The Age Of Rococo - Part 2

There are some who contend that Antoine-Robert Gaudreau (or Gaudreaux c.1680 - 1751) was the inventor of the 'commode sans traverse'. He worked for Louis XV from 1726 and was a competitor of Cressent, employing a most sumptuous style. A commode he produced for the king's bedroom at versailles (now in the Wallace collection, London) had bronze mounts by Jacques Caffieri (1673 - 1755), the greatest master in this medium, and was made to a design by Antoine-Sebastien Slodtz (c.1695 - 1754), whose versatility extended to designing for the theatre.

The honour for inventing the fully developed Rococo style is shared by two designers, both of them well travelled in widely separated parts of Europe. Juste-Aurele Meissonier (c.1693 - 1750) was born in Turin and went to Paris around 1720 where he succeeded Berain in 1725 as architect-designer to the king. He designed a wide range of objects and cultivated the second phase of Rococo, known as the 'genre pittoresque'. This movement totally rejected classic principles, ignored the order of architecture and favoured an asymmetrical fantasy of C-scrolls. flowers, rocks, shells, Chinamen and putti, all of which had been used before but never in such charming and sometimes absurd arrangements. He actually worked as a silversmith and some of his handmade furniture designs give the impression of having been intended to be cast in metal rather than be fashioned our of wood. He worked in Poland and Portugal as an architect, and published a series of highly influential designs for complete interiors, bronzes, silver and furniture.

The other leading light of the 'genre pittoresque' was Nicolas Pineau (1684 - 1754), who was born in Paris but worked in Russia from 1716 to 1726, designing for Peter the Great at he Peterhof, c.1720. On returning to paris, he became a fashionable creator of elegant furnishing schemes, for both fitted and non fitted furniture, at a time when the city rather than versailles had become the smart place to live. (Louis XIV had insisted on his court living most of their lives in the palace.) cressent was among the makers who worked to his designs, six of which were pirated in England by Thomas Langley, without acknowledgement.