The Age Of Rococo - Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Baroque palaces built in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in the capitals of Germanic states in imitation of Versailles, helped to preserve that style from the unsettling effects of Rococo. However, by around 1750, thanks largely to the circulation of French, Italian and English designs printed in Nurenburg and Augsburg, Rococo curlicues were attaching themselves to ponderous Baroque forms. Shortly afterwards, carcase shapes were beginning to assume a livelier and more curvaceous appearance. As is often the way with converts, German designers, once having embraced the new faith, carried it to unprecedented extremes.

The cousins Spindler (Johann Friedrich (1726 - 1799) and Heinrich Wilhelm (1738 - 1799), were the sons of two brothers noted for marquetry work at Bayreuth. The younger generation both went to work for Frederick the Great at Sans Souci, producing some magnificent pieces, notably commodes of bombe form with very deep apron-fronts, lavishly decorated with marquetry and mounted in gilt bronze by the Swiss-born Johann Melchior Kambli (1718 - 1773). Kambli, a cabinet-maker in his own right, was inspired by the Louis XV Rococo style but was one of those responsible for creating the distinctive Potsdam style.

At Wurzburg, capital of Mainz, the episcopal residence began as a Baroque palace but was eventually given a Rococo interior of great brilliance, for which Ferdinand Hundt (1704 - 1758) produced some exceptionally well-carved handmade furniture - particularly firescreens and gueridons. Sadly, much of his authenticated work was destroyed in World War II, but enough survives to demonstrate the great delicacy achieved by the finest German craftsmen.
The trend to lightness was encouraged by the work of Francois Cuvillies (1695 - 1768), a Fleming of diminutive size whose first appointment was as Court Dwarf to the Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria. He studied in Paris and then became Court Architect at Munich, designing furniture fit for a fairy palace, which is what his 'Mirror Room' at Nymphenburg resembles.

A number of other pieces of palace fitted and non fitted furniture can be identified with the men who made them. Unfortunately, furniture made for more modest homes is largely anonymous, for the German guilds did not insist on the signing of pieces and in fact actively discouraged the practice. Thus the handsome oak cupboards of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), carved in the Rococo style with a masterly and delicate touch that rivals the best carved armoires of Liege, usually defy the attempts of scholars to link them with particular makers of whom little is known but their names.

J.P. Schotte's name is noted as a maker to the Court at Dresden. He specialized in chairs in the English style in the 1730s. Both French and English fashions were followed in Saxony, French taste becoming dominant by around 1740.
Another important cabinet-maker was Abraham Roentgen (1711 - 1793), born at Muhlheim, he was a Protestant belonging to the strict Moravian sect. He went to England at the age of twenty, and worked their as a cabinet-maker for around seven years before returning to Germany. He then set sail for Carolina as a missionary, but his ship foundered off the Irish coast. He found employment for a time in Galway, then went back to his home country and set up business in Neuwied, near Coblenz, where there was a Moravian colony, in 1750. His workshops were noted for fine marquetry work which is reminiscent of the architectural subjects of Renaissance craftsmen in South Germany.
Roentgen, however, had to some extent been influenced by his years in England, and English craftsmanship commanded sufficient respects in Germany for him to describe himself as an Englischer Kabinettmacher.
Some of his work in the Rococo style may perhaps justify this, in so far as it is more restrained that most German work of the period.

The business he built up in Neuwied was taken over by his son David, who was to become a major figure internationally in the creation of fine furniture during the Neoclassical period.