The Age Of Rococo

France
The word 'Rococo' is a term coined in the 19th century, and derived from the French 'rocaille', a work which originally described the rock and shell work of the artificially constructed grottoes in the grounds of Versailles and they came to mean any decoration of this type. Many pieces of carved handmade furniture dating from the 18th century, in particular mirror frames, depict rocks, shells and dripping water in their composition, frequently in association with Chinese figures and pagodas. A similar concept of the romantic landscapes is characteristic of much authentic Chinese painting.

Chinoiseries however, were popular in France before the Rococo style began, appearing in the designs of Berain and in Boulle marquetry in the late 17th century, when French Baroque was beginning to display signs of relaxing a little from its customary rigidity but was still preserving an essential symmetry.
One of the first to rebel against this discipline was Pierre Le Pautre (c.1648 - 1716), the son of Jean (chief designer of furniture under Le Brun). Pierre worked as a designer at Versailles (under J.H. Mansart) from 1699 until his death, a period which covered the last years of Louis XIV, when the king himself was growing a little weary of the ornate grandeur with which he had surrounded himself.

It was not until after the death of Louis in 1715 that any fundamental changes were permitted to happen, other than a gradual replacement of vertical legs with those of scroll or S-shape which had made their appearance in the 1680s. When the king died, his heir was his great grandson, Louis XV, then a child of five years old, and a regency under Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was established. Stylistically, the term Regence is usually extended to cover the last years of Louis XIV and the early ones of Louis XV (c.1700 - 1735) and was a period when the heavy, male splendour of the Baroque was slowly giving way to the light, feminine charm of the Rococo.
The femininity however, may not always be apparent in typical pieces of the Regence period. The Boulle commode was at first either 'en tombeau' (sarcophagus form), or serpentine-fronted. Next to appear was the bombe (swollen) form, which was difficult to create, or reproduce using reproduction furniture techniques, because it involved a complexity of curves on both the horizontal and the vertical planes. This had three drawers, the bottom one extended almost to the ground. It was often decorated with parquetry, and fitted with massively cast bronze handles and mounts.

the cabinet-makers chiefly responsible for these developments were probably Boulle himself and Charles Cressent (1685 - 1758), the son of a sculptor who, in 1719, married the widow of Joseph Poitou, Boulle's chief rival and cabinet-maker to the Regent. Cressent gave up his father's profession, which he had been following, and adopted his grandfather's, which happened to be cabinet-making - or rather, he combined the two. His fitted and non fitted furniture, especially the bronze mounts, are highly sculptural. He became cabinet-maker to the Regent in Poinou's place, and developed a rich, flowing, curvaceous style.
Boulle was probably the first to reduce the bulk of the commode by dispensing with the bottom drawer and raising the carcase on curved legs; but Cressent was probably responsible for creating the typical Louis XV commode of bombe form in which the two drawer-fronts appear as one uninterrupted surface, and are decorated as such, with no apparent dividing rail between them. The type is known as 'sans traverse'.
Cressent's early work is characterised by relatively plain veneers in fine woods, ornamented by fine mounts which he made himself - much to the annoyance of the guilds, who insisted on demarcation lines between the crafts of woodwork and metalwork. Although eminently successful, he nevertheless got into financial difficulties in 1748 and thereafter cut down on the expensive bronze mounts which had to be cast, chiselled, gilded with an amalgam of mercury and pure gold and finally burnished. Cressent's later pieces were decorated with floral marquetry.

...to be continued