LITTLE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS ON OLD FRENCH FURNITURE IV. FRENCH FURNITURE UNDER LOUIS XVI AND THE EMPIRE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from . Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/frenchfurnitureuOOflrich Four-poster Bed, Mahogany and Brass, with Satin Hangings LITTLE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS ON OLD FRENCH FURNITURE IV FRENCH FURNITURE UNDER LOUIS XVI AND THE EMPIRE BY ROGER DE FELICE Tr. -SLATED BY F. M. ATKINSON ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY Printed in Great Britain INTRODUCTION In this volume Empire furniture will occupy much less space than Louis Seize. It may perhaps be enough to say that, in our opinion, this inequality is amply justified by the differ- ences in merit, comfort, and adaptableness to the needs of ordinary life that exist between the two styles ; but there is one more solid and positive reason. The aim of this handbook, like its predecessors, is to impart a better know- ledge of the furniture of past times, but most of all the furniture that was simple and practical, the good, honest pieces with no pretentions to sham luxuriousness, belonging to the modest middle classes or even the country folk of old France. Now, the Empire Style never had time to make its way into the depths of the provinces, where everything is so slow to change. In any case, how could that style, so learned and archaeo- logical, which had sprung finished and complete from the brain of a few fanatical devotees of antiquity, as once Minerva sprang in full panoply from out of the head of Jupiter — how could that style, so lacking in tradition, ever have found favour with the country people of France ? How could they have understood it ? And accordingly we find it left no trace in the output of the workshops of Provence or Normandy or Brittany, During the Revolution and the Empire, and still later, the country cabinet-makers, and those in the V vi INTRODUCTION small towns, went on quietly with Louis XVI styles, which were often simply Louis XV hardly modified at all, and they continued this up to the moment when industrial production on a large scale, centralised and carried out by machinery, shut, one by one for ever, the little workshops from which throughout two centuries so much simple beauty had issued to spread its boon among the dwellings of the unpretentious. The Empire Style undoubtedly has its own beauty ; it is simple, severe, not very cordial, but sometimes imposing in grandeur, and superb in its air ; but it is almost always only the most costly and luxurious pieces that have these qualities ; their material must be supremely fine, as it is displayed in large masses with little decoration. The bronzes must be excellent in sculpture, since they often make the whole of the rich effect, and because being isolated, as they usually are, in the middle of large panels of bare wood, they assume an extreme importance, and necessarily hold the eye. The actual composition of these metal appliques can the less permit of mediocrity, inasmuch as it often has to make up for poverty in their invention and design. An Empire piece made on the cheap, with too much veneering, too little bronze or bronzes inferiorly chased or not at all, gives the impression of rubbish made expressly for catch-penny bargain sales ; indeed, was it not precisely under the Empire, perhaps during the Revolution, that cheap- jack furniture first came into being ? In a INTRODUCTION vii word, the ordinary product of this epoch has nothing to call for any infatuated devotion. A very wide-awake collector may still, from time to time, pick up in the heart of Paris, and for a mere song, authentic Jacobs unrecognised by the seller who has them tucked away in his shop, but they are becoming rare, and by the side of these lovely things, pure in line, sometimes with exquisite curves and of superior craftsmanship, how many dull flat horrors there are that have not even the excuse of being unpretentious ! It has doubtless been observed that the Direc- toire Style has no place in the title of this volume nor even in the table of chapters. Many styles are badly named, but none so badly as this — if it even exists at all. The government of the Directors endured four years altogether. Did anyone ever see a style spring up and establish itself in so short a time ? It would be more correct to say Revolution Style^ for chairs with shovel backs,* ^ or roll backs,* made of plain wood, either pierced or carved in weak relief, furniture decorated with lozenges, daisies and stars ; beds with triangular pediments ; all these were being made from 1790; we even find models in collections before the Revolution, such as that of Aubert (1788). This transition period recalls the Regency by the double character of the furniture it produced. Certain pieces carry on the direct tradition of Louis XVI, while little by little modifying the * The asterisk refers to the index at the end. viii INTRODUCTION lines to which cabinet-makers had been faithful during thirty years ; others displaying that excess in novelty which three quarters of a century earlier had characterised Rocaille^ repudiate all the past like the saiis-cidottes^ and are more or less exact copies of Greco-Roman models ; of this kind are the celebrated pieces from David's workshop, which were speedily copied on every hand. When the imperial era arrives, it will drop all the exaggeration and retain the essence of these novelties, give them more restraint, more uniformity too, in a word, more style, precisely as the epoch of Louis XV had done for the some- what disordered imagination of the Regency. And so the Directoire style is Louis XVI ending and also the birth of the Empire ; but it is not an independent and finished style in itself. Without any further preamble, and after expressing our profound gratitude to the owners of antique pieces, and to the keepers of museums in Paris and throughout the country,^ to whose * Mile. M. de Felice, Mesdames de Flandreysy andKahn, Mile. Mouttet, Messieurs Marius Bernard, Brunschvicg, Ceresole and Briquet, Duchene, Ladan-Bockairy, La Maziere, Mezzara and Touzain, of Paris; M. Andre Clamageran, of Rouen; Madame Broquisse, Messieurs Abel and Louis Jay, of Bordeaux ; Madame Meyniac, of Saint Medard (Gironde) ; Mile. Marie Jay, Madame Laregnere, Messieurs Guillet-Dauban, Loreilhe and Pascaud, of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde) ; Mesdames Colin and Roudier, of La Riviere-de-Prat (Gironde); M. Ducros of Simondie (Dordogne) ; and the Directors of the Museum of the Union centrale des Arts decoratifs, of the Carnavalct Museum, of the Departmental Museum of Antiquities of Rouen and of the Museon Arlaten. INTRODUCTION ix courtesy we are indebted for the illustrations in this volume, we shall proceed to set forth a summary account of the history of French furniture during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen years of the nine- teenth, and next we shall describe the charac- teristics and principal shapes of furniture and their possible use in a modern interior, first for the style of Louis XVI and next for the Empire Style. PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES Bayard, ExMILE : " Le Style Louis XVI." Paris. " Le Style Empire." Paris. Benoit, Francois: "L'Art franyais sous la Revolution et TEmpire." Paris, 1897. Champeaux, Alfred de: "Le Meuble" (Bibliotheque de rEnseignement des Beaux- Arts). Paris. Havard, Henri: " Dictionnaire de rAmeublement et de la Decoration." Paris. Lafond, Paul : " L'Art decoratif et le Mobilier sous la Republique et rEmpire." Paris, 1900. MOLINIER, Emile. " Histoire generale des Arts appliques a I'Industrie.** Paris, 1896 (Vol. III.). Seymour de Ricci : " Le Style Louis XVL" Paris, 1913. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE INTRODUCTION y PART I A HISTORY OF THE TWO STYLES I PART II LOUIS XVI FURNITURE: I. CHARACTERISTICS AND TECHNIQUE OF THE STYLE ' 37 IL PANELLED FURNITURE AND TABLES 52 III. CHAIRS AND VARIOUS PIECES : A LOUIS XVI INTERIOR 68 PART III EMPIRE FURNITURE: I. CHARACTERISTICS AND TECHNIQEE OF THE STYLE 93 II. VARIOUS ARTICLES OF FURNITURE AND THEIR USE 115 INDEX-GLOSSARY 135 xm LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PLATE Four-poster Bed, Mahogany and Brass, with Satin Hangings Frontispiece 1. Leaf of a Door \ 2. Panel of Carved Wood ^ ^ 3. Normandy Cupboard in Oak 2 4. Cupboard with Revolutionary Emblems 3 5. Large Cupboard from the Gironde, Half-moon Shaped 4, 6. Mahogany Cupboard from the South-west of France, with Mouldings 5, 7. Provencal Cupboard in Walnut 6 8. Credence Sideboard from Aries, in Walnut 7 9. Etagerc '\ 10. Bread Cupboard I 8 11. Provencal Vi trine in Walnut J 12. Etagere from Aries, in Walnut \ 1$, Kneading Trough from A7'les, in Walnut J ^ 14. Vitrine in Mahogany with Brass Ornaments 10 15. Corner Cupboard in Marquetry, of different Coloured Woods 1 1 16. Drop front Escritoire in Marquetry with Gilt Bronzes 12 17. Bonheur du Jour with Roll-front, in Mahogany and Brass 1 3 18. Commode with Two Drawers and on Legs, in Marquetry 14. 19. Commode with Terminal-Shaped Legs and Pierced BrassesA tn Walnut L 15 20. Commode with Flutings, Diminished at the Base, in Walnut) 21. Commode with Toupie Feet, in Mahogany and Brass 16 22. Commode on Legs, in Mahogany Veneer ^ 23. Commode with " Pieds de Biche," in Rosewood, Tulip- [ 17 wood and Lemon-wood ) 24. Provengal Commode with Revolutionary Emblems, in Walnut 18 25. Tall Chiffonnibrc with Toupie Feet, in Mahogany and Brass I^ 26. Escritoire-commode from the Gironde, in Elm-wood 20 27. Card Table on Pivot, in Mahogany ") 28. Triangular Folding Table, in Walnut ] *' 29. Bouillotte table in Gilt Wood and Marble \ 30. Bouillotte table in Mahogany, Brass and Marble j ^ 31. Console with Two Legs, tn Painted Wood\ 32. Console with Two Legs, in Walnut j ^^ 33. Console with Two Legs, in Gilt Wood 24 34. Small Table with " Pieds de Bichc," in Walnut {begins ) ning of the style) [ 2S. 35. Ntght Table in Mahogany and Brass ) XV xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PL/ 36. Chiffonniere in TiiUp-wood and Marble *) SJ. Chiffonniere in Mahogany and Brass ] 38. Arm-chair {end of the style) ") 39. Bergere in Wood, Upholstered in Lyons Satin Brocade j 40. Arm-chair of Painted Wood, Upholstered in Utrecht Velvet 41. Cabriolet Arm-chair, Medallion Back \ 42. Cabriolet Arnuchair with Fiddle Back ] 43. Cabriolet Arm-chair ivith Round Seat, in Walnut\ 44. Cabriolet Arm-chair in Gilt Wood j 45. Arm-chair with Square Back, in Walnut ") 46. Arm-chair with Upright Consoles, in Gilt Wood {end of [ the style) ) 47. Large Arm-chair covered in Anbusson, Gilt Wood 48. Chair with Quiver -shaped Legs, in Walnut ") 49. X-shaped Stool in Gilt Wood, with Square Aubusson > Cushion ) 50. Bergere in Walnut, Upholstered in Utrecht Velvet \ 51. Small Bergere, in Painted Wood j 52. '' Confessional " Bergere, in Painted Wood 53. Chair with Flat Baluster Back, in Gilt Wood ) 54. Lyre-Backed Chair in Gilt Wood v 55. Chair wiih Open Back, in Painted Wood ) 56. 57 and 58, Mahogany Dining Chairs with Cane Scats, or Covered in Leather 59, 60 and 61. Straw-seated Chairs and Arm-chair with Lyre Backs 62. Carved Straw-seated Chair \ 63. Straw-seated Arm-chair with Cushions i 64. Straw-seated Chair with Sheaf Back ) 65. Straw-seated Chair from the Dordogne, in Cherry-wood ^ 66. Straw-seated Arm-chair from the Dordogne, in Cherry- I wood r 67. Straw-seated Chair from the Dordogne, in Cherry-wood j ^. Straw-seated Sofa from Provence with its Cushions ^, Sofa in Gilt Wood, Upholstered in Broche Silk {end of the style) 70. Chaise Longue in One Piece, Gsndola Shape 71. Chaise Longue Brisee in Two Equal Pieces 72. Chaise Longue Brisee in Two Unequal Pieces 73. Chaise Longue Brisee in Three Pieces 74. Four-poster Bed from Lorraine, Carved in the Renaissance Tradition 75. Angel Bed with ** Hat*' -shaped Dossiers, in Painted Wood 76. Angel Bed with Arched Dossiers, in Painted Wood 77. Screen in Painted Wood and Broche' Silk 1 78. Screen in Walnut and Brocatelle ] 79. Case Clock in Oak, Paris 80. Case Clock in Oak from Lorraine ] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvn FIG. PLATE 8l, 82 and 83. Small Mirrors with Carved Pediment^ in Gilt Wood 52 84. Cupboard from the Gironde^ in Walnut (beginning of the style) 53 85. Drop front Escritoire in Mahogany with Brass Inlay (beginning of the style) 54 86. Bonheur du Jour in mahogany with Flat-gilt Bronze Ornaments 55 87. Console in Rosewood Inlaid with Brass {beginning of \ the style) I ^ 88. Console with Arched Sides, in Pear-wood (beginning of [ ^ the style) ) 89. Console with Caryatides, in Mahogany and Bronze 57 90. Slope-fronted Bureau with Revolutionary Emblem 58 91. Chair with Rolled Back, in Gilt Wood ") 92. A rm-chair with Open Rolled Back, in Painted Wood j ^9 93. Arm-chair with Rolled Back, in Painted Wood ") , 94. Small Bergcre, in Painted Wood j ^" 95. Arm-chair with ''Horned '* Back (beginning of the style) \ ^ 96. Chair of the Revolutionary Period, in Mahogany ) " 97. Meridienne in Mahogany and Gilt Bronze 62 98. Mahogany Chaise Longue in the Antique Style 63 99. Bed with Rolled Dossiers, in Painted Wood (beginning of the style). Used as a Divan 64 PART ONE : A HISTORY OF THE TWO STYLES Empire furniture differs widely from; that" of the Louis XVI period ; and yet the two styles kre derived from the same principle applied from 1 760 to the Revolution with a great deal of dis- cretion and respect for the national taste, and from 1789 to 1815 with the most uncom- promising rigour. This principle is that of the imitation of Antiquity. That was not merely a particular circumstance, limited to the restricted circle of the art of the cabinet-maker, but, as it is called, a fact of civilisation ; something like — in a different proportion — ^what the Renaissance had been to France in the sixteenth century. This return to Antiquity, in fact, manifested itself in all the arts, in literature, and even, a little later, in the ways and customs of the French people. Its evolution took place pretty much as in the sixteenth century ; the art of Louis XV, like the flamboyant Gothic art of the fifteenth century, was an art that was purely French and modern, and which owed nothing, with the exception of certain works of architecture, to Greco- Roman antiquity. The influence of the latter at first transformed it only little by little, with every kind of compromise and accommoda- tion, moving on by regular stages, and never i Louis xvi furniture clashing directly with the national character or modern habits. The first French Renaissance, that of the reigns of Louis XII, and of Frangois the First, had done exactly the same. A little later, as in the time of Phiiibert Delorme, Pierre Lescot and Androuet du Cerceau, the imitation of antiquity becomes much more severely exact ; it has its extreme theorists, whose scorn for every- thing not Greek and Roman is complete and un- mitigated ; and now the Empire Style is born, the exact reverse of all that had been purely French in our applied art. , The Empire then is not a reaction against the Louis XVI Style, but its logical outcome. The brains of stiff and undeviating logicians, such as were so numerous in the revolutionary and imperial epochs, like David, Percier, Fontaine, coming after men like Soufflot and Ledoux, were inevitably bound, with the republican manners helping things on, to draw this absolute con- elusion from the premises imprudently laid down thirty years earlier. That is why it is fitting to set forth at one and the same time the history of two styles which are quite distinct, but the second of which prolongs the first with an immaculate correctness. The Louis XV Style had become quite out of fashion, at any rate at Paris, many years before the death of the King whose name has been given to it ; to be precise, it was about 1760 that furniture decoration and applied arts in general were seen to turn in a new direction, while THEVOGUEOF ANTIQUITY 3 Louis XVI was not to succeed his grandfather until 1774. This first vogue of articles ^'in the Greek manner," as they were then called, came immediately after the appearance — the coinci- dence is complete — of a whole series of works on Ancient Greece and Ancient Italy, accounts of travels, collections of documents, archaeological studies. President de Brosses, about 1740, had brought the classical Italian tour into fashion. From 1749 to 1751 Madame Pompadour's brother, then Marquis de Vandieres, and later Marquis de Marigny, had been sent by his sister on a mission to Florence, Rome and Venice, with the artist Cochin and the architect SoufHot, fo form his taste by the study of the work to the Renaissance, and above all of the Roman antiquities, before becoming Surintendant des Beaux Arts to Louis XV. In 1754 the architect Leroy paid a visit to the East, and four years after published the Riiines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece. The learned Comte de Caylus, a member of the Academic des Inscrip- tions and the Academic de Peinture et de Sculpture, a great amateur in art and patron of artists, helped in the propagation of the " taste for the antique " with all his influence ; he had travelled through Turkey, Greece, Asia Minor. His huge Recuezl d* aiitiquites egyptiennes^ etrusques^ grecques^ gauloises began to appear in 1752 and had a brilliant success of curiosity. Five years later came his Tableaux tires d^Homlr^ et de Virgile^ a collection of 4 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE '* subjects" to be treated by sculptors and painters tired of pastorals dindi fetes galantes. But what struck men's imaginations most was the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the two dead towns that were then beginning to lift their shroud of cinders and lava. Archaeology was made over again from foundation to coping- stone; it became all at once alive, familiar, in- teresting to the most frivolous spirit, for what the excavations were on this occasion bringing out once more into the light of day was no longer a mutilated marble torso, a broken architrave, a sarcophagus, but the round whole of ancient life ; the temples and the theatres, but above all the houses with their decorations, their furnishings, their utensils, the whole setting and apparatus of daily life. Henceforward we knew how beds and tables were made in a Greco- Roman town of the first century, mural paintings, lamps, silver and bronze table ware ; and accordingly nothing was more deeply influenced than the art of the cabinet-maker by this resurrection, which was immediately made known to France by several works. As early as 1 748 the Marquis de PHopital and the savant Darthenay were publishing a Memotre historique et critique sur la ville souterraine decouverte au pied du mont Vesuve ; in 1750 President de Brosses was writing Lettres stir Petat actucl de la ville souterraine d^Herculee ; the next year it was a Lettre sur les peintures d^ Herculanum from Caylus him- self; and in 1754 the Observations sur les A NEW OUTLOOK 5 antiqiittes (T Htrculamim by Cochin and Bcllicard, while waiting for the collection of the Anttquites d^ Herculanum^ by Sylvain Marechal and F. A. David. Thus, in the middle of the eighteenth century, archaeology is no longer the speciality of the Benedictines, the Academie des Inscriptions and a handful of the erudite exchanging obscure memoranda among one another ; it interests folk in the world at large, it is fashionable. But this fashion, which might have been no more than a fleeting caprice, becomes something profound and lasting, a whole new attitude of mind, thanks to the potent patronage of people like Madame de Pompadour, and to the support given it by the " philosophic " writers with their customary en- thusiasm. Diderot and Rousseau especially, smitten with Plutarch and Seneca, never cease chanting the praises of antiquity, simple, virtuous antiquity, and enjoining artists like other citizens to learn from it lessons of dignity and good con- duct. They never perceive, these worshippers of nature, that the Louis XV Style, clearly under- stood in its essence, was nature itself. It is in the domain of architecture and in that of the trinket that the movement of reaction begins. Architecture is a grave personage, a little heavy to set in motion; she does not emancipate herself often, and her vagaries are of short duration ; she was only too happy to fall back under the easy yoke of Vitruvius and to find once more, with her beloved triglyphs, her mos^ 6 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE restful denticles. And so mansions, palaces, theatres, churches, are all ^' in the Greek manner " ; the curved line that everywhere was supinely drooping now pulls itself together and straightens up. Rocaille is banished from the carved stone work and from painted or panelled walls, and is replaced by the classic designs that had fallen for a moment from favour, which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had already borrowed from the Ancients. " After the Greek " also are chased, are hammered, are enamelled, the thousand and one baubles with which both feminine and masculine dress are finished off, and the trinkets with which, in this century, people delight so much to load their pockets or cover the small pieces of furniture with which they surround themselves. It is natural that these little articles should have been the first to follow the new fashion. Then come goldsmiths' work, bronzes for furniture, and the furniture itself ; first the ornamentation, and then the line and structure. Painting and sculpture will bring up the rear, towards the end of the century, under the vigorous impetus of David. We have noted, in the preceding volume, the first somewhat hot protest that was raised against the agreeable freedom of the Louis XV Style, but it is worth returning to it. It had appeared first of all, unsigned, in the Mercure de Prance^ for December, 1754, under the title of a Supplica- Hon aux Orfevres^ Ciseleiirs^ Sculpteurs en bois tour les appartements et autres^ par unc A WITTY PROTEST 7 SocUte d' Artistes. Grimm and Diderot believed that this witty sally was from the pen of the lively Piron, and inserted it, with strong appro- bation, in their Correspondance littiratre ; later it was found to be by the younger Cochin, a good engraver and draughtsman, artistic pro- fessor and adviser to Madame de Pompadour. Three defects above all are in this article charged against this poor Louis XV Style ; the lack of good sense and an excess of imagination ; the abuse of complicated curves ; the mania for vegetable ornament. " Be it most humbly represented to these Gentlemen that, whatever efforts the French nation may have made for several years past to accustom its reason to the vagaries of their imagination, it has been unable wholly to accomplish this ; these Gentlemen are therefore entreated to be good enough hence- forward to observe certain simple rules, that are dictated by good sense, whose principle we cannot wholly root out of our minds." And Cochin has not enough sarcasm for those lines that all want " to go on the spree " and which " make the prettiest contortions in the world." The supplication goes on : " The wood carvers are accordingly begged to be so good as to give credence to the assurance we give them, we who have no interest in deceiving them, that regular rectilinear, square, round and oval shapes give a decoration as rich as all their inventions ; that as their correct execution is more difficult than that of all these herbages, bats' wings and other sorry 8 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE trifles that are now customary, it will do more honour to their talent." The flowery elegance of the ornaments, all the ingenious inventions of the designers who venture to "substitute herbages and other paltry prettinesses for the modillions, the denticles and other ornaments invented by men who knew much more about it than they do," find no mercy from this pitiless censor. " If we are asking for too many things at once, let them grant us at least one favour, that henceforth the principal moulding, which they ordinarily torment and cojQ-tort, shall be and shall remain straight, conformably to the principles of good architecture ; we will then consent that they shall make their ornaments writhe around and over it as much as seems good to them ; we shall count ourselves not so unlucky, since any man of good taste into whose hands such an apartment may come, will be able with a mere chisel to knock away all these nostrums, and find once more the simple moulding that will provide him with a sober decoration from which his reason will not suffer." In conclusion : "With regard to them, it only remains for us to sigh in secret and to wait until, their invention being exhausted, they themselves grow tired of it. It appears that this time is at hand, for they do nothing now but repeat themselves, and we have grounds for hoping that the desire to do something novel will bring back the ancient architecture." Ten years later. Cochin's wish was granted ; PSEUDO-HELLENISM 9 under the date of 1764, we may read in the Memozres Secrets of Bachaumont : ^' The mania of the present day is to make everything after the Greek" ; and it is also in 1764, ten years before the arrival of Louis XVI, that i* Amateur v^as acted, a comedy by a certain N. T. Barthe, one of whose dramatis personce said: *' fortunately for us The fashion is all for the Greek : our furniture, our jewels, Fabrics, head-dress, equipage, Everything is Greek, except our souls . • ." In very truth their souls were hardly Greek, nor their way of living, nor their costumes, and the furniture artists of the time had the good taste and the good sense to bear the fact in mind ; progressively, and by slight touches, they modified the articles of furniture which the preceding epoch had created, so well adapted for modern life. First of all it was the bronzes and the carved and inlaid decorations that borrowed their elements from ancient architec- ture (or what was so called), the form remaining untouched. We can see, for example, armchairs of the transition type, all of whose lines have the sinuosities of the Louis XV Style, but which are ornamented with rangs de piastres or with en^ trelacSy tables with crooked legs {pieds de biche)y whose festooned frame is decorated with flutings (Fig. 34). Many provincial workshops never got beyond this stage, even under the Empire. Afterwards it is the lines of construction that are gradually transformed} the curves become 7 lo LOUIS XVI FURNITURE simplified, decrease or stiffen one after the other into rectitude. An arm-chair still has a back shaped like a fiddle (Fig. 42), but its legs, turned and fluted, are rigid and square with the frame of the seat. A commode (Fig. 22) still has its legs slightly curved, but its body is already rectangular both in section and elevation. The transition period, whose hybrid character has often much of grace, mainly comes to an end when that Dauphin and Dauphiness, who between them cannot count up forty years, become king and queen of France, acclaimed by the love and the hope of the whole nation. During about fifteen years (1770- 1785) evolu- tion remains practically at a standstill, and the differences that can be noted, in style, between this and that type of article, more or less recti- linear in design, with ornament more florid or more architec-ural, are not differences due to their period, but are related rather to the diversity of temperament in the artists or divergence of taste in those for whom the pieces were intended. The first of the great-cabinet makers of the Louis XVI period in point of date and, without any dispute, in point of talent, is Jean Henri Riesener, who after having started, as an appren- tice, by making ''Louis Quinze " in Oeben's workshop, was to live long enough to see the Empire Style triumphant and his own produc- tions disdained. This great artist, whose works are the very flower of French taste in the age when it was purest, was nevertheless a foreigner, RIESENER THE ARTIST ii marvellously assimilated, it is true, but by birth he was German. At the death of Oeben, even before he had been received as maitre ebentste^ he took over the management of his workshop and then married his widow. He became known by finishing the orders given to his former employer by the royal Garde-Meuble, among other items, the famous bureau of King Louis XV, now in the Louvre ; and in the height of the Revolution, in 1791, he delivered to Marie Antoinette the escritoire and the commode that once were the gems of the celebrated Hamilton Collection, and are now the gems of that belong- ing to Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt. It might be said that Riesener unites all the qualities of the style with which we are at present concerned. His works are, in their composition as a whole, ample, full of grandeur, proportioned to perfection, architectural in the best sense of the word, and withal always graceful and supple in line ; as for their ornament, whether it be marquetry or chased bronze, it is exquisite, now abundant and flowery as a rose garden in May — Marie Antoinette adored roses, and Riesener constantly worked for her — ^and now displaying a masculine soberness which is of the very highest taste. With him the outline is never arid; according to the excellent custom of the time of Louis XV he almost invariably adorned the sharp edges of his pieces with beaded or corded mould- ing in bronze ormolu gilt ; he understood how to temper with impeccable touch the deliberate 12 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE rigidity of the " Greek " Style by means of a supple twining branch boldly bestriding a right line, or an acanthus leaf full of sap and life placed at the right spot. No one ever had to a higher degree the art of interpreting into elegance the elements purveyed by antiquity, and it is note- v^orthy that the older he became the more he multiplied dainty garlands, showers of blossoms, and draperies with soft flowing curves ; it might have been said that by redoubling French grace he was making his protest against the triumphant antiquomania of the time. He even remained faithful — which in 1 791 was, to all intents and purposes, an act of defiance — ^to panels of Chinese lacquer. " Martin Carlin is also an excellent representative of this pleasant Louis XVI manner, which is quite at its ease with antiquity; he also readily em- ployed old black and gold lacquer ; his delicate bronzes, deeply chased, perhaps a trifle affected, were frequently tiny garlands embossed upon the mouldings of the framework, or slender, elegant balusters adorning the angles. He loved the striking contrast of gilded bronzes upon polished ebony, dark and shimmering at the same time, which had recovered its bygone favour. We will be able to group together the cabinet- makers of severer taste, of heavier taste too, who sacrified more to sacrosanct antiquity, banished flowers — too frivolous ; and knots of ribbon — too coquettish ; and marquetry, whose fault is that it was never (perhaps) known to the Ancients, to ROENTGEN & MARQUETRY 13 keep all their affection for stiff lines, large uniform unbroken surfaces, and by way of decoration for the ovolos, ogees, modillions, flutings and cablings of the Roman architects. Here will take his place Jean-Franfois Lcleu, who was the first to inlay with thin brass the grooves of his flutings and to put metal rings round his pilasters ; Claude Charles Saunier, an elegant artist in marquetry at the outset of his career, but towards the end a great upholder of the antique genre^ whose man- ner is a trifle poverty stricken; Etienne Avril, whose pieces, vaguely English in appearance, are square, geometrical, with sharp edges, and panels of plain uniform veneer, framed in very narrow mouldings of gilt bronze. David Roentgen — he was generally called David , ^ — was a German like Riesener, but much less ^ Frenchified than he ; his principal workshop was at Neuwied, and he only had a depot at Paris, where he came at frequent intervals to pick up his orders, to procure designs and make enquiries as to the fashions. For the general shape of his pieces, which was extremely simple, as well as their inconspicuous and almost rudimentary bronzes, he would be classed with the makers of whom we have just spoken, without equalling them ; but he is peerless for his marquetry. The art of making paintings with pieces of wood chosen for their various colours had, it appeared, no advance to make after the epoch of Louis XV ; and yet Roentgen managed to give to his persons, emblems or flowers, shadows much more satisfy- V 14 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE ing than those that were obtained by burning or engraving the wood. He used exceedingly small pieces of darker woods admirably arranged, some- what in the manner of the small stone mosaics of Florence, which gave to his marquetry a quite novel depth and vividness. The decorations of his panels were most often composed of a subject of flowers, boldly treated and only occupying the centre of the expanse of satin-wood, on which they stood out strongly. They were accompanied by the traditional ribbons, but treated in a suffi- ciently personal and original way; sometimes stretched out in lozenges to make a frame ; some- times carelessly knotted, they threw their ends boldly across the background ; again they fastened roses, anemones, lilies, narcissi, to a Bacchante's thyrsus, terminating in its fir cone. As the reign of Louis XVI draws near its catastrophe the taste for the antique becomes more exacting and spreads more and more. Choiseul-Gouffier, the Ambassador to Constanti- nople and a traveller in the East, publishes the first volume of his Grece Ptttoresque. The Italianate German, Joachim Winckelmann, Presi- dent des Antiquites in Rome, Librarian at the Vatican, writes his Htstotre de L^Art chez Its Anciens^ translated in 1781, his Reflexions sur r imitation des ouvrages grecs dans lapeinture et la sculpture^ and other works, whose influence in France is almost as great as that of the collec- tions of engravings by the two Venetians, Piranesi the father and Piranesi the son, who engrave with THE YOUNGER ANACHARSIS 15 indefatigable needle and burin the antiquities of Rome and Herculaneum. The Piranesis are also inventors of decorations, and the collection of " Various Ways of Ornamenting Chimney-pieces and all other parts of Buildings after Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman Architecture/' is a source from which architects, decorators, cabinet- makers, goldsmiths, are to draw for fifty years. Let us note the appearance of Egypt on the stage with its sphinxes, its sarcophagi, its gods with the head of a hawk or a jackal ; their em- ployment in French decorative art dates from long before the campaign of Egypt. The Hamil- ton collection of Greco-Etruscan ceramics is described and reproduced in the work of Han- carville, which supplied inspiration to all the painters' studios. These costly folios were produced only for a chosen few, archaeologists, amateurs and artists. Antiquity finds also numerous popular exponents, the most celebrated of whom is the Abbe Barthelemy, with his famous Voyage du Jeime Anacharsts^ which had an enormous success and enabled some notions as to the public and private life of the Greeks to penetrate to what is ca led the "great public" — the "man in the street." In all this still more attention was paid to Athens than to Rome, and accordingly Hellenic art began to be better known and vaguely distin- guished from Roman art. And now literature joins in the game. Since Montesquieu, "beauteous antiquity" had been i6 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE forgotten indeed, once so greatly admired, though for very different reasons, by the poets of the Pleiade, then by the great sixteenth century classicists. Now it was veritably to be dis- covered anew, especially in its artistic and, so to speak, plastic beauty. This was the aspect by which it charmed the sentimental epicureans of the end of the century. Almost everywhere storytellers and poets strove to evoke before the eyes of their readers groups at the same time sculpturesque and emotional, visibly inspired by Greco-Roman art ; Paul et Virginic is full of sujets de pendiile — ^themes for ornamental clocks — in the purest style of late Louis XVI or the Empire. But the most perfect example of this neo- Alexandrian rather than neo- Attic literature, a little sugary, a trifle mannered, after the manner * of Clodion or Canova, are the antique poems of Andre Chenier, le jeune Malade^ la Jeunt Tarentine^ V Aveugle, Even the great Chateau- briand himself will yet offer sacrifice many a time to this taste in Atala and in les Martyres. The same applies to painting. Long before the Revolution broke out David had acquired his icy, rigid, grand manner ; the Oath of the Horaiiiy exhibited in the Salon of 1785, four years after his Belisarius^ marked him out as the chief of the French school. Henceforth this new Le Brun, as despotic and narrow in idea as the other, lays upon the unfortunate French painters the brutal injunction to copy '' antiquity in the raw." In this same Salon of 1785, whiclx EMPIRE STYLE 17 IS a pivotal date, there was nothing else but the Devotion of Alcestis, Priam's Return with the Body of Hector, Mucias Scaevolas burning their hands, and other illustiations of Homer or Livy. In monumental architecture the Greek tri- umphs, even the archaic Greek. Much is talked about the temples of Selinus and Paestum and the " Paestum Style," in other words, the heaviest of primitive Doric has its fanatical devotees. Who could believe it ? It is not under Napoleon the First, but absolutely beginning from 1780 that the gloomy convent of the Capucins d'Antin was built (now the Lycee Condorcet). Private architecture was naturally less offensive in anachronism ; but the Hotel de *Salm (the Palace of the Legion of Honour) was constructed by Rousseau in a style that was already different, for example, from that of Bagatelle ; it was almost the Empire Style. And as much might be said for the Hotel d'Osmont, in the Rue Basse du Rempart, of the Hotel de Soubise, in the Rue de I'Arcade, and other works of Cellerier, Brongniart or Chalgrin. Internal decoration was changing at the same time. The boudoir of Marie- Antoinette at Fontainebleau already has the little octagonal panels, with camaieuXy the Greek palm leaf ornaments, the slender rinceattx out of which the characteristics of the Directoire Style are fashioned. The little mansion of pretty Mile. d'Hervieux in the Rue Chantereine, which iSLOUIS XVI FURNITURE Brongnlart had built at the beginning of the reign, then passed for the last word of the most refined luxury ; the ^' belle impure '' has it newly de- corated from top to bottom in the Roman Style. And the sleeping chamber of the Comte d'Artois represents ^'the tent of the God Mars," as if Percier and Fontaine had already arrived Many of the pieces belonging to the last years of the reign depart from the pure Louis XVI type. On the one hand, and this is especially true of the most luxurious pieces, tables or commodes of state meant for the royal apartments, a striking resemblance can be found to the decor- ative spaciousness of the Louis XIV Style. That is quite natural; the principle (borrowed from decorative motifs in ancient architecture, but without copying the general Greek or Roman forms) is in the main the same a century earlier. When a cabinet-maker, round about 1785, fears to *' sacrifice to the Graces" overmuch, and proposes to make pieces that shall be at the same time rich and severe and majestic, in a word, royal, he inevitably meets his predecessors of the end of the seventeenth century. There are at Fontainebleau and at Versailles certain clock-stands of gilt wood, certain console tables that, if one did not know their true history, one might fancy were made for the Roi-Soleil, although they were in reality made for Louis XVI. Besides, at this period, the Louis XIV Style was frankly copied; the cabinet-makers Montigny, Levasseur, Severin, had for their GUILLAUME BENEMAN 19 special line the copying or imitation of the sumptuous pieces of Andre-Charles BouUe in inlay of ebony, shell, and metals. From these new characteristics we will be able to distinguish another family of cabinet-makers, as different from Riesener and Carlin as Leleu, Saunier or Avril ; their chief will incontestably be Guillaume Bcneman, who is represented in the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, and in the Wallace Collection, by commodes or under cupboards of a truly monumental kind. They are made of mahogany decorated with bronzes, and not in marquetry, but they make one think of the best works of BouUe by the grandeur of their style. The ornamental part of their facade is nearly always a great elliptical arch, shaped like a basket handle, which takes up the whole width and enframes a trophy of arms, a medallion in biscuit ware flanked by rtnceaux ; the copner uprights are Corinthian pilasters, or sheaves of lances, and the feet toupie-shaped or lions' paws. The celebrated jewel cupboard of Marie An- toinette, by Schwerdfeger, with its polychrome ornamentation, somewhat overdone, and its legs terminating somewhat meanly, is decidedly in- ferior both to the maker's reputation and to the work of Beneman. Other pieces belonging to this period, instead of recaUing the style of Louis XIV, herald that of the Revolution and the Empire ; one may even say that they belong to it already. Certain tables have legs in the form of termini whose 20 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE top part is a sphinx's head ; others are carried by those bizarre legs, copied from certain Pompeiian tripods, known as ^' pteds de biche surmounted by caryatides," and showing plainly to what extent this generation lacked any critical sense in its admiration for antiquity. Equally dis- pleasing to the reason as to the eye, they arc com- pounded of two parts treated on a totally different scale ; a deer's leg, the haunch ornamented with a human head surrounded with rinceaux^ is cut clean across, and this cross-section supports a little seated^sphinx, which itself carries on its head' and its uplifted wings the frame of the table. The collections of the designers of furniture are full of these purely antique models from before 1789: those of Lalonde, for instance, of Dugourc, of Aubert. . . . Besides the Roman tripods, we see in them seats with roll backs and legs curving outwards like those of a cathedra^ and X-shapcd fstools that are precisely curule chairs. The cabinet-maker in whom the work of these innovators is summed up is Adam Weisweiler, who makes great use, by way of supports, of elegant metal caryatides, and makes athentennes * " in the Herculanean Style," while at the same time admitting strange compromises, as in this ebony commode in which he has com- bined a pediment turned upside down, acroteria, and palm leaf ornaments come down in direct line from a Grecian tomb, with wonderful panels of old Japanese black and gold lacquer. To sum up, the Empire Style was formed NE.W IDEAS 21 under Louis XVI, as the Louis XVI Style was formed under Louis XV, and the Louis XV Style under Louis XIV and the Regency ; the nomen- clature of our styles invariably lags behind their chronology. The Revolution then did not, even in Paris," bring a rapid change in the fashion of our ancestors' furnishing. It could not be, as the Goncourt brothers accused it of being, the cause of a movement that had begun several years earlier ; but it helped that movement and hastened it in every way, because it was going precisely in the direction that was necessary to satisfy the tastes of the Revolutionary generation, which enthusiastically admired the ancient republics, and which affected a severe austerity in the manner of Lycurgus and Cato. From the time of the Constituent Assembly, new ideas sweep over decoration and furniture as over every department of art. Everyone makes Greek pieces, more and more Greek ; but at the same time pieces that are still altogether Louis XVI are loaded with revolutionary emblems (Figs. 4 and 24). A certain " Sieur Boucher, a merchant upholsterer, well known," according to his own modest statement, " for the purity of his taste in matters of furnishing," advertises in 1790, in the fournal de la Mode et du Gout^ ou Amusements du Salon et de la Toilette^ that he has just ^' enriched his emporium with various articles in harmony with the circumstances of the 22 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE day." These are, for example, ^^ patriotic beds with the symbols of liberty ; in place of plumes there are bonnets on the end of sheaves of lances, which form the bed posts ; they represent the triumphal arch erected on the Champ de Mars on the day of the Federation." Everywhere a disorded taste for allegories runs wild : it is nothing but fasces (strength as the result of union) ; Phrygian caps (Liberty recovered) ; spirit levels (equality) ; pikes (the freedom of man) ; oaken boughs (social virtues) ; triangles with an eye in the middle (reason) ; clasped hands (fraternity) ; tables of the law, etc., without counting the ^' Captures of the Bastille " carved on so many cupboards (Fig, 4). But people tire quickly enough of these emblems. Three years go by (1792- 1795) during which the French industry, which lately turned out luxurious furniture for the whole of Europe (in 1789 it exported to the value of four million livres), is reduced by reason of the social agony, the foreign war, and the insurrection in the west, to an almost complete standstill. This is the moment! when the goldsmith Odiot shuts his shop and fastens up on the door the following notice : " Placed in the safe keeping of the public, as the head of this house is in the army fighting against the enemies of his country." The few pieces now turned out by the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and all those that will hereafter be turned out — whilst the provincial workshops go on making Louis XVI without wavering — ETRUSCAN BROWN 23 are made in the antique style. Here is the description of an '' antique arm-chair " at this precise moment : " the wood painted in grey white and varnished ; the feet of solid brass, highly polished ; the back roll-shaped ; the seat covered in silk with an arabesque design on a background of b/eu d^oeil with a rosace in the centre on an Etruscan brown ground, and red ornaments." What is an Etruscan chair ? Here you are : " a chair in mahogany, the back made of three trumpets and a lyre bound together ; the cushion of brown silk stuff with a green rosace in the centre with yellow ornaments ; antique feet of solid brass, highly polished." These feet, these '^ genuine antique feet" are simply toupie-shaped, broad and splayed out. As for the " Etruscan brown " (a hideous chocolate brown, vulgar and dull), it is a colour " in a new taste," with which everyone is at present much concerned in the upholsterers' world : " the happy blending " — it is still the Journal de la Mode etdu Gout speaking — " the happy blending of several colours upon a very deep brown, which forms what is called the Etruscan Style, sets off materials in a way that we had never had any idea of till now." How far we are, with these green and yellow rosaces on an Etruscan brown ground, from those harmonies discreet and gay at the same time, that smart and elegant mixture of fresh bright hues the tapestry-weavers and the upholsterers of yore knew the secret of composing! So now it is that pieces no longer decorated 24 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE with antique ornaments, but copied exactly from those that the excavations of Pompeii have brought to light, or that have been disclosed to us from ancient vases and bas-reliefs, are sanctioned by fashion ; still better, this is the official style of the Republic, and to adopt it is to display civic virtue, just like giving up wearing breeches and powder, like wearing the tricolour cockade, like calling your son Astyanax-Scaevola, as the painter Jean Bosio actually did. David did more than anyone else to impose this new style ; he had power to do it, being the important person he was under the Terror. The antique pieces in his studio, which he has brought into nearly all his historical pictures, were so celebrated that they deserve a brief mention. They had been made, in 1789 or 1790, by old Georges Jacob, the head of the dynasty, from designs by David himself and by his pupil Moreau. They were mahogany chairs, a kind of large arm-chair with an all mahogany back, very singular in appearance, round as a tower and ornamented with bronzes, a curule chair whose Xes ended in lions' heads and lions' paws ; and that day-bed of the purest lines, on which the painter stretched out the charming person of Madame Recamier. These chairs were furnished with cushions and draperies in red woollen stuff with palm designs in black : David had naively reproduced in them the colours of Greek vases of red earthenware with black figures, from which, when designing them, he had taken his inspiration. SUPPRESSION OF GUILDS 25 It was David too who had the order for the furniture for the Convention given to Georges Jacob and two young architects and designers, then quite unknown and very poor, already partners for life, and for whom this affair was the beginning of fortune : Pierre Fontaine and Charles Percier. Soon after the production of this furniture Georges Jacob retired from business, leaving the management of the huge workshop in the Rue Meslay, or Meslee, to his sons, the third one of whom, Francois Honore, was destined, under the name of Jacob Desmalter, to eclipse the others and become the king of cabinet-makers in the Imperial epoch. The Guilds, masterships, wardenships were all, as is well known, suppressed by the Revolution. From the social point of view this was un- doubtedly a point of progress ; from the technical point of view also, perhaps, in certain industries that heretofore had been matters of routine ; but certainly not from the artistic point of view. To suppress all this strict body of rules and regula- tions governing the ancient trade corporations was to suppress their traditions, the careful, thorough training of the craftsmen, and certain rules of professional honour. Marat himself had expressed fears in the Ami du Peuple: "With this doing away of all novitiate, the workers no longer take any trouble about solidity and finish, work is rushed, dashed off. ... I do not know whether I am mistaken or not, but I should not be surprised if in twenty years time it will be 5> 26 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE impossible to find a single workman in Paris who knows how to make a hat or a pair shoes " Marat's fears were excessive with regard to hats and shoes ; but it is certain that artistic industries such as furniture-making started to decline, beginning with this reform, except for the magnificent furniture de luxe made under the Empire — and in any case made by workmen who had been trained and fashioned in the ancient corporations. Another reason for this decadence is the change in the clientele of cabinet-makers and joiners. As soon as the Terror was over the various in- dustries returned to life, orders flowed into the re-opened workshops, and if it is true that the *' Directoire Style " either scarcely exists at all or actually existed earlier than the government of the Directors and was destined to outlive it, it is also most true that the greater part of the pieces that are grouped under this description were made after 1795, because during the preceding years hardly any had been made at all. But the Directoire is 2i plutocracy^ and as nearly all the old fortunes had been swept away, this plutocracy is a regime of yiouveaux riches. Some are the "nantis," the "corrupted" of the political world, admirers and imitators of Barras ; others have speculated in army supplies ; the most have grown rich by buying the goods of the nation for a song ; all are parvenus without taste, without traditions, who mean to enjoy as rapidly as pos- sible a fortune that may be fragile, and make the THE NOUVEAUX RICHES 27 utmost possible display of it. But they do not know the art of spending royally, like a grand seigneur or fermier general of the old time, who set a high value upon fine things ; they bargain and are stingy in giving their orders ; for them work must be done quickly and cheap, with economy both in material and workmanship. Hence the general meanness of furniture during the last years of the century. They might, those nouveaux riches, have acquired, and could still acquire for a sheaf of assignats^ the masterpieces of Riesener and Oeben, but they prefer to sur- round themselves with bran new pieces, made expressly for them, for which we should be wrong to blame them. It is only just to say it : these " articles of furniture and objects of taste " — ^that is the name La Mesangere, the director of the Journal des Modes et des Dames ^ gives, in his famous collection of models, to the furniture in fashion at the time — were much sought after abroad, and began once more to be exported in spite of the wars waged by the Republic against so many coalitions. The imitation of the antique was more than ever the supreme law ; we know the Merveilleuses all had the ambition to be clothed — or unclothed — like Sappho, and it was about this time that Madame Vigee-Lebrun gave the memorable dinner described in her Souvenirs^ at which the guests were crowned with roses, draped in the antique fashion, recHning on couches on their elbows, and ate " Spartan black broth," drinking 28 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE out of "Etruscan" goblets and singing, to the accompaniment of a lyre, hymns to Bacchus punctuated with cries of ^'Evoe ! " The most celebrated interior of the last years of the Republic was the one that Madame Rccamier had had decorated and furnished by the fashionable upholsterer Berthaud, under the guidance of Percier, Fontaine and BcUange. The sleeping chamber was all in mahogany, from the pilasters on the walls, the door cases, the doors, down to the smallest article of furniture ; all this severe red-brown was relieved by some inlay of citron wood and silver fillets ; for hangings red velvet, and on the chairs Beauvais tapestry v/ith flowers and fruits of brilliant colours on a deep brown ground — the famous Etruscan fashion ! Furthermore, architraves of polished violet granite, architectural motifs in oriental alabaster ; curtains of chamois, violet and black, draped in the most complicated fashion. Such were the colours in vogue. There was much talk too of the little mansion General Buonaparte had bought, on his return from the campaign in Italy, from Talma. It was in the Rue Chantereine, which then became the Rue de la V^ctoire. The furniture, as be- fitted the conqueror (£ Areola and Rivoli, was nothing but symbols of war and victory; for seats, arm-chairs of ebony inlaid with silver, and stools that were drums, with their cords stretched round a barrel of yellow hide ; a mahogany commode with lions' heads; a bed "painted ALLEGORICAL FURNITURE 29 antique bronze '^ ; a bureau, the bronze ornaments on which were Roman glaives. After the Egyptian campaign, in which a kind of archaeological staff duplicated the military staff of the hero, there could not fail to come a fit of Egyptomania. It did come, and it was then that Vivant-Denon, one of the savants that had followed the expedition, both archaeologist and architect at the same time,^ had a bedroom fitted up by Jacob Desmalter to his own designs, which aimed at being of the purest Pharaonic style. The bed, of mahogany inlaid with silver, had three faces ornamented with bas-reliefs of rows of kneeling figures ; its head was decorated with a carved Isis, and the legs with the Uraeus symbol. Numerous Egyptian pieces will presently figure in the collection of designs by Percier and Fontaine. All this was in arguable taste ; but what is to be said of so much other allegorical furniture that passed at this time for the latest word in art ? For a " warrior " who seeks recreation and relax- ation between two campaigns, from the noble works of Bellona, here is a bedroom that is a soldier's tent, whose hangings are held up by pikes ; everywhere are hung trophies of weapons, glaives and shields ; the posts of the couch, which is in the shape of a camp bed, aie surmounted by the helmets of Greek hoplites. A "disciple of Act aeon '' (for this read "a great hunter '') has his chamber transformed into a temple of Diana. The ceiling has two sloped * The Venddme Column is his work. 30 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE sides, like the roof of a Greek temple ; the bed is under a canopy with a pediment, upheld on four slender columns. For ornaments, a bust of Diana flanked by two stags' heads at the peak of the pediment ; dogs, bows, arrows, etc. Behind the bed, on the back wall, a bas-relief, Diana and Endymion. In the foreground two termini representing Silence and Night, one with a finger on his lips and holding a cornucopia full of poppies, the other bearing a torch. The roof '* appears to be upborne on open pillars, which allow the beholder to perceive," in painting, "the verdure of the trees among which it is supposed this little temple has been erected." And this too is still Percier and Fontaine. After these extravagances, half archaeological half symbolic, the Empire Style, properly so called, will be, in spite of its persistent pedantry, a real return to reason and simplicity. On the 1 8th Brumaire, in the year VIII, France gives herself to her hero. It is not yet the Empire, but, as far as the domain of art goes, the reign of Napoleon begins. The First Consul dreams at once of peace, offers peace to England, speaks of nothing but the works of peace. " We must lay aside our jack-boots," he says, "and think of commerce, encourage the arts, give prosperity to our country." One of his first cares is to re-establish French luxury and refine- ment in its glorious traditions, to remake a court little by little. He wishes to have palaces, ADVENT OF NAPOLEON 31 if not built for him, at least decorated and furnished for him. He begins by employing Percier and Fontaine, who are presented to him by David, to restore and furnish Malmaison, which Josephine has bought in 1798. Hencefor- ward Napoleon will never wish to have any other architect or decorator for his great official fetes but the two inseparable friends ; the doing up of Saint Cloud will come after Malmaison, then the Tuileries, the Louvre, etc. We may say that the coup (Tetat of Brumaire, and all that followed from it, has been an inexpressible boon for our artistic industries. It is not that Napoleon had any passion for art, nor that he had a great deal of taste ; the setting in which his devouring activity moved, when he was not on campaign, was a matter of profound indifference to him — he did not even see it. But it was part of his scheme of policy to want to have about him a solid and grandiose luxury, fitted to give a lofty impression of his power ; he was imperious, always in a hurry, abounding in colossal projects quickly cast aside ; but he opened his coffers wide, and when he had once given an artist his confidence he never withdrew it without good reason. It must be admitted, also, that men like David, Percier, and Fontaine were wonderfully made to fit in with him. Of the two latter it may be said that they were the creators of the official Empire*Style. ^^^Was it for the good of French decorative art or the reverse ? The answer is not in doubt- The de- 32 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE fects of Empire art, coldness, aridness, continual anachronisms, are not to be imputed to them. It would have had those faults without them (for it had them already) even if they had not been the whole-hearted admirers of the Ancients which they always showed themselves. On the other hand, they were architects in their souls, and their architectural qualities they gave to all their projects of decoration and furnishing ; they had a lofty imagination, grandeur and simplicity of taste, they understood their epoch and the Napoleonic regime to a hair ; their conception may displease us, or chill us, but we cannot deny that it was admirably appropriate to its destined use. Can any praise be greater ? Can there be conceived for this epoch, when national pride straightened every frame, when warlike enthusiasm hovered in the air and swelled every bosom, when glory inflamed every youthful brain, when every will was stiff and proud, when military despotism was imposed upon the nation by virtue of its conquests, can there be conceived other furniture or another style of decoration than those on which, upon broad austere surfaces, marked out by straight lines and sharp edges, there were hung swords and triumphing palms were displayed, and golden Victories postured with widespread wings ? It is because they profoundly felt this fitness and harmony that Percier and Fontaine were great artists. This style, so highly appropriate to Imperial France, was nevertheless, in spite of the slow AN ARTIFICIAL STYLE 33 elaboration we have described, not in the pure national tradition ; it was not sprung spon- taneously from our own soil and under our own skies ; it had something abstract and arbitrary, something imposed on our taste as the regime itself was imposed on the nation. In short, there have been styles that are far more truly French. There is a contradiction here, someone will say. It is in appearance only. The truth is that France was then at a quite exceptional moment in her long existence. The fever of conquest that had come after the revolutionary fever had broken the equilibrium of her tempera- ment ; she was beside herself at this moment when her history seems to be pure legend. The Empire Style was very exactly befitting for France as she was from 1800 to 18 15, but to that France only, not the eternal France. When it found favour once more with artists and public, between 1890 and 1895, it was, let us confess it, a quite artificial movement. What clearly shows that this style is something international — in any case the imitation of antiquity from which it proceeded was by no means specially French ; think of Canova, Thorwaldsen, Angelica Kaufmann, and otheri — is the enthusiasm with which it was adopted at once by all nations, whether they were subjected to Napoleon's domination or not. Never perhaps had French decorative art such expansive force. Jacob Desmalter (almost always following the models of Percier and Fontaine) furnishedj^not 34 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE only Malmaison, Compiegne, Saint Cloud, Fon- tainebleau, the Elysee, without reckoning so many private mansions in Paris, but also the Escurial, Aran] uez, Windsor Castle, and countless palaces and mansions in Antwerp, Mayence, Potsdam, and even as far as Petrogad. But when this species of exaltation subsided in France, and the Empire was succeeded by the Restoration, that royalty devoid of glory, that peaceful, bourgeois, somewhat flat and dull period of our history, the decadence was immediate and profound ; the Empire Style was preserved in a haphazard fashion, for want of knowing what to put in its place, but at the same time its character was changed in the direction of heaviness and flabbiness ; it degenerated very speedily, because there was no longer harmony between it and the manners of the time. SECOND PART THE LOUIS XVI FURNITURE CHAPTER ONE : CHARACTER- ISTICS AND TECHNIQUE OF THE LOUIS XVI STYLE The least instructed eye can tell at the first glance a Louis XVI piece from a Louis XV ; and yet there is no essential or fundamental difference such as there is between the style of Louis XV and that of Louis XIV. It is because manners and customs are at bottom the same after 1760 as before that date, and will remain the same until 1789 ; now, only a transformation in manners and customs can bring about a radical change in furniture fashions. We have determined the approximate date when the new style replaced the old ; at this date Louis XV is still on the throne, and in spite of his age his ways have not altered. Madame du Barry succeeds Madame de Pompadour, and it is merely one degree more of abasement. It is for this Lange woman, become Comtesse du Barry, that the pavilion of Louveciennes was built and furnished ; that vanished marvel which, without any doubt, was the most exquisite masterpiece of the Louis XVI Style. The aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie are always the same in the round, equally eager for the life of society and for pleasure, equally denuded of moral sense ; but if they take good care not to practise virtue, 37 38 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE just as Diderot and Rousseau did, they have fallen to adoring it with emotion in other people. That senile blase society had its living allegory in old Marquise du Deffand ; by dint of adven- tures, satirical conversations, v^it spent||with heedless prodigality, by dint of scepticism, and of having been through everything, she had fallen into a state of profound ennui, which was a genuine malady and one that she believed to be incurable ; and lo ! at seventy years or near it, she was seized with a passion, one of those passions that take complete possession of a soul, an absurd and touching passion for Horace Walpole, whom, as she was blind, she had never seen. . . . Like her, eighteenth century society had its senti- mental fit, rather late in life. The virtue, the sensibility (they are the same things in the minds of the people of this epoch), the simplicity of the ancient days and "natural" men are all the fashion, but merely a fashion. Women of quality continue to go every night to the Opera or the new Opera Comique, and in what extrava- gant array ! but the pieces they listen to are called le Bon Fils^ le Bon Seigneur^ V Amour Paternal^ or la Suivante reconnaissanU^ and if they are young mothers, as they have read Entile^ they have their babies brought to them during the interval and suckle them in their box in such a way as to be in full view while doing so. Philanthropy is a novelty which becomes the rage, and on every chiffonier the Mercure de France meets with the Annates A SOPHISTICATED SOCIETY 39 de la Bienfaisance and the Etrennes de la Vertu^ newspapers founded to advertise the virtuous doings of fashionable folk. The financier on his w^ay, accompanied by some *' modern Terpsichore," to a smart party in the little house in the suburbs, v^as happy to stop his coach on the way to give alms, shedding gentle tears the while, to some poor but respectable aged man caught sight of on the wayside. Everyone delights to exclaim, *' Simplicity ! Virtue ! what charms ye hold for feeling mortals ! " but luxury becomes more and more unbridled. Palates are weary of too learned gravies and over-seasoned bisques, and it is a delicious pleasure to pay a visit to a farm and dip a slice of home-made bread in a pitcher of hot milk ; but they will be back for supper again next day. The typical men of this generation are Diderot, who alternates so naively his blackguardism and his tearful ex- hortations to virtue, and Greuze, who so much delights to slip spicy innuendos into his studies of girls as into his large melodramatic pictures. Such is the double character of Society under Louis XVI ; at bottom epicurean and worldly, just as in the first half of the century, it never- theless loves simplicity, virtue and reason. Let us repeat that it returns to a taste for Greco- Roman antiquity, and there you have the principal elements of the style. The task of architects, designers, cabinet-makers and joiners, metal casters and engravers, up to the end of the old regime, is to be to harmonise the taste for snug 40 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE comfort, intimacy, attaching grace, the most exquisite refinement, which marked the highest and the middle classes in French society of the time, with the noble and simple beauty of antiquity. Refined simplicity, a sober elegance, neatness and precision, softened by abundant grace ; such is the ideal, Antiquity will then be interpreted and made French as in the noble days of the Renaissance, and when archaelogy is in conflict with what is comfortable and pleasing, so much the worse for archaeology ; it must needs give way. In fine, in spite of the progress in the science of antiquity, in spite of exhumed Pompeii, what was best known in ancient art about 1760 was Roman architecture. Accordingly it is Roman architecture that gives the tone to the new style. Furniture falls again under the yoke of architec- ture, which it had shaken off, for the first time and for a, little while during the reign of the grotto. "There are," said Delacroix, "certain lines that are monsters : the straight line, the regular serpentine, above all two parallel lines." These monsters are henceforth and for a long time to rule in furniture. Roman architecture, in fact, is primarily a family of lines ; the straight line and the semi-circular arch, the horizontal parallels of cornices, the vertical parallels of pilasters and their flutings ; right angles too ; that is to say, the negation of all sinuous lines like those of nature — if indeed there be any lines in nature — GEOMETRY IN DESIGN 41 the sweet living lines that the Louis XV Style had placed everywhere for the delight of our eyes. Henceforth commodes no longer fear to look like "a box perched up on four laths," except those that link their fa?ade v^th the wall against which they stand by two little quarter-cylindrical cupboards, or by shelves shaped to quarter circles full or re-entrant ; except again those that vsdll retain supports slightly tending Xo pied de btche shape under their chamfered angles. This kind continued to be made up till towards the end of the style. Quantities of arches, semi- circular or elliptical, on top of panels of woodwork (Fig. 2), mirrors, chair backs (Figs. 48, 50, 76), numbers of ellipses also; frames of panels (Fig. 2) upon walls, borders for mirrors and pictures, medallion-shaped chair backs (Figs. 41, etc.), tables large and small, console tables (Figs. 31, 32), folding tables, com- modes, even armoires (Fig. 5) are very frequently semi-circular in ground plan. In short, the im- personal traced with ruler and square and compass constantly takes the place of freehand designs, the fancy of the crayon and the graving-tool. All this geometry has in it something abstract, some- thing purely rational, calculated to please mathe- matical minds, like that of d'Alembert, for in- stance, or Condillac's ; but it would be very arid if it was not almost always mitigated by the more living grace of the ornaments. Many Louis XVI pieces follow this principle of the straight line to the very end, and do not comprise a single curve 42 Louis xvi furniture (Figs. 20, 26, etc.). The excess of abstraction and dryness cannot then be denied. On the other hand, this uncompromising rigidness, these joins that are all made at right angles, satisfy the reason by defining with complete and perfect distinctness every part of the piece, by respecting to the utmost the grain of the wood, and by giving the joints the maximum of solidity and strength. No doubt, but how cold it all is ! Ancient architecture brought back also absolute symmetry in form and in ornament ; never more do designers offend, except for insignificant details of decoration (flowers, ribbons, etc.), against the venerable rule of the identity of the corre- sponding parts to the right and to the left of a centre line. t^ Another principle, architectural in its origin ; the definition of a surface, devoid of ornament, by a border or several parallel borders taking the place of ornamentation. Numbers of pieces have no other decoration (Figs. 6, 17, 21) ; large bare surfaces are in high favour ; " the sublime and virtuous nudity of the Greeks," as David said, exists for mahogany and stone as well as for the human body ; and when that mahogany is of a very handsome quality, veined, figured, with a warm patina from age, nothing more by way of ornamentation need be desired. These framings are generally mouldings in gilt bronze, or covered with brass ; sometimes, especially at the latter end of the epoch, they are simple bands of brass embedded in the wood (Fig. 35). When the SIMPLEX MUNDITIIS 43 piece contains no brass, they are thin strips o^ wood, the colour of which stands out against that of the background. As for the shape of the panels thus defined, they are squares, rectangles, arches accompanied by corner pieces of the same border or a triangular rosace of acanthus leaf, ellipses, circles. The rectangular panels are often sloped off at the angles, either rounded off or squared off, and this slope is adorned with a small round rosace. One very favourite panel also, on commodes and escritoires with flaps (those made by Riesener particularly), is a trapezium, the oblique sides of which are concave. The form of moulding is changed. There is now less than on Louis XV pieces ; it is flatter, more austere, more uniform also ; in general it obeys the laws of the ancient kinds ; ogee, doucine, scotia, cavetto, apophysis, all auto- matically combined, without any fanciful effects, with fillets and baguets. These elements are poor enough ; they do not offer any very varied resources to artists. How is it then that so many Louis XVI pieces give so full an impression of grace or beauty ? First of all by their proportions, which are nearly always exquisitely right, by the faultless equilibrium of balanced masses, the harmonious division of surfaces, the importance of the framing calculated with exactitude according to that of the parts enclosed by the frame. In these matters tact has perhaps never been so sure as 44 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE in the epoch of Louis XVI. And then the ornamentation came with the same sureness of taste to add to a somewhat bare whole just what richness was needed within the limits of deliberate sobriety. The essential difference between the orna- mentation of pieces belonging to the Louis XV period and that of Louis XVI pieces is that the latter most frequently proceeds by way of repetition of similar element^ arranged in lines or combined in a running motif. This also is a legacy from ancient architecture. Such a decora- tion can be made, so to speak, by the yard, which facilitates to a distressing degree cheap- jack imitation, even machine made imitation of Louis XVI pieces. Another characteristic common to the majority of the ornaments of the Louis XVI Style is the small scale on which they are treated by carvers, and especially by the artists in bronze. It appears that they never find their motives sufficiently finished and delicate, sufficiently em- bellished w'th little details that serve to display the cunning of their engraving tool. A furniture bronze is treated like a piece of goldsmith's work, and a piece of goldsmith's work like a gem. This fault, for it is a fault — ^let us call it affectation — comes without a doubt, as has been well observed, from the passion both men and women of the time had for small articles, the toys, " brimborions '' as they were called, such as were bought at the famous shop, the Petit Dunkerque ; little fancy DECORATIVE MOTIFS 45 boxes of gold, enamelled or chased (with the inscription Don (T Amitie — " friendship's gift '*), little boxes of pale tortoise shell, with gold inlay or piqu6 work, handles of walking canes in painted china, coat buttons with miniatures, incense boxes of mother-of-pearl pierced and engraved. . . . These thousand and one knick-knacks, whose tiny ornamentation, marvellous in its finish, has something Japanese about it, had accustomed the eye to a singularly reduced scale of decora- tion ; so much so that the superb amplitude of the Louis XIV and Louis XV ornaments passed for coarseness. Let us be quite frank; for less sophisti- cated eyes a bronze by the great Gouthiere cuts a sorry figure beside a bronze by Caffieri. The running ornaments most generally used are denticules^^ godrons^^ entrelacs^^ formed of two interlacing ribbons which very often enclose rosaces in their bows ; oves^*" a succession of egg- shaped projections, rais de coeur^ lines of small feuilles d^eau^ not indented, or feutlles d^acanthc ; fret decoration on plain friezes ; rinceauXy^ tores (or boiidins) of bay or oak leaves ^; rubans enroules ^ around baguets ; rangs de *Fig.5. * See the chapeau top of the arm-chair in Fig. 3S. * Framing of the cupboard doors in Fig. 4; the drawer of the escritoire (Fig. 16), etc. * Cornice of the cupboard (Fig, 4). * Top of the cupboard (Fig. 4). « Fixed central part of the same cupboard (Fig. 4). 7 The same (Fig. 4) on the lower part of the cornice ; framing on the drawers of the commode (Fig. 24), 46 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE piastres ^ that ought rather to be called rangs de sapeques^ for more than anything else they resemble those coins current in the Far East, pierced in the middle and strung on a rush tie ; W7tcs or reeds fastened by an intertwined ribbon ; cotes bound by acanthus leaves ; chap lets of olives and beads alternating; rangs de perles^i and lastly the ornament far the most frequently employed of all, because it is made quickly and easily w^ith a gouge ; rows of short cannelures ' or flutings covering friezes, traverses and string courses. Among the other ornamental motifs ^ the following are the principal that were borrowed from ancient architecture. First and foremost the column^ detached, or more frequently en- gaged, at the angles of commodes, escritoires, and chiffoniers/ The base is turned, the shaft generally fluted. It is well known how great use this style made of cannelures ^ which were called rather canaux. Sometimes they were plain, sometimes rudente^ that is to say, each one filled to a ceitain distance from the base with a baguet ; if the filling is plain it is given the name of chandelle^ and if it ends in a carved motif like a half opened bud or a head of corn, it is known as asperge? Very much used are imita- tion flutings of marquetry with burnt shading,^ * Back of the arm-chair (Fig. 38) ; arm consoles (Figs. 40 and 47) * See the cupboard, Fig. 7. * Figs. 20, 26, 28, etc. * Figs. 14, 25. » Figs. 6, 14, 25, etc. 6 Figs. 48, 50, etc. ^ Figs. 29, A7. ' Fig. 15. THE CARYATID APPEARS 47 pilastres * ^ are fluted in a similar way ; the balustres * that serve as supports for the arms of chairs are frequently, as also are the legs of chairs,* given a spiral instead of a vertical fluting. The capitals of columns and pilasters are Ionic or Corinthian ; the Ionic capital often carries a garland hanging from the centre of the volutes. Tov^ards the end of the Louis XVI period the capital is replaced by a circular moulding covered with brass. ^ For the column may be substituted the caryatid ; in the eighteenth century, this name was given not merely to a human figure or a terminus, but any animal, fabulous or other- wise (a seated female sphinx, for example), any / bust or torso acting as a support. ^ The console is employed, such as it is, with two volutes as its extremities, or more or lesss modified, whether as the support of a console table * or as a chute * ; it is often ornamented with a garland. It was also as chutes^ or rinceaux^ at the base of the tabliers^ of commodes that cabinet-makers used triglyphs,^ ornaments borrowed from the Doric frieze, and composed of two grooves and two half-grooves hollowed or cut through in a bronze plate, under which there hung the gouttes^ a kind of small pyramid suspended by the apex. ^ Fig. 21. 2 Fig. 40 » Figs. 14, 17, etc, * Fig. 33. * See the chutes of the commode in Fig. 28, etc. £ 48 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE It would be too long to describe all these antique ornaments ; let us merely call attention, in the animal kingdom, to the Roman eagles,^ the dolphins, the heads of lions,^ rams, goats, the bucranes^ or bull's skulls, the pieds de btche (an exact reproduction of the animal's leg, and no longer, as under Louis XVI, a far-off interpreta- tion) ; then the whole series of mythological monsters, sphinxes, male and female, griffons, chimaeras, sirens ; then in the vegetable world, garlands and chutes de gtnrlandes^ of every kind, wreaths of ivy, bay, flowers ; rtnceaux^ of foliage, especially of acanthus leaf,^ which is so supple in adapting itself to every method of use, alone or combined in ^' grotesques '^ with the human face or animals' masks, and which this period has succeeded in making so elegant ; the pine cone,^ the pomegranate, the Bacchante's thyrsus, the caduceus. . . . Lastly, objects made by man : bows, quivers,^ antique urns ^ (which curio dealers disrespectfully call soup tureens !), garlanded, draped, set up on top of lambrequins ; fire balls, perfume burners, tripods, etc. Certain things were borrowed also from the Renaissance, such as the vertical string courses of * Top of the cupboard in Fig. 4. ' Arm of the chair in Fig. 38. ' Commode (Fig. 24), consoles in Figs. 31 and 33. * Woodwork in Figs. I and 2, etc. ^ Console (Fig. 33); bergeres (Figs. 51 and 52, etc). « Fig. 76. 7 Fig. 2. * Figs. 3, 7, 9, etc. VOGUE OP MAHOGANY 49 arabesques, imitated from those of Giovanni of Udine in the Loggias of the Vatican, and the • grotesque masks or mascarons^ half human half vegetable. \^ Finally, many of the motifs are quite modern, and common to the Louis XV and ,V Louis XVI styles ; baskets of flowers, of fruits, branches of laurel, or oak, or ivy, roses, lilies, scattered, crossed, or hung from ribbons ; the knots of ribbons ^ so much used and abused by this epoch ; little profile medallions and all the symbols ; of v^ar, music, the sciences, agriculture, the pastoral life, fishing, commerce ; lovers' trophies hung from bow^s of ribbon ; draperies of fringed or tasselled stuff forming a frieze or a chute^ Working cabinet-makers, in the time of Louis XV, had carried the perfection of their technique so far that there remained but little of any importance to be discovered in this domain. Certain of their technical secrets are even lost, like that of the Martin lacquer. The same kinds of wood are used, native woods M^''^^'^ and foreign ; above all mahogany, which comes in (/ greater quantities from the Antilles, enjoys extra- ordinary favour. Marie Antoinette's boudoir at Fontainebleau is completely parqueted with it. What is something new, chairs are made of it ; it is used for the most part in large surfaces of plain veneer. \Ebony, rather given up as too austere, — . > Figs, 37, 43, etc. » Fig. 24. 50 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE under Louis XV, now reappears. The method of working the wood does not alter, but the return to straight lines makes it possible to use much more turning, for the legs of furniture, for balusters, and pillars ; and the guild of wood turners becomes one with that of the joiners. The preceding epoch had seen the appearance of porcelain plaques embedded in the panels of very elaborate and costly pieces ; this trick, which is assuredly an error in logic and in taste, becomes general in small escritoires for ladies, round breakfast tables, jardinieres, and other very refined pieces, in proportion as the Sevres china becomes more plentiful and more perfect. The little bas-reliefs of Wedgwood in biscuit ware on a blue ground begin to show themselves beside the flowerets of Sevres. Towards the end of the reign, the need of finding something novel, though there should be nothing new left under the sun, led cabinet- makers to risk innovations that were more or less happy. For example, the inlaying of brass in wood in the shape of bands and little plaques ; mouldings covered with brass, flutings adorned with brass,^ plaques of gilded bronze with parallel horizontal stripes above the legs of pieces of furniture.^ Tables, round tripod tables (called atheniennes)^ console tables, are made, except the top, which is porphyry or onyx, all of metal, gilded bronze, bronze with antique green patina, ^Figs. 14, 21, etc. *Fig. 14. ECCENTRICITIES 51 wrought and gilded iron, steel inlaid with silver ; Weisweiler attempts ornaments of pierced brass on a ground of polished steel. At the same time, others had the strange notion of painting designs in oils on the background of natural wood, a decoration that had no permanence when it was left bare, and that was very ugly when it was covered with glass. Still others would cover a piece with lozenges of mother-of-pearl. . . . All these eccentric attempts are clear symptoms of decadence. CHAPTER II : PANELLED FURNITURE AND TABLES The Louis XVI Style, as we have said, only came to its full development in Paris and in the largest cities in the kingdom. In the depths of the provinces, where the fashions hardly changed at all, and especially did not change quickly, it only took its place late and in part in the habits of the furniture makers. They only, it appears, abandoned the goodly Louis XV shapes, with which they had achieved such remarkable results, after having remained obstinately faithful to them as long as they could. Very often the only con- cession they made to the new fashion was to add the " antique " motifs to the repertoire of the ornaments they employed. That is especially remarkable with regard to the armoires and buffets of the provinces ; one might be tempted to catalogue them nearly all as " transition " pieces, if one did not know that the most salient Louis XV characteristics were main- tained until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As, on the other hand, the Paris work- shops, where fashions were followed, only turned out a small number of cupboards, we must not be surprised at the scarcity of those that are homogeneously Louis XVI in their lines as in their ornamentation. The Normandy cupboard reproduced in Fig. 3 52 REVOLUTIONARY EMBLEMS 53 is one of these ; the straight line dominates it, each of its panels is symmetrical, and all the details of its decoration, which is of an exquisite elegance, are borrowed from the architecture of the ancients or of the sixteenth century. But here (Fig. 4) is the armoire in the Car- navalet Museum, known as the armoire ^' of the taking of the Bastille." It is precisely dated by the motif in bas-relief on the left hand panel, which has given it its name, and by the symbols of the three orders of the nation carved on the middle upright ; above, the crosier of the Clergy ; in the middle the spade topped by the Phrygian cap, the emblem of the emancipated Third Estate ; below the sword denoting the Nobility. Note still other revolutionary emblems ; the flags above the leaves of the doors, the pikes on the rounded angles of the armoire. It was made, therefore, in 1790 or 1791 ; none the less, the shape of the panels and that of the bottom cross piece are com- pletely Louiv XV, as is the contorted shape of the front feet. The large half- moon armoire from the Gironde, seen in Fig. 5, is also a compromise between the two styles ; the shape of the panels, of the lower cross pieces, of the feet is Louis XV ; all the rest clearly belongs to the style of the next epoch. So, too, this other armoire from the Gironde (Fig. 6), superb in its refined simplicity (it is made of very beautiful solid mahogany), is hardly Louis XVI except by the flutings of its fausse tartie dormante* an4 of its chamfered corners, 54 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE and by the somewhat dry distinctness of the moulding of the cornice. On the other hand, many Normandy cupboards of this epoch affect the most tortuous Hnes, as if the Rococo style was still dominant, and carry a regular medley of carvings in high relief, where rows of ovolos, chaplets of beads, modillions * with acanthus leaves meet with the rmceaiix and the " haricots " that were the foundation of the Louis XV ornamentation. In Provence it is better still; the armoires called garde robes, those handsome large armoires of pale cherry, or walnut unctuous to the finger, always date from the Louis XVI epoch when their decoration is all flowery with roses, narcissi, suns intermingled with emblems of love and musical instruments ; whilst the pieces that belong to the Louis XV epoch are much more sober, and are only de- corated with mouldings. As for the construction lines and the shape of the panels, they remained the same from one style to the other. The Provencal pieces we reproduce here have been selected out of many of their contem- poraries as presenting the most recognisable of the Louis XVI motifs ; the antique vases on the armoire (Fig. 7), on the kneading trough (Fig. 13), and the whatnot shown in Fig. 9, the fluted columns and the fows of beading on the buffet- credence (Fig. 8),'^ the lyre, the bow of ribbon, ■"and the crossed palms of the little glass case (Fig. 11). ^ Under Loi;is XVI there was invented prac- THE VITRINE S5 tically only one single new piece of furniture with panels, the vitrine. Heretofore) knick-knacks, even the most precious, had been placed on the chimney-piece or on the shelves^of a coin (a little corner whatnot) ; henceforth a special piece of furniture will keep safe from dust and knocks, while allowing them to be seen, rare porcelains, fragile biscuit ware, Chinese curiosities. The vitrine is either a small cupboard (Fig. 14), or an under cupboard; sometimes it is placed on top of another piece of furniture, for example, a commode. Its ornamentation is sober, often re- duced to baguets and flutings in brass, for the container must not ''draw the eye " to the pre- judice of the contained. The turned and splayed out feet of the vitrine we reproduce are called toupies. The top is on three of its sides sur- rounded by a little gallery or balustrade of pierced brass, which we shall meet again very often, and which is a novelty of the Louis XVI epoch. The general appearance of this little glazed armoire has all the rectilinear effect typical of the end of the style. The other forms of panelled furniture remain what they were of old, except for certain super- ficial changes; the corner cupboard (Fig. 15) has no longer its serpentine front, but one with very slight relief in a ressault or forepart of shallow projection, when it is not altogether straight and flat. The surfaces of the flattened angles are decorated with grooves imitated in marquetry; the keyhole is more than simple, although the 56 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE piece itself is of sufficiently exquisite workman- ship. The vitrine of Fig. 14, the drop-front escritoire (Fig. 16), the bonheiir dii Jour with its roll-top front (Fig. 17), the commode (Fig. 18) have the same plain keyholes that are in har- ^ mony with their angular austereness. The secretaire a ahattant is one of the /^ favourite pieces of this epoch. Here is the classic shape (Fig. 16) with its typical frieze of entrelacs a rosaces in gilded bronze, the chutes of tri- glyphs and gouttes^ the keyholes (in the doors of the lower part) of the most favoured contem- porary model — a medallion surmounted by a bow and with two pendant garlands. The marquetry, at the same time refined and naive in crafts- manship, presents a curious design of a formal French garden, with pavilions and fountain of over fanciful proportions. That is the large drop-front escritoire, a serious, rather masculine piece ; but the cabinet-makers had invented a crowd of quite small kinds, for ladies, in which they had given play to all their ingenuity and their sense of slightly affected grace. These small models are often lightened at the top by detached miniature columns or corner caryatids of gilded brass ; the cupboard in the lower part is done away with, replaced by four spindle legs, joined either by a shelf with a piece hollowed out in front or by X-shaped cross bars with interlacing curves. The costliest of these small boudoir pieces have a Sevres plaque inlaid in the flap, and tiny bronzes, sometimes of LOUIS XVI COMMODE S7 incredible finenesss ; nothing more delicately feminine could be imagined. In sum, it is merely a return, in miniature, to the shape of the seven- teenth-century cabinet mounted on legs. Louis XVI commodes have a great diversity V^ of shapes. To begin w^ith, we can distinguish two great families : commodes with three drawers or rows of drawers, and those that have only two. The latter are much the lighter and more elegant ; they are called commodes a pieds Sieves. If they have retained the pieds de btche of the Louis XV epoch, while more or less diminishing their curve, they can be extremely graceful ; with their happy combination of straight lines and curves, uniting the qualities of both styles, they are, indeed, one of the most elegant pieces of furniture that have ever been devised. The commode we have photographed (Fig. i8) is particularly delightful for its proportions, and thanks to the excellent bronzes of its legs and its rmceau^ which have preserved something of the easy suppleness of the Louis XV Style. This other one (Fig. 19) also has a charm of its own, in spite of the rigidity of its terminal-shaped fluted legs. The projection, with double ressault, of its fagade is enough to make it interesting, and the pierced brass of its keyholes and handles are of very good design. Let us remark in this connection that, in the period we are discussing, the handles of drawers or mains ^ are nearly always mains pendanteSy drop handles ; they are very often rectangular 58 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE and of absolute simplicity (Figs. 21, 25) ; but the most frequent form is that of the ring handle framing a circular ;//o///" which, on simple pieces, is a plaque of embossed brass (Figs. 22, 23). The keyholes are then similar plaques. Sometimes the plaque is oval, and the handle is merely a half ring (Fig. 26). As for mains fixes or fixed handles, these are garlands fastened to bows that hold up medallions (Fig, 20) or else held by the teeth of two lion masks. The Provengal commode with two drawers, in Fig. 24, is contemporary with the revolutionary armoire we have already mentioned, and it also carries in one of the entrelacs of the bottom traverse the crosier, the sword, and the spade with the Phrygian cap, the symbols of the three estates. The drapery motif is here interpreted naively, but in a very decorative fashion. Commodes with three lines of drawers of necessity owe a sufficiently heavy aspect to their construction, and nevertheless there are some of them which, raising themselves a little on pieds de biche (Fig. 23), arrive at a certain elegance. That in Fig. 20, which is a country made com- mode from the south-west, testifies to a fairly extensive research ; the craftsman, while remain- ing strictly faithful to the straight line, has endeavoured to lighten the shape by contracting the base, in imitation of the Louis XV commodes called en console. The construction of commodes is sometimes more complicated. The cabinet-maker, anxious AN ERROR IN DECORATION 59 to avoid the aspect of a brutally square case, added to the right and the left quadrant-shaped shelves ; in that case^ to lighten his piece still further and, so to speak, give it air, he put a mirror back to the compartments formed in this way at the sides. We have seen that these shelves may be replaced by little armoires with curved doors ; or indeed the commode is frankly a half-moon, the drawers being them- selves convex also ; a very graceful shape, perfect to adorn the space between two windows in default of a console pier glass. If in the half- moon commode only the top drawers are re- tained, and the lower ones replaced by two shelves with brass galleries and mirror back, we have what the dealers called a commode otcverte a Panglaise. A fault common to many fine commodes of the Louis XVI Style, is that the decoration of their facade is treated without taking into account the division of the drawers, this being disguised as much as possible by the exact fitting of the bronzes or the marquetry designs which continue from one drawer to the other. Cabinet-makers who were so pre-occupied with architecture and its laws never should have fallen into this error of logic, for the first duty of a facade, in good architecture, is to show distinctly the divisions within. J It is true that before their eyes they had illustrious examples of falsehoods like that of their furniture pieces ; the fagades of the two palaces of the Garde-Meubles, built by Gabriel, at the 60 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE entrance to the Rue Royale. The little com- mode in Fig. 18 has, to some extent, this fault, but lessened by the presence of two very obvious and visible keyholes, which frankly declare the existence of the two drawers ; it is true that the lower keyhole is at fault in partly hiding the principal motif of the marquetry. The developments of the commode devised under Louis XV became more and more elaborate ; chtffonnieres with five or six drawers one upon another, fluted pillars at the corners, toupie feet, marble tops with open-work galleries ; very handsome pieces, and so practical ! (Fig. 25) and secretaires- commodes^ then known as commodes a dessiis brise (Fig. 26), whose shape, something too geometrical, does not escape clumsiness, unless it is refined by pieds de biche. Louis XVI tables have vertical legs and straight frames,''*' without festoons ; that is what distinguishes them from Louis XV tables at the first glance. Nevertheless, even more than for commodes, the pied de biche of less generous curve was retained sufficiently long for small work tables, breakfast tables, and gueridons. These vertical legs are of different kinds. ^ Some of them are square in section, tapering off towards the foot (Fig. 28) ; these are called iieds en gaine^ terminal-shaped (from the name * What w« say here of table legs applies also to the leg» of chairs. CHARACTERISTIC LEGS 6i of the bust-carrying pedestals which are of the same shape) ; they often end in projecting dice- shaped feet ; there are round legs, turned, slightly conic, with a gorge moulding at the top, and another projecting moulding at the foot ; they are fluted vertically, with or without rudentures^ sometimes in a spiral. That is the classic type. Above the moulding at the top, a part square of section, stouter, decorated with fluting or a rectangular rosace (Figs. 27, 28, 29, etc.), is joined with tenon and mortise to the cross pieces of the frame. Far from being disguised, this necessary reinforcement is, in well-planned tables, accentuated by the decoration. Round fluted legs are often called pieds en carquois^ quiver legs, even when there is no representation of arrow feathers at the top. Towards the end of the Louis XVI period many legs are no longer fluted, but furnished below with a brass shoe with mouldings, above with a ring-capital in plain brass or engine-turned; the '' tete du pied^^^ as cabinet-makers call it by a bold metaphor, is then decorated with a small plaque of brass, either striated or engine-turned. Other more elaborate legs imitate a bundle of arrows or pikes, fastened by ribbons intercrossed ; the feathers and the heads then serve as motifs for the ornamented parts at the top and the bottom. The use of castors is becoming general. Louis XV tables dispensed as much as possible with cross pieces between the legs, for they seldom harmonised with the continuous Hne of 62 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE the pzeds de biche\ they re-appear under Louis XVl ; they are even frequently more complicated and elaborate than is needed for solidity and strength, and their complex lines play an import- ant part in the decoration. Their join with each leg is always very openly made with a stout square piece. The frame of the table is decorated with fluting (Fig. 28), with entrelacs (Fig. 29), with framing lines of marquetry (Fig. 27). The table top is no longer wavy in outline, but round, oval, sometimes haricot-shaped (or kidney-shaped), rectangular, square ; in the last two cases it may have at each corner a projection, round or square, according to the kind of leg that is below it. Extending dining tables, invented quite at the end of the preceding epoch, under the name of tables a Paiiglaise^ are .still fairly uncommon ; they are round or oval, with leaves. Consoles have a great diversity of aspect, being meant to harmonise with widely different kinds of decoration for apartments. The most simple type, but not the least elegant, is a half- moon, with two vertical feet and a stretcher in the shape of a horizontal concave arch, adorned in the middle with a motif which is most frequently an "antique" urn. The console of Fig. 32 is an excellent model, excellent in its perfect simplicity. Most commonly these handsome pieces are enriched with garlands of flowers, bouquets, bows of ribbons (Fig. 31). Other con- soles, richer still, and more architectural in style. CARD TABLES 63 like the elegant model made of gilt wood, shown in Fig. 33, remarkable for the large design of its decoration, have legs that come very near to the consoles of architecture properly so called. Another type is that of the console with four legs, joined by stretchers or a shelf between them, half- moon or rectangular in shape ; when it is of this last shape it is in reality nothing more than a slightly tall table made to be seen only on three sides. Card tables (Fig. 27) had nearly all been invented under Louis XV ; we will not describe here all their different shapes. But there is one very well known one that properly belongs to the epoch now under review : the table-bouillotte^ a shape that became highly popular, and of which authentic examples can still be found easily enough. The game of bouillotte was a kind of brelan, played very quickly ; but the bouillotte table, an exceedingly practical one, can be used for many other things besides cards. It is round, has a marble top with brass gallery; its four legs are ^' quiver "-shaped : its frame contains two little drawers and two pull-out shelves (Fig. 30). Now comes the large family of quite small fancy tables such as no woman worthy of the name could possibly do without having around her ; and here is the triumph of this delicate Louis XVI Style. Here again, nearly everything had been said and there was hardly any novelty to be introduced. The toilet table changes nothing but the line of its legs ; alongside it 64 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE appears the athenienne^ an antique tripod, made of metal, supporting a vase of malachite or crystal; the Pompeiian Style is indispensable, and hence we have sphinxes, cloven hoofs, swans, rams' heads, etc. The chiffonmere (Figs. 36 and 37) which offers every intermediate shape between a simple table and a small commode, is nearly always provided with a brass gallery, useful to keep bobbins and needle-cases from rolling on to the floor. Here is a new word for the cabinet-makers' vocabulary : the tricoteuse. Now it is a chiffonnilre whose top is surrounded with a pretty high wall of gilt brass trellis to keep the balls of wool within bounds ; now a work table, exactly like those of to-day, with a top that lifts up, lined with a mirror, and compartments inside ; in a word, a toilette not greatly modified. Did society ladies knit then? Certainly, and the ci-devant marquises could have given lessons to those sinister harridans, the knitting women that used to sit by at their trial before the revolution- ary tribunals. Let us not forget that benevolence and good works was the rule, the proper form, and the mania for knitting garments for the poor was already raging. The breakfast table or chocolate table is a gueridon wiah two tiers ; the lower table is carried by four legs, the top by one pillar in the centre ; it is exceedingly ugly, a design that went wrong. Many of these tables — for the evil itch of writing is universal, — are provided with a pull-out shelf and a little drawer on the right hand containing a writing desk; WRITING TABLES 65 or indeed, the top drawer of a chifonniere has a sliding top inlaid with morocco leather, in place of the shelf. For these light tables new shapes of legs have been invented, lyre-shaped or crossed like an X ; as for the top it is fre- quently oval. Here is a completely new kind of table : the table d, Jleiirs^ which will not be called a jardiniere till later. People have read Rousseau, everyone admires nature, botanises perhaps ; in any case loves to go, wearing a big hat in the fashion of Madame Vigee Lebrun, and gather blossoms at the hour when Aurora has scattered over the meads all the pearls from off her tresses ; and then it is discovered that the porcelain fteurs de Vtncennes^ with their foliage of painted copper, are perhaps no more beautiful than the natural ones ; in short, one adores flowers, and that is when one takes it into one's head to adorn one's dwelling continually with cut flowers and living flowers. The jardiniere from the start found the shape it still has to-day ; it was often decorated with Sevres plaques. There remain the writing tables, their deriva- tives and their hybrids. The great flat bureau of the time of Louis XV, v^th or without the bout de bureau or pigeon-holes for papers, is still made, though much less frequent ; the roll top bureau, so extremely useful and practical, has dethroned it. A new shape, which will later become the heavy bureau-ministre^ makes its appearance, a flat bureau provided to left and 66 LOUIS XVI FURNITURE right of the space for the writer's knees with drawers one above the other ; if they come down to the ground it is altogether our bureau- ministre^ and it is not a thing of beauty. If the sides do not come so low, they are carried on eight legs ; and there we are, back again to the bureau of the time of Louis XIV. It goes as far as combining the round top with the drawers coming down to the ground ; and this is nothing more or less than our " American bureau " ; so true it is that there is nothing new under the sun. The small ladies' bureaux are very varied. Some are flat, some round-topped; the most popular is the bonheur dujour^ which was indeed in existence at the end of the Louis XV epoch, but had not as yet any special name. The bonheur dujour is a writing table that carries on top, set back, a small armoire. This is usually glazed, or fitted with mirrors, or indeed with imitation backs of books ; above is the inevitable white marble with its brass gallery. For writing there is a pull-out shelf, or a hinged shelf that opens forward, or a drawer with a top in the shape of a writing board. And there are bonheurs dujour with roll top (Fig. 17) ; others are ^ pente^ as it is called to-day, that is to say with a flap that occupies a sloping position when the bureau is closed. Straining for novelties, the cabinet-makers invent the most ingenious but most bizarre combinations. We see advertised, for instance, a STRANGE COMBINATIONS 67 ''roll top toilette, that can be used by a lady as an escritoire, with two small strong-boxes and a white marble top," or what is still better, a ^' table de nuit that can be used as a writing table, and as a stove in winter ! " CHAPTER III: CHAIRS AND VARIOUS PIECES : A LOUIS XVI INTERIOR Perfection, from the point of viev^ of comfort, had been reached by the chairs of Louis XV's time ; those of the following period, less roomy and more angular, are rather inferior in this regard. On the other hand, they are more varied in shape and ornament. As with all the other kinds of furniture, the essential difference is that the Louis XV chairs have not one single line that -^j can be called straight, while the Louis XVI chairs * always have at least their legs rectilinear. The frame of the chair is straight behind, most fre- quently curved at the sides and front (Figs. 38, 39, etc.). Certain types have their seat horse- shoe shaped (Fig. 56); others circular (Fig. 43); but there are some also in which it is trapeze- shaped, without a single curve (Figs. 45, 46). Another important difference is that, all the parts, all the ^Uimbs " of, for example, an arm-chair, arc at the same time united and separated by well marked joints (always the architectural influ- ence), while a Louis XV arm-chair is, like a living creature, all made up of continuous curves. The legs, like the legs of tables, are terminal- shaped (though not often), or turned and '' quiver "-shaped and fluted either vertically (Figs. 38, 39, etc.) or spirally (Fig. 40). The 68 CHAIRS AND SKIRTS 69 top part of the leg is a cube decorated on two faces with a square rosace of acanthus leaf (Fig. 40), later by a marguerite (Fig. 47), or a design of circular mouldings (Fig. 43). Towards the end of the period appear back legs square of section, curved outwards, and with their line directly continued by the uprights of the back ; this is a first discreet imitation of the Greek shapes (Fig. 55).^ The frame is decorated with simple mouldings (Fig. 41), or carved with one of those running ornaments we have described, rang de perles (Fig. 40), rang de feuilles (Fig. 52), rang dd piastres (Fig. 51) ; or it is decorated with a bow of ribbon or a rosace in the middle of the front (Figs. 43, 44, 47). The arms, or accotoirs^ always provided with manchetteSy* are attached to the back by a more or less graceful curve, which may even begin at the very top of the uprights of the back (Fig. 38) ; this arrangement is sufficiently un- graceful. They end in front in a volute of no great importance, under which the console de Vaccotoir^ the vertical support of the arm, joins it. Certain very ornate armchairs (Fig. 38) have lions' heads at this point, which is a jump of fifty years backwards. During the Regency women wore skirts with panniers, which brought about the invention of arm-chairs with set back * The back of this same chair (Fig. 55) already shows the shovel shape— o a O Fig. 84. CUPBOARD, FROM THE GIRONDB, IN WALNUT (BEGINNING OF THE STYLE) Fig. 85. DROP FRONT ESCRITOIRE IN MAHOGANY WITH BRASS INLAY (BEGINNING OF THE STYLE) Fig. 86. BONHEUR DU JOUR IN MAHOGANY WITH FLAT-GILT BRONZE ORNAMENTS is O Q 12; -si o o 02 M o o Fig. 90. SLOPE-FRONTED BUREAU WITH REVOLUTIONARY EMBLEM ' ■'Stefii ■ ^^^^mm^ m^s^i^ ... I OH ace ^o go 3s §^ ^g 2 INDEX-GLOSSARY Acanthus leaf in ornament, 48 " Accotoirs," 69 Alembert, d', 41 Allegorical furniture after Egyptian cam©aign, 29 Amateur {V\ comedy, 9 "American bureau," the, 66 "Angel bed " [see "Lit d*ange ") Antilles, woods from the, 49 An tin, Capucins d*, convent of, 17 Antiquity, Greco-Roman, influ- ence on style of furniture, 1-4, 39, 40, 86 sacred character of, 95-96 Antoinette, Marie, escritoire and commode of, by Riesner, li boudoir at Foatainebleau, 17,49 . chair of, 74 jewel cupboard by Schwerd- feger, 19 Arabesques, 48-49 Aranjuez, 34 Arcade, Rue de 1*, 17 "Arcatures (a),*' 73 Architecture, the Greek manner in, 5, 6, 17 Louis XVI Style in, 78, 79 Areola, 28 Aries, buffets from, 86-87 Arm-chairs of the transition period, 9, 10 antique, of the Revolution- ary period, 23 Empire Style, 103 Armoires, Louis XV Style in the provinces, 52 Empire Style, 1 15 from the Gironde, 53, 54 from Provence, 54 " taking of the Bastille," 53 Arthur, paper-maker, 79 Artois, Comte d*, sleeping chamber of, 18 " Asperge,** 46 Assembly, the Constituent, 21 " Atheniennes," 20, 50, 64 Aubert, designer, 20 Aubusson, carpets, 13 1 Avril, Etienne, 13, 19 BachaUMONT, Mcmoires Secrets, 9 Backs of chairs, 70-71 Bagatelle, style, 17 "Balustres," 47 Barras, influence, 26 Barry, Madame du, 37 Barthe, N. T., 9 Barthelemy, Abbe, Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis^ 15 Bas-reliefs, 97 Bastille, taking of the, "ar- moire,** 53 Beauharnais, Hotel de, 98 and note Beauvais tapestry, 28 Bedroom, furnishing the, 87-89 an "Empire," 1 30-3 1 Beds, Louis XVI Style, 75 boat, 122-23 Empire Style, 121 the "lit d'ange," 75-76, 88, 121 Bellange, 28 Bellicard, see Cochin Bellona, 29 Benedictines, the, 5 Beneman, Guillaume, 19 Bergeres, popularity, 71-72 Berthaud, upholsterer, 28 Boat beds, 122, 123 " Bonheur du jour," 56, 66, 82, I 16-17 135 136 INDEX-GLOSSARY *' Bonnetieres/' 89 Bookcase bureau, 120 Bosio, Jean, 24 Boucassin, 90 Boucher, Sieur, 21-22 Boudins, 45 Boudon-Goubeau, III Bouillotte, game of, 63 Boulle, Andre-Charles, 19 " Bout de bureau," 65 Brass inlay, 13, 50-51 gilded, 56 leg ornaments, 61 pierced brass, 55 Breakfast table, the, 64 Brimborions, 44 Brongniart, works, 17, 1 8 Bronze, artists in, 44 Bronzes, the " ancient,*' 9 Empire, 107-8 Brosses, President de, I.ctb es, 3, 4 Brown, " Etruscan,*' 23 Brumaire, coup d'etat of, 31 Brun (Le), 16 " Bucranes," 48 Buffet, a " Normandy," 86-87 " Buffet-credence," 87 Buffets, style in the provinces, 52 "Buffets-Vaisseliers," 90 Buonaparte, General, mansion, 28-29 Bureau-ministre, 65-66, 120 " Bureaux a dessus brise," 120 "Bureaux de dames," 112 Bureaux, Louis XVI Style, 65-66 1 8th century, 120 Burette, 95 Cabinet-makers of Louis XVI, 10, 18-19 "Cabinet" mounted on legs, 17th century, 57 " Cabriolet (en)," 70 Caffieri, bronzes, 45 Caillot, Mcmoires quo ted, 79-82, 85, 87, 89, 131 " Camaieux," 17 '•Canapes," 74-75 *' Canaux," 46 Cane-seated chairs, 72-73 "Cannelures," 46 Canova, 33 " Capital," the, in ornament, 47 Card-tables, Louis XVI, 63 Carlin, Martin, 12, 19, 95 Carnavalet Museum, 53 " Carre aux," 72 Caryatides, 20, 47, 56, 106-107 Cased clocks, 89-90 "Cassolette,'* 118 Castors, use of, 61 "Cathedra,'' 20 Caylus, Comte de, 3, 4 Cellerier, 17 Ceramics, Greco-Etruscan, 15 Cerceau, A., 2 Chairs, Louis XVI, 68-71 a la capucine, 72 and note backs of, 70-74 "canapes," 74-75 cane-seated, 72-73 "consoles montantes," 70 " consoles reculees," 69-70 coverings for, 81 dining-room, 87 Empire, 123-27 " en cabriolet," 70 lyre-backed, 74 mahogany, 72 straw, 72-74 the"bergere," 71-72 "Chaise-longue," the, 75, 88, 126-27 Chalgrin, works of, 17 "Chandelle,"46 Chanterine, Rue, 17-18, 28 "Chapiteau," the, 77-78 "Chaplets" of olives, etc., 46 Chateaubriand, 16 Chenier, Andre, poems, 16 Cherry-wood, use, 74 Chiffonnieres. 60, 64, 1 18 Chimney-pieces, Louis XVI Style, 79 Chinese lacquer panels, 12 papers, 77 trinkets, 86 "Chinoise (a la)'* bed, 75 INDEX-GLOSSARY 137 Choiseul-Gouffier, Grece-Pittor^ esq lie, 14 "Chutes," 47, 49, 56 ,, ^ " Chutes de guirlandes, 48 Clocks, ornamental, 16 cased, 89-90 Louis XVI Style, 77 Cochin, 3 article in the Mercure, 6-9 Bellicard and, Observation siir Us antiquitcs d* Heretic lanum, 4-5 "Coin," the, 55 Colours, light, vogue of, 79 for drawing rooms, 80-8 1 "Column,'* the, use in ornament, 46-47 "Commode ouverte a Van- glaise," 59 , . , „ ^ "Commodes a dessusbrise, 60 Commodes " en console," 58 Commodes of the transition period, 10 construction, 58-59 faults in decoration, 59-60 Louis XVI, 57-58 Provengal, 58 the half-moon, 59 Compiegne, 34 Conciergerie, the, 74 Condillac, 41 Condorcet, Lycee, 17 ''Confidents," 75 Console pier glass, 59 Console, the, 47 Empire Style, I18-19 Louis XVI Style, 62-63 "Console-commode," II9 "Consoles d' accotoirs," 70 "Consoles montantes," 70 "Consoles reculees," 69-70 Convention, furniture for the, 25 "Corbeil de vannerie," 72 Corinthian style, 109 "Cotes," 46 Country house furnishing, 89 Cressent, 95 Cupboards, Louis XVI, 52-54 corner, 55-56 Curule chairs, 20 DarTHENAY, memoir 6 historiqu€, 4 David, F. A. {see Marechal, Sylvain) David, Jacques Louis, influence, 6 Beiisarttis, 16 canvases of, 99 his antique pieces, 24 Napoleon and, 31 Oath of the Horatii, 16 on ornamentation, 42 portrait of Mme. Recamier, 127 studio, 130 Decoration, internal, end 1 8th century, 17 Deffand, Marquise du, 38 Delacroix, quoted, 40 Delorme, Philibert, 2 "Denticules,"45 Designers, furniture, 20 Desmalter, Jacob, work of, 25, 29, 33, 95, 112 Diderot, 5, 38, 39- Dining-room, furnishing the, 86.87 Dining-tables, extending, 62 "Diphros," chair, 97 Directoire Style, 17, 26-27, 69 and note, II5 Dolphins, 48 " Don d'Amitie," inscription, 45 Doric frieze, 47 style in brasses, 109 "Dossiers,'* 76 " Dossiers en chapeau," 71 ** Doucine," lOO Drawing-room, the walls, 79-80 furniture, Caillot,gw(>^^^, 81- 82 knick-knacks, 85-86 mixing of styles, 82-84 Dresden ornaments, 81, 85 Duchesses, 75, 88 Dugourc, designer, 20 Ebony, disuse and re-appearance of, 49-50 13 8 INDEX-GLOSSARY 1 Egyptomania, 15, 29, 108-9 Elastiques, a, style of upholstery, 126 Elysee, the, 34 Empire furniture, history of the style, 1-2, 9-10, 19 bronzes, 107-8 characteristics, 93-100 colours used, 84-85 development of the, 2®-2I, 26, 30-34 ornaments, 108- lO technique, 100-107 "Entrelacs,'' 9, 45, 62 " Entrelacs a rosaces," 56 Escritoire, the large drop-front, 56 Empire Style, 116 Escurial, 34 Etruscan brown, 23 goblets, 28 '*Evoe," 28 Federation, day of the, 22 beds a la, 121 ''Feuilles d'acanthe," 45 " Feuilles d'eau," 45 Flat gilding, 45, III "Fleuron," 1 26 " Fleurs de Vincennes," 65 Flower-tables, 120-121 Flutings of marquetry, 46-47 Fontaine, Pierre, and Charles Percier, art of, 2, 18, 25, 28, 31-34 allegorical pieces, 30 designs for flower-tables, I20-I2I Egyptian pieces, 29 influence on the art of furnishing, 93-96 on compromise, 97-98 on the new mouldings, II4 use of new lines, 99-IOI, 103 Fontainebleau, boudoir of Marie Antoinette, 17, 49 furniture in style of Louis XIV, 18 Napoleon's throne, 112 Fontainebleau, work of Beneman, 19 Four-poster bed, 75 Francois I, 2 French decorative art, Egyptian architecture in, 15 Gabriel, architect, 59 Garde-Meubles, palace, fagades, 11,59 Gardeur, discovery, 114 Giovanni of Udine, 49 Gironde, armoire from, 53 "Godrons,"45 Goncourt Bros., eitcdy 21 Gouthiere, 45, III "Gouttes/'47, 56 "Grands fagonnes," 1 29 Greco-Etruscan ceramics, 15 Greco-Roman motifs^ 108-9 " Greek manner,'' articles in the, 3, 5-9, 69, 77 fashions under the Empire, I17-18 influence at time of Revolu- tion, 21 monumental architecture, 17 Greeks, furniture of the, 96-98 Greuze, 39 Grimm, Diderot and, Corresponds cncc litter air Cf 7 Grotesques, 48 Gueridon, the, 64, II 7-1 8 Guilds, suppressed by the Revo- lution, 25-26 Hamilton collection, some gems, II, 15 Hancarville, 15 Handles, " drop," of Louis XVI epoch, 57-58 " Haricots," ornament, 54 '* Hat " design, the, 71, 73, 76 Hellenic art, Roman, and, 15 Herculaneum, discovery, 4 book on, 4-5 style, 20 Hervieux, Mile, d', mansion of, 17-18 INDEX. GLOSSARY 130 Homer, influence seen in salon of 1785, 16, 17 "Horse-shoe" back, 73 Hopital, Marquis de T, Mcmoirc hisioriqnc, 4 Howard, Henry, 1 12 *' IMPERIALE (a rV'beds, 75 Indian ornaments, 86 Inlay work, 13, 1 12 Inscriptions, Academie des, 3, 5 Interiors of the Republic, 28 Ionic capital, use, 47 Italian tour, fashion of the, 3 '* Italienne (a 1')," beds, 75 Jacob, Georges, 24, 25, 113, 124 Jacquart loom, the, 129 Japanese trinkets, 86 Jardiniere, the, 65 Joiners, guild of, 50, 73 Jones, 46 Josephine, restoration of Mal- maison, 31, 132 Jottes pleincs, 71 Journal tie la Mode et du Gout, 21,23 Jouy linen, 88 Kaufmann, Angelica, 33 Keyholes, Louis XVI Style, 55, 56,58 Kneading-trough, the, 87 Knick-knacks, popularity, 85-86 Knitting, the rage for, 64 Lacquer, the Martin, 49 Lalonde, designer, 20 ** Lampas," 129 "Lanternes," 81 note Lassalle, Philippe de, 80 ** Lavabo," the, 119-20 Ledoux, 2 Legion of Honour, Palace of, 17 Legs, characteristic, 60-61 bed, 76 chair, 68, 69 Leleu, 13, 19 Lepalisse, M. de, cited, 93 Leroy, 3 Lescott, Pierre, 2 Levasseur, 18 Lignereux, 95 Lines of construction, transform- ation in, 9-10 " Listel," 160 " Lit d'ange,'* 75-76, 88, 121 Literature, the antique in, 15-16 Livy, influence seen in salon of 1785, 16-17 Louis XII, 2 Louis XIV Style, copied by cabinet-makers of Louis XVI, 18-21, 37 bureaux, 66 colour, 84-85 ornaments, 45 Louis XV Style, decay of, I-3 a drawing-room, 82 a " Louis Quinze,' ' by Riese- ner, 10 armoires, 54, 76 basket-shaped ottomans, 74 beds, 75 bronzes, 107 bureau in the Louvre, il card-tables, 63 character, 5-9,37,73,89,115 note commodes, 57, 60 form, 21 marquetry, 13 motifs J 49 mouldings, 1 1, 43 ornaments, 45, 54 style of clocks, y/ tables, 61-62 ^ Louis XVI, taste for the antique under, 14 society of the age, 37-40 Louis XVI Style, history, 1-2, 9, 10,21 armoires, 54 beauty of the pieces, 43-44 beds, 75 characteristics, II-I2, 37-40, 115 colour, 84-85 140 INDEX-GLOSSARY Louis Xyi Style, commodes, S7 definition of surfaces, 42 difference from Louis XV Style, 83-84 escritoires, 1 16 lines, 99-100, III motifs, 45-49, 54 moulding, 43 non-development in the pro- vinces, 52 ornamentation, 44-46 pieces with revolutionary emblems, 21 principle of the straight line, 40-42 tapestries, 80 Louis-Phillipe, fashions under, 84-85, 132-33 Louveciennes, pavilion of, 37 Louvre, the, bureau of Louis XV, II restoration, 31 sample of Beneman, 19 '* Lumiere (bras de)," 81 note Lyons, looms of, 80 Lyre, the, motif, 72 lyre-backs, 73-74 Mahogany, vogue of, 49-50, 72, III '* Mains," Louis XVI, pendantes, 57-58 fixes, 58 Malmaison, restoration, 31, 34 Manchettes, 69 Marat, Ami du Peuple, quoted, 25-26 Marechal, Sylvian, F. A. David and, A ntiquitcs d*Herculamim,^ Marguerite, the, in ornament, 69 Marie-Louise, 132 Marquetry, Roentgen and, 13-14 flutings of, 46-47 for escritoires, 56 Marquise, the, 82 Mars, Champ de, the triumphal arch, 22 Marseilles, 90 Martin lacquer, the, 49 '^Mascarons,*' 49 Mercure de France, the " Suppli- cation,'* 6-7 " Meridiennes,*' 127 Merveilleuses, the, 27-28 Mesengere, La, Journal des Modes et des Dames, 27 Meslay, or Meslee, Rue, 25 Metal ornaments on seats, I12-13 " Militaire (a la)," bed, 75 Mirrors, small, yy, 78 movable, I19-120 Modillions, 54 Montesquieu, 15-16 " Montgolfiere (en)," 72 Montigny, 18 Moreau, 24 Mosaics of Florence, 14 *' Motifs," ornamental, 46-47 antique, 52 Louis XVI, 54 the drapery, 58 Mouldings, beaded, II-I2 atrophied, under the Empire, lOO-IOI Louis XVI Style, 43 " Moyenne," the, 77-78 Napoleon, First Consul, 30-31 throne at Fontainebleau, Ii2 Neuwied, 13 Normandy cupboards, 52-54 buffets, 86-87 Nouveaux Riches after 1795, 26-27 Oberkampf, 88 Odiot, 22 Oeben, works of, 10, II, 27, 95 Ornaments, Louis XVI Style, 44-49 Empire Style, 108-II0 Osmont, Hotel d*, 17 Ottomans, 74-75 "Oves,"45 "Paduasoy," 129 " Paestum Style," 17 Painting, the antique in, 16-17 INDEX. GLOSSARY 141 Panels, definition of, 42-43 " Panurge (a la)," 75 "Papiers des Indes,'* ^^ "Patisseries," 79 Faul et Virgifiic, 16 Pediments, mirror, 77-7^ Peinture et de Sculpture, Aca- demie de, 3 " Petit Dunkerque," the, 44 Percier, Charles {see Fontaine, Pierre) Pianoforte, the, 129 "Pieds de biche," 9, 20, 48, 57, 58, 60, 62 " Pieds en carquois," 6 1 "Pieds en gaine," 60 "Pilastres,"47 Piranesi, 14- 15 "Polonaise (a* la)," beds, 75-76 Pompadour, Mme. de, 3, 5, 37 Pompeii excavations, influence on taste of the time, 4, 24, 40, 64,86 Porcelain plaques, 50 Printed linens, 90 Provence, armoires from, 54 commodes from, 58 Provincial workshops, work during the Revolution, 22 Pyrenees, buffet from, 90 note "Quart de rond," 100 Quinquet, lamps of, 130 " Rais de cceur," 45 " Rang de feuilles," 69 " Rang de perles," 69 "Rangs de piastres," 9, 45-46, 69 " Rangs de Sapeques," 46 Rascalon, 95 Ravrio, bronzes by, 108, J 31 Recamier, Mme., portrait by David, 24, 127 decoration of her house, 28 Rccucil d* antiqnitcs, etc., 3 Regency, style of the, 21, 69-70 Rempart, Rue Basse du, 17 Renaissance, the first French, 2 influence on style of orna- ment, 48-49 Republic, style of the, 24 interiors of the, 28 turners under the, 100 Restoration Style, 34, 132-33 Reveillon, papers made by, 79-80, 88 Revolutionary period, style, 19, 21,115 chairs, 125 pieces of the, 83-84 symbols on Louis XVI pieces, 21-22, 58 Ribbons, knots of, 14, 49 Riesener, Jean Henri, lO-ll, 19, 27, 43, 95 " Rinceaux," 17, 19, 20, 45, 47, 48, 54, 124 Rivoli, 28 "Rocaille," 6 Rococo Style, 54 Roederer, he OpuscuIeSf quoted, 103-5 Roentgen, David, marquetry of, 13-14 Roman architecture, influence on the Louis XVI Style, 40, 43 Romans, furniture of the, 96-98 Rondin, 103 Rosace, ornament, 23, 43, 45, 69, 108 Rousseau, 38, 65 construction of the Hotel de Salm, 17 love of antiquity, 5 Royal e. Rue, 60 *' Rubans enroules," 45 *'Rudente," 46 Rtdnes des plus beaux momimcnts de la Grece, 3 Saint-Antoine, Faubourg, cabinet makers, 22 Saint-Cloud, restoration, 31, 34 Salm, Hotel de, 17 Salon of 1785, 16-17 *' Salons de oompagnie," 82 Saunier, Claude C, 13, 19 Schwerdfeger, 19 Screens, 76-77 142 INDEX-GLOSSARY Seats, Empire, 122-23 ** Secretaire a abattant/' 56 ** Secretaires-commodes," 60 Severin, cabinet-maker, 18 Sevres china, popularity, 50 plaques, 56, 65, HI * *' Sheaf "back, 73 Skirts of the Regency, 69-70 Sofa a le Pommier, 127 Sofas, Empire, 126-27 Soubise, Hotel de, 17 Soufflot, 2, 3 Soupiere, I2I, 124 Straw chairs, 72-74, 126 Symbols, Revolutionary, on Louis XVI pieces, 21-22 Symmetry in Empire Style, 1 02-3 " Table a fleurs," 65 "Table de nuit,*' 67 Tableaux tires cV Homere et de Virtue, 3-4 "Table-bouillotte,"63 "Table-coiffeuse," the, 1 19-20 Tables, crooked-legged, 9 a Tanglaise, 62 card, 63 consoles, 62-63 Empire, 117-18 legs of, 60-61 Louis XVI small, 62-64 the cross-piece, 61-62 the frame, 62 writing, 65-66 " Tables-dessertes," 86 "Tabliers,"47 Talma, 28 "Termes," II8 " Tete du pied," 61 Thomire, bronzes, 108 Thorwaldsen, 33 Toilet arm-chairs, 72 Toilet tables, Louis XVI, 63-64 "Toilette," l8th century, 119 "Tombeau, (ala),"bed, 75 "Tores," 45 "Toupies,"55 "Transition" pieces, 52 "Tricoteuse," the, 64 Triglyphs, 47, 56 Trinkets, the Greek manner in, ( popularity of, 85-86 Tuileries, restoration, 31 Turkey carpets, 129 Turners, guild of, 50, 73 "Turque (a la)," bed, 75 Tuscan order, the, I09 Twin beds, 88 Vanderbilt collection, the, 11 Vandieres, Marquis de, 3 *' Various ways of ornamentini chimney pieces,*' 15 Vatican Loggias, arabesques, 49 Vendome Column, 29 note Versailles, 18 Vigee-Lebrun, Mme., Souvenirs cited, 27-28 style, 65 Vitrine, the, 55-56 Vitruvius, 5 Vivant-Denon, savant, 29 Wallace Collection, 19 Wall-hangings, Empire, 128-29 Wall-papers, 80 Walpole, Horace, 38 Wedgwood, bas-reliefs, 50 plaques, ]I2 Weisweiler, Adam, 20, 5 1 Winckelmann, J., 14 Windsor Castle, redecoration 34» 112 Woods, used under the Empire III Writing tables, 65-66 X-shaped stools, 20 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. LD 21A-60m-10 '65 Tf7763sY0)476B^^ \^ VSK^ General Li ^TJniversity of t Library . California Berkeley /.CI 1 4, ?33b) V F^3 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY