18th century furniture - Robert Adam

The interiors of the Scottish architect Robert Adam became so well known that the term 'Adam Style' was coined to describe his distinctive look.
Beginning his career by training as an architect in Edinburgh, under his father William, a classical architect. Robert spent five years studying in Italy, drawing the sights frequented by scholars on the Grand Tour. On his return in 1758 he established an office in London, where he was later joined by his elder brother James.
Adam's designs were primarily for interiors, rather than for whole buildings, and he designed every element of them, to create an integrated whole, from ceilings and matching carpets down to mirrors and urns. As a result, his designs included a wide variety of handmade furniture, including chairs, sofas, commodes, stools and mirrors. He also designed console tables, bookcases, and sideboards as 'wall furniture', an integral part of his decorative scheme for walls.
Adam did not make furniture himself, but instead commissioned established London cabinet-makers, including Chippendale  and Linnell, to make it. In his first decade in London, Adam developed the style of decoration that was to remain the dominant feature of his work throughout his career.

Early Influences
The Palladian style had a strong influence on Adam's early work. Armchairs and sofas that he designed for Sir Laurence Dundas - made by Chippendale - had typically Palladian, rectangular backs. However, the sphinxes on the curved seat rails showed the influence of Renaissance grotesques, and the use of anthemia harked back to Classical motifs.
By the late 1760s, Adam had begun to develop a more sophisticated style. His furniture designs became more delicate, the carving less dramatic, and he began to use straight legs. Case pieces were still rectangular but Adams began to use new shapes in other types of furniture, now only made using reproduction furniture techniques. In 1767, he designed furniture for the dining room at Osterley Park in West London and the dining chairs introduced a new shape of chair back, known as a harp or lyre back, inspired by Classical shapes.

The Later Years
By the 1770s, Adam's fame had grown and he carried out many commissions for the aristocracy. His elegant furniture designs were widely imitated. His tables and chairs had slender, tapered legs and armchairs had oval backs and slender frames. Mirrors were an important feature of his interiors and included simple designs intended to be positioned above pier tables, as well as enormous pieces with slight frames that were designed to cover an entire wall.

Colours And Decoration
Adam's designs were usually for furniture, fitted and non fitted furniture, made from lights woods, such as satinwood and harewood (sycamore that was dyed grey). Adam favoured delicate, painted designs, in soft pastel colours, such as pale green and lilac pink, and gilding.
The intricate, swirling arabesques that he used to decorate ceilings and floors were repeated in the filigree decoration used on his furniture. He also frequently used scagliola, not just on pieces of furniture but also as architectural features of an interior, such as the intricate scagliola columns at Syon House in West London.    

18th century furniture - Early George III

George III came to the throne in 1760 and British handmade furniture making reached its zenith during his 51 year reign. British design was highly influential, owing to the publications of key designers whose names have become synonymous with Georgian furniture.
The key style of the period was Neoclassical, which was largely introduced to Britain by James Stuart and Robert Adams in the 1760s. Thomas Chippendale also played a role in the development of the movement, and worked alongside Robert Adam on a number of occasions. The designers George Hepplewhite, who published his cabinet-maker and upholsterer's guide in 1788 and Thomas Sheraton, whose cabinet-maker and upholsterer's drawing book came out between 1791 and 1794, are also strongly associated with the style and helped to spread the Neoclassical ideal.
Important furniture-makers included Gillows of Lancaster, Ince and Mayhew, George Seddon, and John Linnell.

Adopting A New Style
By around 1765, the Rococo style was waning, and its typical decorative details, such as carved foliage can C-scrolls, had become passe. The main change ushered in by the Neoclassical movement with the introduction of symmetrical designs. New decorations made use of Classical ornaments such as urns, rosettes, swags of husks, and bellflowers. Other popular motifs included vases, Greek keys, laurel wreaths, palmettes, sphinxes, anthemion, and guilloche.
At first, Neoclassical decoration was applied to existing Rococo furniture shapes. However, these soon began to show the influence of Neoclassicalism, and became more refined and rectilinear in shape, with symmetrical lines and fewer curves.

Decorative Features
The way in which furniture was decorated also changed. Carved decoration was pronounced at first, but as the century progressed it became shallower, and was finally replaced by inlaid woods in imitation of earlier carved decoration. These inlays were made from a greater variety of woods than previously, including satinwood, tulipwood, and rosewood.
By 1780, carving on case furniture or tables was reduced to a minimum. The grain of the timber or inlay became more important.
Painting was also a popular decorative technique, and was another way in which Neoclassical designs and motifs could be incorporated into pieces of furniture, now in reproduction furniture.

Furniture Types
Linen chests of clothes presses remained popular, as did mahogany chests of drawers. Neoclassical styling sometimes appeared as canted corners of carved, fluted corner columns.
Large dining tables were made from around 1770 onwards. The most formal tables had rounded ends with centre sections and gatelegs. Additional leaves were made to fit in between. Gateleg tables were sometimes placed side by side to be used as dining tables well into the 1790s. Towards the end of the 18th century, long pedestal dining tables were introduced. These always had extra leaves that could be inserted to extend them. The pedestal form also became popular for a variety of other types of table, including drum, breakfast, and centre tables - all forms of non fitted furniture.
 

18th century furniture - Low Countries

The Netherlands underwent a variety of political changes in the late 18th century as Spanish and Austrian rule was ceded to revolutionary France in 1795, the Netherlands was renamed the Batavian Republic.
Despite these changes, several areas of commerce continued successfully - agriculture, the money markets of Amsterdam, and trade with the East Indies all prospered and provided income for furniture and building.
The established trade links also facilitated the import of exotic woods such as mahogany and American satinwood.

Imported Furniture Ban
While wood continued to be imported, the import of finished furniture was banned in 1771, largely due to the excessive popularity of French and British handmade furniture. This ban meant that Dutch cabinet-makers lacked competition and an environment in which new ideas were readily generated. This led to the provincial nature of much late 18th century furniture, and to satisfy demand, the imitation of French Louis XVI pieces. Andries Borgenwas known for this type of work.

Applying The New Style
The rectilinear styling of Louis XVI furniture was applied to Low Countries case fitted and non fitted furniture. Cabinets were also inspired by British designs, as pediments became less heavy, and later examples incorporated a stylized swan's neck or a broken pediment.
Canted corners were common and, while cases swelled out at the base, they were not as broad as previous examples. Feet became square and sharply tapered. Glazed panels, rather than solid wooden doors, were used  on cabinets designed to display collections of ceramics. Smaller case pieces such as the commode kept their signature shape but had a lighter, more geometric feel.
In the last quarter of the 18th century, a new type of case furniture, the low buffet of sideboard cabinet, was introduced. This piece was similar to a commode, but had a hinged top that opened to reveal an enclosed cistern for washing glasses. On some examples, a number of shelves were attached to the lid,, which fell open on lifting the lid. On other models, additional flaps were fitted under the lid and could be opened to provide more surface space.

Decorative Features
Local cabinet-makers continued to excel in the art of marquetry, using exotic woods such as rosewood, satinwood, or ebony. During the second half of the century, marquetry designs began to incorporate Classical motifs such as the stylized fan, urn, and trophies, commonly used in reproduction furniture techniques today.
Despite the Dutch appreciation of French style, the angular, contrasting geometric shapes of the marquetry and the minimal use of ormolu mounts - except in keyhole escutcheons and handles - gave their furniture a distinctive Dutch character.
Decorative inlays remained popular, and as furniture became more rectilinear in the 1780s, lacquer was again used for decoration on cupboard doors, table tops, and cabinet fall-fronts. These lacquer panels were quite often combined with light woods to provide a strong colour contrast.

18th Century Furniture - Russia

Catherine the Great became empress of Russia in 1762 and ruled until 1796. Her reign marked a golden age of Russian culture, during which St. Petersburg, built in the first half of the 18th century, became a prominent European capital.
Catherine's predecessor, Empress Elizabeth I, had commissioned architects to build magnificent Rococo palaces and pavilions, but Catherine promoted the Neoclassical style, both in architecture and furnishings of fitted and non fitted furniture. During her reign she commissioned the building of the two Hermitages next to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Both were built in the austere Neoclassical style, with colonnaded facades, the first as a pavilion where Catherine could relax and the second to house the Empress's library and growing art collection. Following Catherine's example, the aristocracy built imposing new mansions in St. Petersburg and grand homes on large country estates.

Neoclassical Style
Handmade furniture styles became more severe, but lighter. Russian Neoclassical furniture is rectilinear and decorated primarily with symmetrical motifs and geometric patterns, but it is larger in scale and often more brightly decorated than similar styles elsewhere in Europe.
Commodes, tables, and chairs were influenced by French examples and were often made of mahogany with gilt, bronze, or brass mounts. Elaborate tables were designed to be placed in the centre of a room, rather than against a wall, and were therefore decorated on all sides. Elegant brass-enriched dining chairs were fashionable in the 1790s and could be found in most of the palaces and in the collections of the Russian elite. Some had trellis-pattern backs with mounts attached to the joins of the pattern, and legs inlaid with reeded brass.

Innovative Designs
Mechanical furniture was popular in Russia. The inventive German cabinet-maker, David Roentgen, visited St. Petersburg five times between 1783 and 1789, and supplied many intriguing pieces of furniture to Catherine the Great, including desks at which she could write either standing up or sitting down, cabinets in which she could display her medals and gems, and a revolving armchair. The pieces that Roentgen produced for his Russian clients were more elaborate and ostentatious than those that he produced for his French and German patrons, and were made from woods that resembled the native Russian Karelian birch.

Decorative Features
Private factories and estate workshops were set up in St. Petersburg and around Russia, to create furnishings for the new palaces and mansions. Russian craftsmen became highly skilled, skill required today with the reproduction furniture techniques, and created fine pieces of furniture decorated with marquetry and gilding, influenced by both French and German designs. The Classical motifs of sphinxes. griffins, dolphins, lions' heads, acanthus, rosettes, and swags were very common, and fine brass inlays were used to imitate Classical columns.
Table cabinets were decorated with exotic inlays of ivory and bone, and porcelain plaques from the Wedgwood factory in England were set into furniture panels.

Traditional Styles
Vernacular furniture remained traditional and was usually made of oak. Armchairs based on monastic furniture, benches, and tables, sometimes with extending leaves, were simple and differed little from the pieces in peasant homes.

David Roentgen

The finest, most innovative and commercially driven cabinet-maker of the 18th century created furniture that still remains unparalleled in quality.

It is unlikely that David Roentgen would have achieved his level of fame without the influence of his father, Abraham, who produced handmade furniture combining superb craftsmanship with technical complexity. David began as Abraham's apprentice, and eventually took over his Neuwied workshop, near Koblenz in Germany, in 1768.

Increasingly influenced by French design, David travelled to Paris in 1774 to present a desk to Queen Marie-Antoinette. Realising that his work was old-fashioned, he began to study the latest Neoclassical styles he saw in the city. By the late 1770s, his furniture showed the results of this study in its more austere shapes, the decoration reduced the veneering in plain timbers, usually mahogany, with gilt-bronze or brass mountings. Such was his success in Paris that he joined the Guild of Ebenistes. His stamp was D.ROENTGEN, although most of his pieces were unstamped.

Roentgen set up depots for his fitted and non fitted furniture in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, enabling him to promote his designs, gain commissions, and supply furniture more quickly without losing control  of his Neuwied workshop. This innovative thinking and commercial acumen also allowed him to keep up with the latest fashions, through pattern books and prints.

Roentgen's Furniture
Initially, Roentgen worked in wood, which he engraved, but by the late 1760s he was using stained and tinted woods. After 1770, delicate pictorial marquetry became a speciality of his workshop, the designs for which were often taken from paintings by Januarius Zick. This resulted in extraordinarily realistic renditions of floral sprays, arrangements of garden utensils, musical instruments, and, after his first trip to Paris, pastoral idylls and architectural scenes.

Towards the end of the 1770s, Roentgen was producing a range of furniture in the Louis XVI style. He was also noted for his writing desks, produced in the later years of the Neuwied workshop, which features ingenious mechanical devices that were operated by moving a section of the piece.

In 1783, Roentgen visited Russia with his first consignment of furniture, which included dressing tables, chests of drawers, a revolving armchair, and desks at which one could write seated or standing. Following this visit, he received several commissions from Catherine the Great. Roentgen's main customers were the French king and court. Louis XVI had purchased a writing table in 1779 and subsequently appointed David Ebeniste-mecanicien - he was already cabinet-maker to Queen Marie-Antoinette.

Over the next ten years he supplied the French court with furniture that was noted both for its intricate marquetry and its ingenious mechanical construction.
In 1791, Roentgen was appointed Court Furnisher to Frederick William II of Prussia and by this time he was recognised as the most celebrated cabinet-maker in Europe. However, the French Revolution seriously weakened his business and he never regained his former status. David Roentgen died in Wiesbadan while on his travels in 1807.

18th century furniture - Germany

Neoclassical styles came later to the German states than other European countries. This was partly the result of German guild restrictions, which primarily sought to protect those craftsmen who were not privileged enough to work in a Court workshop. By restricting the numbers of workshops in a city in order to guarantee work for all the masters to produce fitted and non fitted furniture, the guilds made it very difficult for foreign craftsmen to settle, so their influence was, at times, found to be lacking. Also, the conservatism of the middle classes meant that new fashions were less readily accepted.

The Spindler brothers were leading cabinet-makers who made furniture for Frederick II. They were famous for their use of floral marquetry, and continued to make Rococo style commodes up until the late 1760s. At the height of their career, the two-drawer serpentine commode on long legs was very popular, a shape that had already become passe' in France.
Commodes made for use outside court circles were less formal and resembled a chest of drawers with three or four drawers, despite this simplicity, these commodes still favoured Rococo styling with curvilinear fronts and veneers in walnut, rather than mahogany.

Abraham Roentgen and his son, David, were the most famous German cabinet-makers to embrace the Neoclassical style, However, the handmade furniture Abraham Roentgen initially produced was strongly influenced by the English Queen Anne and Low Countries designs. Much of the Roentgen's early furniture was made in walnut, as mahogany became fashionable in German cabinetwork much later than in Britain and France. Both enjoyed a great following at all the German Courts of their time.

Neoclassical Furniture
It was not until the 1770s that the early Neoclassical style, or Zopfstil, became accepted. As in France, where enthusiasm following the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum had led to the emergence of the gout grec style, German designers began to seek inspiration in the ancient Greco-Roman world. The term 'Zopfstil' itself derives from Classical braided friezes. The Zopfstil continued to apply many of the decorative features seen in the marquetry of the late Rococo style - acanthus shaped mounts, bay leaves, swags, medallions, triglyphs, and lion's and ram's heads. Initially furniture, now produced using reproduction furniture techniques, was similar to that of the Louis XVI style, albeit with more exaggerated proportions. From the middle of the 1780s, however, furniture forms became lighter and more refined and had very little decoration.

English Pattern Books

Furniture pattern books helped to bring the very best of London design to an audience of tradesmen and eager clients.

Pattern books revolutionized the way fitted and non fitted furniture fashions were disseminated. Much of the modern understanding of Georgian furniture originated from the designs illustrated in pattern books, and the golden trio of British design - Thomas Chippendale, Thomas Sheraton, and George Hepplewhite, owe the longevity of their reputations more to their published works than to the furniture itself.
Pattern books were published for many reasons - to introduce new fashions - to assist in the pricing of work - to impress wealthy patrons and ultimately to acquire new clients. The London cabinet-makers, William Ince and John Mayhew, publishers of The Universal System of Household Furniture, handmade furniture, even translated their volumes into French in order to target the lucrative market across the Channel.

Some of the pieces illustrated in pattern books already existed, such as Robert and James Adam's pieces, and work by Chippendale, and Ince and Mayhew. Many designs were not meant to be slavishly copied, but rather were intended as a guide for other makers. In the 'French Chairs' plate, illustrated below, the chair could be either an arm or side chair and Chippendale designed a variety of choices for leg designs.

Other cabinet-makers were actively encouaged to recreate the designs themselves. Some publications included dimensional drawings and most included heights of the furniture and instructions for when these should be altered - a change that was dependent upon the room for which a piece of furniture was intended.

Thomas Sheraton's two volume 'The Cabinet Dictionary' (1803) ensured that nothing was left to chance in the implementation of his instructions. The book included perspective drawings, measurements, the type of wood or paint to be used, a description of types of furniture, now made using reproduction furniture techniques, and even instructions on where the furniture should be placed.

It is a curious fact that despite his immense fame, no actual pieces of furniture can be attributed to George Hepplewhite. His notoriety is entirely due to his published works, and he only became famous after his death, on the publication of 'The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide' in 1788. This book was intended to be of use to both craftsmen and clients. Hepplewhite was a great advocate of the Adam style, and it is thanks in no small part to Hepplewhite's publication that Adams' work continues to be so well known today.

France - Louis XVI

When Louis XVI and his Austrian wife Marie Antoinette came to the French throne in 1774, many German craftsmen, including prominent cabinet-makers such as Adam Weisweiler and Jean-Henri Riesener, moved to France in the hope of royal commissions. Their hopes were fulfilled, and in the years before the Revolution they supplied the royal household with sumptuous handmade furniture that was both Rococo and Neoclassical in style.

Developing Style
Furniture styles evolved gradually at this time. Pieces from the early years are often referred to as 'Transitional' because that contained elements of both Rococo and Neoclassical designs. As time went on, the Neoclassical elements became more pronounced.
In the 20 years or so before the French Revolution in 1789, English taste began to influence the French, and this trend can be seen in fitted and non fitted furniture designs. Mahogany was now used frequently, particularly when trade with America increased at the end of the Revolutionary War, and the wood could be easily imported from the West Indies.

Decoration
Different styles of marquetry developed as a method of decoration. Pictorial designs became more prominent than the loosely arranged floral decorations of previous eras. Landscapes and architectural compositions were very popular, as were vases or baskets of flowers. Parquetry, a geometric form of marquetry, was another common decorative feature.
Later in Louis XVI's reign, Riesener became one of the most important cabinet-makers. Around 1780, he abandoned marquetry and started to produce much plainer furniture that relied on well-figured veneers for its decorative effect. Only truly French aspect of furniture design of this period was the use of delicately detailed porcelain plaques from the sevres factory, which were set into pieces of furniture, now antique furniture, as a decorative feature. Mounts were often elaborate and of very fine quality, particularly those made by foundries such as Gouthiere and Thomire.
Boullework was still favoured, as was furniture that incorporated pieces of painted and foiled glass known as verre eglomise, or Chinese or Japanese lacquer panels, often reused from late 17th - or early 18th century pieces. Painted furniture was also very popular.

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