the first centuries of Mohammedanism. It consisted of mosque furniture, which cannot be dealt with here as it belongs to church furnishing. The chief pieces are pulpits (mimbar), prayer niches (mihrab), wall cupboards, doors and Koran desks, Koran caskets and dish stands (kursi). The framework is joined in a masterly manner and in such a way that the surfaces are divided into small, richly carved panels to prevent warping owing to the hot climate. The flat pierced arabesque carving of the geometrical panels is just as masterly, and was later on enriched by mother- of-pearl and ivory inlays. The Egyptian Islamic turnery is remarkable for its perfection. It was specially employed for bay window trellis work in Cairo and for tomb railings (musharabieh). The furniture of the Far East, that of China and Japan, is more important than that of the Near East and India. The lasting influence which is exercised on European furniture during the Baroque period alone gives it a remarkable position. But there is no denying that, particularly in Japanese furniture of the 18th and 19th centuries, there are all sorts of features and qualities which may be usefully adopted in modern furniture. This applies especially to the light movable stands, receptacles and screens of all sorts. Chinese furniture only develops, at least so far as can be discovered, during the 16th and 17th centuries in the Ming period. The period which introduced coloured, painted Chinese porcelain to the Dutch and English in the 17th century is the first to give a clear idea of Chinese furniture. One cannot find such a variety of decorative furniture in China as in Central Europe. The simple mode of life and the prevalence of wooden architecture limited the possible development of furniture. Old Chinese pictures of the 17th and 18th centuries show us scenes of family and social life in which the people are usually squatting on the ground or sifting on low stools drinking their tea and eating from low tables. In the 17th century the tables, stools and vase stands are charac- terized by curved and scroll legs. The straight legs are bent inwards at the bottom; and between the legs and underframe, bent, crossed and frellis-like supports are often to be found. Etagéres for vases are also popular. These supports and lattice-work are a peculiar expression of that lack of structural ideas, in our sense of the term, from which Chinese cabinet-makers suffer. And it is an important fact that this Chinese manner of constructing furniture was a weighty factor in the transition of the severe Baroque to the more lively Rococo in European decorative furniture. The rare Chinese cupboards with two and four doors and chest-like boxes of the 16th century and later, are simply and plainly made with straight frames and large surfaces, uninterrupted by constructional features. We should remember here the important fact that all Chinese furniture is lacquered. This lacquer painting is the chief beauty and strongest feature of Chinese and Japanese furniture. The smooth cupboards and boxes are painted chiefly with landscapes and horsemen in gold on a black ground. Sometimes the brilliant effect is heightened by mother-of- pearl inlay. About 1700 flowers, large birds and rocks were added, especially in high relief work. The flat carved coloured lacquer work on Coromandel wood, dating from the end of the 17th century, is a special type of its own. Chinese lacquer furniture was in its most flourishing con- dition during the Ming and Kanghsi period (16th—-18th centuries). Red and brown lacquer furniture was also made. During the Chieng Lung period lacquer work flourishes once more and finally; and then the feeling for style slowly declines. The greatest number of cabinet cupboards was exported to Holland and England about 1700. Japanese furniture owes ifs character solely to lacquer work. The scanty receptacles, chiefly coffin-like pieces for arms, and writing boxes, are alone distinguished by their excellent lacquer work: for the rest, they lack plastic forms or profiles. Japanese lacquer may be traced back fo 62 EASTERN FURNITURE the earliest times of Japanese culture, that is, to the 8th and 10th centuries. But the furniture and boxes of this early period are almost exclusively in the temples as well as in the celebrated national sanctuary Nara and in the imperial palaces. The majority of Japanese lacquer furniture and utensils that have been preserved date, like those of China, from recent centuries; chiefly from the 17th and 18th. Japanese lacquer is characterized by inlay with gold specks, the so-called aventurine work, and by an unsurpassed polish. The motifs in the early periods are severely conventionalized weapons, rosettes and foliage ornament; later landscapes, peonies and birds are scattered over the surface, all more delicate in design and finer in relief and lacquer than Chinese lacquer furniture. Various stands for clothes and utensils, which can be taken apart and put away, are interesfing pieces of Japanese furniture. The delicacy of finer Japanese household uten- sils, of the boxes and chests, is augmented by rich silk cords and tassels by which they are often held together, as well as by gilt-bronze mounts. 63 iL eee he Fes eee ; t ’ rey bots: : > - ? shi7e | nad ; rors ee : He Prawn d . We na ive a unt wees Ue oups Roe Te = i hetisagae ut Per: ila cz AREF rw me ee vitante i jae. OE WN wa tat ‘pine a ae oy siini aa We AE ae ee laste Sead Nel ‘as +. Liaw: (Ow ae htt Pel sds vt b+ % ree os ig ith whe aOR GRE © atin Rear Feeys Mate me fy. ON fin dis day vate. £F Ppa ae Agestat Phe ey tae dated a aR Rae sateen aay ia inh eae Age ; | i ae arn EF a NSA aA atiaa? vetmditet WH evees ; . que: rudy ees re ey fa va ae s, 2nd cent. B.C. (Bedstead earlier) Egypt—Seats and Couche —_— i — ZY, > Egypt—Seats and Mummy Cases, 2nd cent. B.C. Egypt—Coffers, 2nd cent. B.C. Egypt—Seats and Chests, 2ndscent suse Egypt—Couches for the dead, 2nd cent. B.C. Egypt—Head-Rest and Mummy Case, 2nd cent. B.C Egypt—Head-Rest and Stool, 2nd cent. B.C. ek uoissaidwy [vag Aug pue yorpay—uojAqeg 2 a 008 ¢ ]00}S}00J pue auoiygy & jo syie~eg—enAssy uopuoy “0D 8 T12sUeW OV MA 30Ud ‘OA "FUID YIO “Jatjar e wos ‘2uo0Iyy be jo y1oddng—eisiag juslouy 10 iG B. 9th-8th cent ’ ib ik and from the Palace of Sennacher Reliefs from Koyunj dias Assyr 11 7OOTB 2G, Ca. , Reliefs from the Palace of Sennacherib Assyria— Ss = Ba; 6th-5th cent ’ s fter reliefs on tomb Sica tuseea Greece Greece— Seats and Couches, after stone reliefs, 6th- 5th cent. B.C. 13 14 ———— ow C—O yonosd e jo adeys ay} ul sndeydooies —'9'q ° juad Y}O ‘uUeWOY ueosniyy I I sndeydooie s BP UO Jaljadq 1a}yje “Yono7 —ueuoy 16 11aduro qd wo1 j dInjluiny 9Zuolg —urwoy a HE | ptt © P . ne om Le d[PITOIS og pure tladwog wodj ainjluingy azu01g —uewoy 18 Roman Stone Furniture—I1st-2nd cent. A.D. 19 D. f= 2nid cent. A: 1s Roman Stone Furniture g * ” os A DORR Ae ventas Wovret pt. Roman—Couches, after stone reliefs, 2nd cent. B.C. and 3rd cent. A.D. Roman—Couches, after reliefs, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D. paps elit Metin ae ee Ss ESS Skike Bro Waeee ed eee Se a NN fox fate SAL SOOARAELEE ES Telia r I RARLE 2 y e : f $ RA Throne, after an ivory relief - 10th cent.— 8th Byzantine AS x WY Byzantine, 6th-10th cent.—Seats and Couches, after ivory reliefs euudary UL JUOIYT AIOAT—"}U99 YI9 ‘ueMOY ySeq i slibdididdibddldddr n - AMMA ALLS ALLA LALLA LN | ait tpbidddibs A auoIYT F4U0}G—"}U9d YITT-YIOT ‘FulzuezAg-oyeyy ee es ee << . be: a ae 4a a ee mm se ee £ i F , 8th cent. Coffer Italy (under Byzantine influence) — Pat’ Archiv ''Mas‘‘ Batcelona Romanesque, 12th~ 13th cent.—Church Bench from Spain mani tlt ete q Ee daa ae Seats after ivory, stone and wood sculptures Romanesque, 12th- 13th cent. Romanesque, 10th aE ees Oe aOR EA RO eT Oe and 12th-13th cent.—Seats and Couches, after ivory and stone sculptures 29 30 Romanesque Cupboard with paintings, Germany, early 13th cent. Chest, Mediaeval form with Romanesque ornamental motifs, 15th cent. *» seth SOON ara RAR A Ae he ee i af é ? Z ae & Gable-Roofed Cupboards, Romanesque forms, Germany, 13th~-14th cent. Gable-Roofed Chests, 15th cent. NN ry Barcelona “*Mas’”’ Archiv “ddtheeents Spain Cupboard Romanesque — 33 celona Archiv ‘‘Mas’’ Bar Spain (above) and Germany ’ iron mounts 13th cent.—Chests with Romanesque, 34 Romanesque, 13th cent.—Small Box with animal figures and interlaced pattern 35 geome $40 20 (GRRE et hemes ee poe Seats in Romanesque forms—Germany, 13th cent. and later 36 PLE ERG BERTI Ne et. al Hh % b | EAS 4 it 3 ay Seats in Romanesque forms from Norway Seats in Romanesque forms from Iceland and Norway SW AUOXPS IIMOT puke (IAOQR) Sdli}uUNOD auId[Y 34} WoO ‘WIJ [eAaLIpPaW ‘s}sayd URWIID 39 (Mo]2q) eIARPUIPUPIS ‘ (asoqge) Auewsay pure sduerg— yuo UIGT YIP I “s}soqd) yeo d1Y}OL) Ayaeg 40 South France, 13th cent. ’ Chair, Italy, 14th cent; Chest Early Gothic—Arm- Early Gothic—Priedieu, Germany, ca. 1300; Chest, France, 15th cent. 41 x —F 15th cent ’ fers Gothic Cof France — Gothic Coffers, 15th cent. France— 44 15th cent. ce— Gothic Coffer Fronts, Fran France— Details of Gothic Coffer Fronts, 15th cent. 46 wmey)-a1y pue piroqdny—d1y}045 “Judd YICT “‘g0uely AT SILTOSSIIGC] —1Y4}OH -4U99 YC] ‘9duely 48 A a a St AOE 5k es France, 15th cent. Gothic—Church Bench France, 15th cent. Gothic—Church Bench 49 50 aX 4 uf Flanders, 15th cent. Gothic ~ Arm-Chair and Cupboard 51 rey )-a1iy pue ye9IS yoinyd —I1YIO) yuo) YICT ‘spure[IaqiIN bh =a i Soomeanl El ace Be PPS lle \ * oo | Es er ~_ ya | ee ' jt {\ AN LV a) ' Vim Riis Seat, right: Netherlands; stern Switzerland Coffer and Box Seat left: We Gothic, 15th cent Arxiv ‘‘Mas’’ Barcelona Gothic, 15th cent.—Folding Chair, Spain, ca. 1400; Credence, Flanders nn wl of I 1 ni Al ‘ |S! . we) . S Pupey ‘usmney “[{ “youg PURER es en LLAMA Bs ii ohana: ied pn gi mrs “ S}SIYD—INYIOH “Jud YICT « uteds PUupep ‘ousro; ‘Ww }0ud 56 London Victoria and Albert Museum Standing Cupboard England, Gothic, middle of 16th cent Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Gothic, middle of 16th cent.— Standing Cupboard 58 London a and Albert Museum Victori England, Gothic, ca: 1500— Oak Chests Victoria and piss Lite Albert Museum, London England, Gothic— Credence, 15th cent.; Chest, early 16th cent. 59 60 alae SOT Auewia9 YON wor sprrogdny— Qoc] ‘Bo ‘91YyY}0H ‘AurMIIH 61 Auewiay YIION woods spireoqdny yoinys) pue 9IUIPII7)— OOST "Pd D1YIOH ‘Auewday 62 North Germany, Gothic, 2nd half of 15th cent.—Credence and Chest North Germany, Late Gothic, early 16th cent. Cupboard and Chest with iron mounts 64 "JU99 YICT ‘S9pqey 214I0H azeT— Auewssy yNog pue puejpslaz}IMS yuaa yrCT Jo sley Puc ‘ SoTqe]L ITYFO*L) aye T—Aurewisy YyyNos Sa 66 Judd YICT JO sey puz ‘spreoqgdny ds1y30H ayeT—Aurwiayg yyNoS 4 Wey ele wnuwinun 67 Juod YC, Jo pus ‘sprreoqdny JIY}OL) 94}e e YT—Auewssay yiNoS 68 ASP NAANY "yU99 YICT ‘preoqdns-[jeAy pue (6¢¢1) pzeOgdny Aq}saQ — I1Y}OD a}eT ‘SatizuNoy dsuldjy uewssay scores IN | A AN// SVD | WAS 4 69 (1Z¢1) prveogdny AdjsaQ I1Y}OH 3} eT—SalijuNOD duidjy uewiay UU, mC \- 70 South Germany, Late Gothic, 15th cent.—Chest and Box-Settle German Alpine Countries, Late Gothic, ca. 1500—Chests 71 preoqdn)-4stAN Pur peoispod = 00cT "BD ‘I1YIOH) 3}e7T ‘salqjunoy auldiy uewiiay iS) pareoqdny puvr 489d Suiperay — *yU99 YIC1 “ITYIOL) ye 7T Fy \OArS « Salizunoy surdyy uremia 74 [OIA] WOIZ pRr}ISPIG—OOCT “PI ‘I1YIOH Ie T ‘sotazuno’ auldjy uewisay V5 4099. 046] ‘ATeI] YIION “35294D pure e14eL — 0271 ‘Auewsayg yINos ‘pag —d!Y}OL) 9}eT 76 North Italy and Alpine Countries—Late Gothic Chests, end of 15th cent. 19) SSRN e North Italy, Gothic, 15th cent.—Chest and Cupboard 78 one FO oe ie Pa Peo De ae Bee ee ie et ee $50 73> & > ae bos ee ad o> North Italy, Late Gothic, end of 15th cent.—Chests from Venice (above) and the Adige district 79 7, ot _ as Italy, Late Gothic, 15th cent.—Chests with gilt stucco ornament 80 Italy, Early Renaissance—Folding Chairs from Venice, Chest from the Adige district Italy, Early Renaissance— X-Chair, early 16th cent.; Painted Chest (Tuscany) 81 Re srerponpiAiaee: pean se EVAN IRIN Italy, Early Renaissance —Chests from Tuscany, 16th cent. LV PLS UVP UPPER ELC er ere ets sect RAEN HACE Italy, Early Renaissance —Box-Settles, Tuscany, 16th cent. 83 84 aI[pe1D ‘saxog poajuleg [[euls ‘9dUapPIID ‘YIeY sayiO[D —‘}uad YO] ‘aduessieuay ‘A[e}] l » iy é 3 ee a a ibe tints ae 85 I[]qeL pue asduapaiyg [[rurg— ‘juss YyyOT ‘aduessieusy ‘AyeRY 5 3 2 $ 3 nas Ni : Be SN BLAS CAC RENERE LEAS LON AMAA eas : PARR RUBE AURiALA LALA Lata ia tiRtiatial ee Sage ce sccm ae 86 Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Tables Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Seats and Chest 87 Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Seats 89 i AERIS Oy , % Seats Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent. 90 Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Tables hes ae ad Ha eA ee me ae ae Ha de ie fae a tae tes aes ae Oe ad fee te eta Us fe fae eB fe He Sm Be Be 8 be be te be be bie Bs Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Credences 91 pieoqgdny a[qnoq pure jaulqed-nesing—‘juad Yio] ‘aouessieuasy ysipy ‘Aypeqy 93 spreoqdny—‘}uU99 Y}OT ‘9dURSSIeUdY ysipy ‘Aypery EGR, GING AD; rt PPP RRUUUUILUIUID way paste it os 94 Italy, High Renaissance, 16th cent.—Chests from Venice and Northern Italy Italy, Renaissance, 16th cent. — Chests 95 96 Syoulqe7)-neosiIng —‘*}u9a5 qi9T ‘gouessieuay ysipy ‘Alery Ss = aS uz ‘77 yy) me 2. JY S11 “ ‘4 uas YO] jo J[ePy puc ‘FJ2] “xneging Fae %. JD). yyy SullIA\ — dduessieudsy Yysiyy as ~ABRPAS Seals Se “AT EH] 98 = Nee MAIOIOTATATRT ATS epee 4 , ¥ pass ILENE mi RE ERA AAR RR HR ADK R RK A Aga tA EPARRA BR AAA RA AS 440 Italy, Renaissance—Credence and lable from Bologna, about 1600 9 9 100 Dressoir, about 1540 France, Early Renaissance 101 leet alate eee ad | ARN Re ORR RITE LED SLANT IR Oe I me gsc a AGN ee en ey al te AL AE A EAA OT coe 2. Dy) % S35 JE > 2 cos, + \ SY x S 4 < < N < ‘ ’ AS Se a \ | < 4 ten, 4 a France, Early Renaissance, Ist half of 16th cent.—Dressoir 102 TIOSsSoIG] —°}U9d YIOT JO jjey ist ‘g0uessieuasy Ale “Qouvig 103 } =) ulged pue ileys —‘ju e) 2 Yi9] jo yjey pu - c ‘ aouessivudy ysiyy e g g A\ Al 4| SESE tak duel y SAU whe ck, 1 104 Say AAD ye SUR IM or 9 A vod icp? D> rar’ France, Early Renaissance, 16th cent.—Chests 105 France, Early Renaissance Chest, ca. 1540; Folding Seat, 2nd half of loth cent. 106 syeag payxoeg-Yysip{— ‘uss YIOT JO JleYy puz ‘aduessivusy ysipy ‘aduriy 107 $}P9$ pa ye g-4YstH — "yUd) YIOT JO F[eY puz ‘aduessivudsy ysipy ‘9ouesy A ell od 8h Hb AN OANA Ny 108 France, High Renaissance, 2nd half of 16th cent.— lables 109 Tables 2nd half of 16th cent France, High Renaissance, 110 25 oe 2s Ot SS ON eS oS ca . —— ete =, sileyd-Wiy—'}uUd) YIOT JO [eY puz ‘aduessieuay ysipy ‘aurry 111 ne Sa Early Renais France, Renaissance, 16th cent/— Chairs, left: Late Renaissance, right Tr rd aided aad Sa EC ee gry pe eat oe BA i god aA eke France, High Renaissance, 2nd half of 16th cent.—Cupboard with decorative carving ig) France, Late Renaissance, 16th cent.—Cabinet Lit sprreoqdny — ‘jugs YI9T jo Jiey puz ‘aouessieusy ysiy ‘gouely BARISTA NG AEE ANS AAG EAN SEERA INTE MS I CO BIS ed ; ate Pre eo ee adel a aa tine eaten cian id it sb, wh MES 4 GA YH SCH ie AN ARDS AM SGD 115 AP[UI I] qIeW YIM :3Y SII | ssuijured yum Wyo] ‘spareoqdny —aduessie udy ysiyy ‘gouely BOSH eee 7 a ee 116 i 4 : & « France, Early Renaissance, 16th cent.—Fourposter France, Late Renaissance, 16th cent.—Fourposter 117 Germany, Early Renaissance, 16th cent.— Folding Chairs and Shaped Chairs ; from Southern Germany & 119 dugggaga Germany, Early Renaissance— Nuremberg Cupboard by Peter Flétner, ca. 1540 120 Germany, Renaissance, 16th cent.— Writing Desk, Central Germany, ca. 1554; Chest from Augsburg, ca. 1570 Germany, Renais sance, end of 16th cent.—Chairs from Dresden, ca. 1590; Table from South Germany, ca. 1600 bho NN “NN Fourposter South Germany, Late Renaissance, beginning of 17th cent. Germany, Renaissance—above: South German Trestle-table, late 16th cent.; below: Table with drawer from Franconia, 17th cent. 1 124 OF “INYO edu 9[tse7) Ulo}sua 1 uw ) PIPFH Olj yIUIpII7) —"}fUugad YI9T jo I]ppiu ‘g0ueSssieudsy “pue[laz}im ay 125 Re WEN ¢ "Judd YIOT Jo AueWIID YNOS “FY4SII 'OGCT “BD ‘aye :352] « spivoqgdn7) aduessieuay 126 Inlaid Chest and Credence ,2nd half of l6th cents ssance zerland, Renai Swit Renaissance—Folding Chairs from South Germany and Switzerland, first half of 17th cent. 128 middle of 16th cent.— Westphalian Dressoirs, ’ orth Germany, Early Renaissance ca. 1550 (lower part missing); Rhenish Marriage Coffer N middle of 16th cent. ’ North Germany, Early Renaissance—Cologne Dressoir, ca. 1540 129 130 Cupboard Doors and beginning of 16th cent Balustrade Panelling ’ Flemish Early Renaissance 131 ’ ’ Holstein Cupboard from Sleswig High Renaissance— North Germany, ca. 1580 136 Denmark, Late Renaissance —Oak Cupboard, beginning of 17th cent. N37 Denmark, Late Renaissance— Oak Chests, beginning of 17th cent. 138 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Renaissance—above: Late Gothic Sideboard Table (oak), ca. 1500; below: Writing-Desk (oak with coloured woods inlay), end 16th cent. 159 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Renaissance— Cabinet with marquetry, 2nd half of loth cent. 140 sey — "JU9d YIOT ‘aduessieuay ‘puelsugq uopuoy ‘uinasnw yaqry pue elo}IA ‘JoYg 141 uopuoT ‘unasnw Weqry pue PLIOJIIA “JOU SIEYD —"}U39 YIOT ‘aouessieuay ‘puerlsugq = De Be Bude Marae” Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance—Bed with Tester (walnut), 1593 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance—Oak Court Cupboard, 1610 144 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance, middle of 17th cent.— Box-Settle; Cradle, dated 1641 145 Phot.Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance, 17th cent.—Oak Table and Box Stools 146 London Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum k), 17th cent. Cabinet (0a England, Late Renaissance— 147 E Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance— Cabinet (walnut), middle of 17th cent. 148 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Late Renaissance—Chairs and Table, oak, 17th cent. 149 Netherlands, Renaissance—Chairs and Bench, beginning of 17th cent. 150 bs Bebe eR s eeeeecensy: oe Te Ya > 32 , i eee €€ €F z Netherlands, Late Renaissance—Chairs, EG Inga wee ile cent. ive ence asa AAR AI beginning of 17th cent. ’ Netherlands, Renaissance—Bed with Tester yU99 YI] ‘sprveoqdny—aduessieuay aye 7 ‘spuerli1ayiaN a Ba >> P?> spy { ey é = we (iar a a as arrose eT i || mm ick SWic Late Renaissance, 17th cent.—Dutch Room from Friedrichstadt in Sle 154 = ca nirrenisiremernven gen nant nee GE ae aed emer erp ene ee, ce FeRReECreeee AAA S z= PI MTT INT INT ITs LWPEPPDABPDPDPBEBWPDLDDIBY, 4 = Z 2 F 3 7 MLEEDEPDPLBPPRDAVIPPIDL, < i EHS Hy 8) FWA Ye Ne ee ee ee AAA PLAID EEE AAPA AEE DEEL Aas TAA - 5 KERN AMERE SRS SEO i eae ett aah eee LL YUN Holland, Late Renaissance— Chests, 17th cent. Holland, Late Renaissance—Cupboard, 17th cent. 155 156 Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.— Cabinet bS7 Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid Spain, Renaissance, 6th cent.—Cupboard and Table | dt we a ci Phot. M. Moreno, ANS CHEESE OES if i SENS S ~ 4 WAMSICTAAG pe RRR ee oe ct ect am aaa ag a ap 9 a Aa a a Madrid Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.—Cupboard 159 7 ih th Regn lt i ts ie a al oe ine DT ie gl a ia %, aay eth syst Sac at sete Stace aga net Sac Teal Sd Nie? ag gd aad et ye hee tote te ta Tu Sie ba” . So Ga at Seat ft te Sule Fut atgtntal alata tut nha te ta ta lak g Gataewute Fite Ta Wome a tetat. sanieinint “tnmeinantnse ce iene seseronn tose enerereyrra ss CORSE ae ee ee ee 5S Tee Sa Mh Nl or Se Se a ee be cnanermencgireereeth re ee Pade 4 ¥ MS 3 Sata arenas | 1 eee E : ao ee eae serait er ee oy er aetaanarey Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.—Chairs and Cabinet with ivory inlay 160 Fee ge Y y Y, y ww Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid ‘Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.—Cabinet (Varguenfio) 161 ~ MMM LEM eer re ed a i i a a al a a Madrid Phot. M. Moreno, Cabinet (open) and Chairs 16th cent.— Renaissance, iMiak. . Spa Spain, Late Renaissance, 17th cent.— Cabinet (open below), ebony with ivory 163 H Ps « é Pali 4 A Z cA y 4 z cA & Archiv ’'Mas‘‘ Barcelona Spain, Renaissance, l6th-17th cent.—Cabinet in Italian Renaissance Style; below: small Box, wood and ivory 164 (444 4 FPEE Rett |g ii ei RCCL | (4444 Tre rel AAA AAROE | | S80 RS il elie mata adrid Phot. M. Moreno, M Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.—Cupboard 165 BERS keto d Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid Spain, Renaissance, 16th cent.—Cupboard 166 (paso]> pue uado) yaurqed — ‘3499 YF/T-YIOT ‘ad uessieusy ‘ureds eT oe PoP + Nace a i 2 a PHpry ‘ousow ‘W 304d 167 spreoqdny —"}uU99 YI/] JO jley 3s] ‘aduessieuasy ajyeq ‘uireds Dati l PHPeW ‘ouaroW "W doug 168 gee $e. TOR Pe man gt {| Ay ie Vy Archiv "’Mas‘‘ Barcelona Spain, Late Renaissance, 17th cent,— Chests 1 od ; 8 é i PORVOO NE POT ™ “ tuasgi sg = ‘ Ja Sy 4 * Nz | = a PO za Se Gee Archiv '’Mas‘‘ Barcelona Spain, Late Renaissance, 17th cent.—Chest and Cabinet 169 170 sg uh ahs al eb a a OSS ee 2 eo ET eh ee ‘ Sstsaiel ~S My ¥ POR ID PARA AR A AN A AR A AR oR RR bales een eal ann Sean tedl “e id we we —— ite v ot it i at ded 8 8 SLT OL I | Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid Spain, Late Renaissance, 2nd half of 16th cent.— Chairs 171 Archiv '’Mas‘‘ Barcelona Spain, Baroque, ca. 1700—Seat with leather coverings and Leather Coffer 172 $ ae ae fen 4 pone z iS) ; i ror | = 4) mg ry . Ke orc 4 sam sad des ot Be——$§4) +4) ey Phot. J. Laurent, Madrid Part of a Bedstead, wood and bronze 17th cent. ’ Spain, Late Renaissance b/s) ie ee Be ee ee ee Se Te at - @ ej e* @& © 6 inde a Gt WH bie & estes er ¥ anh bie Pos BO Hahn ee cee Oe ME ey eet ae A ey mn ee eee Bl a. ae a aoere oe 2 fai a et Oe OR Bee oe) banieta paren ee ele Archiy ''Mas‘' Barcelona Spain, Baroque, 17th cent.— Fourposter 174 = tyme bE | ol Archiy ’’Mas‘‘ Barcelona Spain, Late Baroque, 18th cent.— Chairs 175 spag—"}uss YIST —YIZI ‘gnboieg ajeq ‘ureds :¥ * or * a a £3 * * * ¢ * - — euojaaieg SPW. AIyIW 176 Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid eipsreeetesserereneersreryerereseeeeeres set eevee sees ee eowes Bb tok bb be eR Be wt S25 SRSTHTIEAS Do aa L EEG LES ILL SGV ELA ELLE LAT EE Spain, Baroque, 17th cent.—Cabinet Sa aa se 177 Hee ? + ee i “ 2 / Chneedieebeenerckaeebiatineeees. Phot. M. Moreno, Madrid Lppatddedadaded ed raddereesaseerceeeny i eta : aba seease sawenea ERP PALE ALLOA ELD PLO POLE LDA? Le ee OOP LOD LP MO Si a a Phot. J, Laurent, Madrid Spain, Baroque, 17th cent.—Cabinet (opened) and Table 178 Flanders, Baroque, 17th cent.—Chairs 179 2142. — ‘3499 YIZT anboieg slogpueyiy 180 Auoqgs Ul yauIges UFTsizeg-— OCT © (111X sINOT) d.UeSSIPUayY aye] ‘UPI ee sie lll ing oe HUTTE x x RASS ECURULUS US LCL OLAS UPRUTU UNE L UL SEEN EVIAT ER EeTET ‘ cao. $: a8 eorrert LATIN i, A ; Coe a te 06 PE REERAAERSRECSASRE GEES SRAEEISRONRSSESEERDRARESERRERRRANES PRRERESE segeasesaaeas Sr IS e rm Be Se NTNUHTL 181 aT qey-SulpzlaAy —'}UI) YIZT Jo sey Cos = Bec “ ( AIX Sino7]) anboieg Ayjiey FEES “ s9uel Ty sere pe ae 182 doysyxiom Ss a]]Nog wos sprrogdny—QgglT B9 ‘(‘AIX SINOT) anborrg ‘aouely TAR Anam ee Ap REAR RN em MNT Pad RIAN INN NASA SRG AAS J a DIBA Ad DARD DS DOSASSSNSURSRAAR SAAS OREASSS 183 aTynog jo apArs oy} ul youTqe*) ]yeurs pue FTGPL ITOSUO")—OS89IT SA ean WCAC ATCA eo ( AIX SIno7]) anboieg « suey 184 France, Baroque (Louis XIV.), ca. 1700—Commodes in the Style of Boulle 185 France, Baroque—Above Table de luxe, ca. 1700, and Writing-Table in the style of Bérain, ca. 1710 186 France, Baroque (Louis XIV.)—Fire Screen and Arm-Chair, ca. 1710 187 OIZI PI APY) ISuIs pue ‘ "yU99 YF] JO pua ‘ssuljured yyIM OUuRelg — (‘AX Sino 7) anboieg ‘aoueiy 188 France, Baroque (Louis XIV.)—State Bed, end of 17th cent, 189 Italy, Baroque, ca. 1700—Ornate Florentine Cabinet 190 Italy, Baroque ca. 1720—Stool and Arm-Chair 1 Elaborately carved Cupboard » 2h 1AOO) Baroque Italy, 192 Italy, Baroque ca. 1720—Arm-Chairs (left, from Venice) 195 Auerwday YON pure yyNog wor ss1eyD-WIiy—OOLT 29 ‘gnboieg ‘Aueulday aS 3 ® ey ~ e ° e 5 r] * Y e e a * ¢ saan gat : 3 3 3 3 r S28 8086880835003000080 3a 194 MUATEFESELERS39 Neu Steatesereteeees st bakes SS AR Poreereassery ; Sy Tastee? 228 Meese’? South German Cupboards Germany, Baroque, end of 17th cent. at cet mh * te eH ns #iil — ' eee OTIS | wes HARRY lett) Cabinet on stand; right. Cupboard, Bale, 1605 Germany, Baroque, end Ole thecent: 196 Germany, Baroque, ca. 1700—Hamburg, Hall Cupboard 7 19 South German Cupboard, ca. 1670 Germany, Baroque 198 Phot. Muller, Nurnberg Germany, Baroque, ca. 1700—South German Tables 19) Germany, Baroque, ca. 1700—Tables from Danzig and Liubeck 200 Spuejs uO syauIqey Sizureq—QoO/] ‘v2 ‘anboieg ‘Auewsay sii 8448 ¥ % ast : 201 (Sizueg ‘ +Y 511) sprvoqdny uvua YyIION —3u99 yd] JO pus ‘onboreg ‘Auewday 2 0 2 Auewias yyION wosy sprrogdny—"yuao yi] jo gyey puz ‘anboieg ‘Auewisay oes ae wee ~~ € ee cS S| 203 Mittin 1 mea CER ORIN! AOS ANOORNESRUEECCROCERCOTE: Germany, Baroque, end of 17th cent.— Chairs 204 Berlin caa700m , Germany, Baroque—Elaborately carved Tables Phot. Staatl. Bildstelle, Berlin Germany, Baroque— Writing-Table and Table with lacquer decoration, Berlin, ca. 1700 206 Sugiays) y YIZI Jo pua ‘ayA3g yoyngqg ul spreoqdn- anboieg sain 207 spireoqgdns—"}ua9 yi] Jo sey puz ‘anboieg ‘pueyjopy 208 spaeoqdns —‘}u99 YZ] Jo Jey puz ‘anboieg ‘puejjoy 209 Spurs UO S}soy) — LLL eee yud> YIZT JO FpTeY puz ‘afAys [eLuoloD urostomy YON 210 yaurqey payuleg—ogg] #2 ‘anboieg ‘pue;suq uopuoTy ‘unasnp }oaq~y pure e110} A “04g ’ BRO MY, ae, wy, Aq, oe " Aajanbiew yyIMm syaurqes —'}uU99 ee YZ] JO puea ‘anboieg ‘puejsuq tN ie) wars. Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Baroque (Charles II.), ca. 1680—Lacquer Cabinet eee hea tciee Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, Baroque (Queen Anne) ca. 1700—Chests on stand inlaid with marquetry i) Ol 21st yourqes aanboe] pue rey —OOLI ‘#2 ‘purlsuq > OE ET i uopuoT ‘winasnyw waqiy pue e0}1A ‘JOY ml uOoT}eIO 4 3 p ianboe] 4uIM silejetaeag pur ss] 4) J°[lOi juste) Ajiva ‘puelsug uopuoy ‘umasny yaq Ty pur el0}IA “JOY Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, beginning of the 18th cent. — Long-Case Clock with lacquer decoration 217. Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, early 18th cent.— Writing-Cabinet with lacquer decoration 218 siley a —"}uas yg] Ajiva ‘puelsugq uopuoy ‘uinasny eq; y Pure eO}IA “}OYd 219 JUuUOY UIPITT IAL jo rauuew oUt UP 14k) SAN P1099 — 40 30°q7 8 Tehl ieee puel sam uopuoT ‘unasnw daq>y pue el0}1A “04g NY N secones? esse sI1eYD —‘}U99 YIST Jo ley 3s] ‘puelsuyq } ! Ad adga coneee. LLELS Se. ree SALES ope ad uopuoy ‘umasnyw weq¢ry pur PHO}IA “JOUg NN NN ajepuaddiys jo ajAys ay} ul sareyd —‘}uas YISl JO appr ‘purelsugq uopuoy ‘wnasnw W2q|V pue e10}1A “304g i) Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, middle of 18th cent.—Hanging Cupboard. in Chinese Chippendale style Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, middle of 18th cent.—Bed, Chinese Chippendale style i) i) Ww 224 d[qUT aAtjer0saq —‘}UI9 YI] JO I pplu ‘puelsug uopuoT ‘umasny Waq;y Pure e10}1A “joYg Va) NX JUISSIID sayreyD Aq apourumtos—-jua9 YIST JO X[ppiw ‘aouely WOpUuOT ‘UO}I21[0D rrrI[PA\ Regence Bookcase by Cressent middle of 18th cent. — ’ France and Rococo Commode France, Louis XV., middle of 18th cent.—Writing-Table and Commode i) ih) to France, Louis XV., middle of 18th cent. —Writing-Table and Commode Erance: Louis XV., middle of 18th cent.—Settee and Sofa 230 apowwos Ianboe, pue 91930} —"AX SINOT ‘aduely x3 o a € Peeve 2 : Ze rey WIW pue ussIdg ally — judo WIS lop Cee | Pip ie ‘ AX StnoyT gouel Ty Phot. Stoedtner, Berlin SSO RP SBOP LILO France, Louis XV., middle of 18th cent.—Commode Wallace Collection, London France, Louis XV., middle of 18th cent.— Corner Cupboard with lacquer decoration ho At Zot siieyd —‘}uad YIS1 JO ePPHW “AX simo7q ‘aouery aeowsee ce Heer es ceeeee eee eoeewens /S) j cs i ysaq-suijAy s Ape] youeiy pue qweydy weiter Reed tee A leuee an aa a aaa Aas: a Wiy uelyey]— jus) YIT Jo x;ppiu « 090904 236 Germany, Iransitional style, ca. 1720—South German Console Tables Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Settee and Chairs oy! [ han) NN COLT “82 ‘wepsjog ‘(pos pue moqjad ‘anyq yy 31]) UOI}e1OIIp Jan bse] YIM Fpowuwody —0I0I0Y ‘Auewdsay 259 ureps}Og WoOlj UIIIIO IIIy pue iley)-waiy—jyuas YIST jo I[ppiu 4 od0s0y ‘AueWIay 240 Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Frederick the Great's tortoiseshell Bookshelf and Writing-Table 241 Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Commodes from the castles of Potsdam Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.— Table with small cabinet superimposed, and upholstered seat, from the castles of Potsdam Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—South German Cabinet and Commode 244 bee tae ¥ Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Sofa and Arm-Chairs from Potsdam i) Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—~Commode and decorative Furniture from Schonbrunn Castle, near Vienna 46 Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Hamburg Commode, West German Chairs Germany, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—North German Chairs and Triple Chair-Back Settee 248 AUPWIID SIAN WOU sIleYD OIOIOY pue rsdudTday 49 4 dpouuwo) pue neosing uruldasr) WJION — ‘4ua9 T38 taj Ong LE aR « od000y ‘Aura 250 Auewia5 YWION pue yyNog wos syaurqed —‘}UI YIS] JO appl ‘od0d0y ‘AurUIay oy me if Zo ‘JU3d YT J © IPPIW— ]]9deyD-e]-x1y pue asaiqy wor aanjiuiny yroO EAI AERA * Ae AES Jaen. 0 EARLE OTM 2% at d\loalage EL EENGEMEENG ED EAGLE LOA Holland, Ist half of 18th cent.—Cabinet of coloured woods in the Chinese style Holland, Rococo, middle of 18th cent.— China Cabinet a8) Rococo Cabinet from Lima (Peru) — Spanish Colonial style, 2nd half of 18thcent: 2D) Archiv '’Mas‘‘ Barcelona Rococo, middle of 18th cent.—Settee from Spain, and Commodes from Liege ry ‘ ri esencerett Colonial Furniture from Cape Town (above) and North America— Middle of 18th cent. Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, 2nd half of 18th cent.—Chairs in Chippendale style (below left, Windsor type) 258 uadsjyus0y plaArqd Aq y10mM Ajava ‘yaurqed-Sulpli Ay — OLLI “#2 WSldIsseyc) Ajaeq ‘Aurwiay 259) S}JIUIQLD-SUIZIAY mee UAV EN! (2a) “TAX SInoT ‘ aouely 260 France, Louis XVI. ca. 1780—Commodes i i i i { i France, Louis XVI., ca. 1780—Commodes (top one by Riesener) 61 262 WeyD-Way pue uw3rId¢g-I11y—OGLI “89 “IAX SINoT ‘a.ue1y = SEES eRe es a ’ £ if ¥ ¢ f t r 1 € e v +5 TT AS Pe Pact ch aed ba Cee 2) 263 [0038300] pur sIIeYQ—OB/T V2 “TAX SINOT ‘ aouely . SBS France, Louis XVI. ca. 1780—Console Tables, Chair and Writing-Table 265 i, az 3 4 a 1 d AE 13 i i ae i pereerere er irre ay Preemie ee =. ees BEE aN oY OWN PARE? He SREB RE OE SRY DPT} ‘Oath Dub RUW? bercncs SEDER DO rome mv LK SRN, PPA LAM 3 France, Louis XVI, ca. 1780-1790— Sideboard and Commode 266 uaSjus0y Aq 420] Ia] {SYO[D aseD-SuoqT pue paeoqdny arasesos9q —O8/I “2 “IAX SINOT ‘e.ueIy 267 PA CRE AX sInoy ‘adue1y A nO ena AEC N AIOE 61S 268 uaSjyus0y plaeq Aq adieyarsag pure JaUIqeD)-SUlzIA —OB/] BD ‘UISIDISSETD Ajaeq ‘Auewiay we 269 a1 Gel Wooy sISNW—OGLI “PD “WISIDISSETD Ajaeq ‘Aueuwtias 270 “. ; SSSA SSSANRAANNAS ERASE ESSN SENPSSEES AE 1g CSS AUSE SUISSE ES VOY ww 8 EERE NEED EERE ER ET ESE AREER TORE TERETE TERE EEE SPOON ERE EEER ENTE OE (eeReeREe nce NEUE TER TTE ENTE EPCOT EES EE ESE EE LETT TEEDITENT AL Peocouevecsacersdsvecsocs canes: 6A VERE OTT OR EERE S OREN ENE OTOL TTL LL PIF EP LOE ER ELLE ETI PLT ET EEL TILT ET TOE LYLE er erk tER ORR ELECT CECE TERENCE RETIREE CEE ETE ET ET PEPE LET EEE EEE EERSTE EEN EEE wen anderresreavencevensrssecenee: Germany, Early Classicism, ca. 1790—Writing-Table and Chest of Drawers Germany, Early Classicism, ca. 1790—Writing- Tables bo NI Dike eittateeete ee ewan nese SIIPYD—OGLI “82 ‘wistoisse[D Ajrieg ‘Auewilay CV CERE TEC CE EE ERE CECE MAREN EEN Mm NX ppetecceesae a oe See e tae ee ease c \A POSSI IObO IID IIE SbdedddddduUdvouWawss & 33}}399 B& pure sIleyD—O6/| ‘22 ‘wsidisse[D Ajieg ‘Auewi3sy eeeee « “ caaebeand dda dOddd dobbs 0 FF ~e : FIID 4D AAABRIUG IAD GD AED UDG ddA? i “pe Bee sala 04 ont ih: Germany, Early Classicism, ca. 1790—Settee and Chairs with painted frames YOR Aa; PROOPEOELOEELOOOEHEROLEOEE COLO LOL EEDLE EEO LEOEOO LOE EL ECECCOOH REE E RE REG ‘fee r OR Den HOE y " ‘ene. we ™ VA CPP FOOTER TORES Dee eemnee 7 * : casero Germany, Early Classicism, ca. 1790— Upholstered Seats SAIN NNR NNN Italy, Early Classicism, end of 18th cent. —Settee and Commode with lacquer painting a xd4 ies Se AAAuKEES Italy, Early Classic i ARAAALH sm, end of 18th cent.—Chairs and Dressing-Table tf Italy, Early Classicism, end of 18th cent.—Seats and Commode aw ek ie Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, ca. 1770—Furniture in Adam Style 80 England, end of 18th cent.—Sideboard and Table in Adam Style England) endioftl&th cent: — Table and Sideboard 81 282 England, end of 18th cent.— Bookcase Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, late 18th cent.—Long Case Clock, Bureau Bookcase and Side-Table 83 284 Phot. Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, ca. 1800—Lady’s Dressing-Iable © A RA SL smi rt 6 ASSETS SE Pea gee SPEED England, ca, 1790—Chairs, Sheraton and Hepplewhite Style 86 MOUSE BEREEONS LATELY i : Ree vara t ine French Writing-Cab ’ Empire, ca. 1800—Settee (Denmark) 287 Adoues yuIM pag pure jJaurqes aAl}e1059q —O08I 9 ‘saiduq ‘aduely ee GEN ON RENAE | ' i SIND RABN maces sate é (Fal 288 gps ERP Oe PDI: 9 i : : SIIMPIC JO ISAO pue ssepH-[eaAsyD—OOI “#9 ‘aaidurg ‘a.ueiy 289 UdIITIC-IILT pure TeYD)—OOS] “BO ‘saIdurg ‘adueiy SOO ES oes e SEO Tere yep et see eoniceat as 90 Empire, ca. 1800—Chairs vo France, Empire, ca. 1800— Decorative Table and Chest of Drawers ot 292 sejos pure spaqg—QOosl ‘#9 ‘sridwy ‘a.ueig 293 $39}}9¢ pure SIIeYD—OOST ‘29 ‘aaidwy “« a0uely ty. ih AB ta 294 2 Le een ULE a» Germany, Empire, ca. 1810—Bedroom in Wurzburg Castle ‘Resa stear abe cane ieilieantienareecaed Russia, Empire, ca. 1810—Living Room in Tsarskoe Selo Castle bo an Germany, Empire, Ca. 1810— Bedstead, Chair and Bedside-Table 297 PUP RU EPI eE SPE PE SEP Ese eereerrer essen) Poraeeee Devore arene Pad OPER DODO F® DADALALELALEDALALILLILAAALALEARAALLALL AAAS R RAED RARE ROLE RADA AEE RARE ED ERED! Germany—Berlin Empire Furniture, ca. 1810 298 OIS] ‘#2 ‘ainjyiuing airdwy asauuai, — Auewiay 299 apquyp-Suiayy s, Apey pur apqey-Surmag— 7g ‘e9 ‘Aurwday 300 PUUdIA puke Ul[IIgG WOIJ syaulqes-SulzlIA\ —OCRI-OT8I 29 ‘Auevusay wangpase 301 Yoig ueljaiey Jo sprveoqdnyj—¢g] ‘v2 ‘eIssny Ke" ay. A x st aes Par ok: - oe te See Pa hile. 7 we es oS 5. es 302 Germany, “Biedermeier’, ca. 1830—Chair, Sewing-Tables and Paper Basket eevecesse YY Germany, “Biedermeier’, ca. 1820—Sofas 03 304 YIqny] worj sinjruiny —oc¢gy] . ‘ ed ‘ dalawiiapalg,, ‘Auewsay 305 din}iuIny poom-ArIayy—OC8I 29 “ JI IWIIpIlg,, « Auewdo 3, 306 niin ¥ gy PEAR AAVANE RANA VALTER OVE PENI AND EST UN TERED SS a DARIN LRA RAS Ee OE ca RY Germany, lst half of 19th cent.—Couch and Settee THE NEAR EAST AND EE EARS EAS P 308 MELEE! 81h I I OH. SEZ A Islamic, Turkey, 18th cent.— Koran Desk 309 k Koran Des Egypt— ier Islam 510 ysaq ueloy —‘}ua2 YIFT ‘gouan{juy dIqeiy dapun uenjdisy 311 ee bere Pert eee ree rr ysaq uereloy pue de jus) YI T ‘spuejs ueloy SSK AO syoulqe7) lanboey—‘}uas YISl-YiZI ‘eulyy a ce . Fos ra ee 515 pueyS UIpOOM pue youtqr-) jonboey—‘jua9 YIst YIZT ‘eu I Gh, 314 China—Lacquer Cabinet, 18thcent.; Indo-China— Cabinet, 18th cent. 315 China— Chairs, 18th cent.; Table Frame, 17th cent. 316 NERA SOOROOESIEO. Se een ene ne enn rosea scanaeaomenpiaanmnnciiaies = idan oe a AT A SN + LK AL vt 7 y eS iw 4a he -w< ‘., i oe od ay ’ Z 7 a ee e st iet Petry’, * * « pa a 2 oie - vat SA , ge eye e > Sage > i . ——= eee va * = wee i - - ements ae “ 7 c -e a —— - + -_ tee 6 rs 5 an ee — =i oho : e * - ae ee i = » eps ae a a _ _ 7 ee Km >a, pM ¥ - b “ resid os wes ‘ 4 - hie ng - a — - = ee ee ‘ , : ; ; - ney 2 en aT eS be = awed » a 2 - a - - en — fs . 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TAS bt ‘ ; x ' ; t GETTY CENTER LIBRARY NK 2270 E56 1926 BKS } ; “) : ¢. 1 Schmitz, Hermann, 18 | yi i The encyclopaedia of furniture : an outl | : eg SRE tory so INU 3 3125 00361 8010 cS | ae = _ cee et a Se