Neoclassicism - France - Part 2

Riesener's prices proved a little too much for the King, whose chief interest in handmade furniture lay in any mechanical devices or gadgetry forming part of a piece. In 1785, Riesener lost his appointment as cabinet-maker to the King, although the Queen continued to patronise him to the end. He was replaced as ebeniste-du-Roi by another German, Guillaume Beneman (fl.1784 - 1811), whose pieces were more competitive and who was not above revamping other men's work, if it was considered a little old-fashioned, by giving it a new look in the 'Roman' style. An adaptable man, he survived the Revolution and continued to work during the Empire period.

Not all the important makers of the Louis XVI era were German. Rene Dubois (1737 - 1799), belonged to an established French family of craftsmen that also included his father, Jacques (c.1693 - 1763) and a brother, Louis (1732 - 1790). Rene was given a royal appointment by the Queen in 1779 and produced the famous 'Tilsit' table carved with figures (probably by his brother Louis) which was given by the king to the empress of Russia, Catherine II. It is now in the Wallace Collection in London.

Although the name sounds French, Martin Carlin was in fact of German origin. He had worked under Oeben and had married Oeben's sister, Marie-Catherine. Carlin was more of an artist than a craftsman, specialising in small, feminine pieces such as the bonheur-du-jour on which he used Sevres plaques against a ground of ebony. His work is original in conception and refined in execution, but he died relatively poor in 1785.

David Roentgen supplied large quantities of fitted and non fitted furniture both to the crown and to fashionable society in Paris, but as he never had workshops in France, preferring to remain at Neuwied, his career is discussed in the section on Germany.

It was a Frenchman, the artist Jacques-Louis David (1748 - 1825), who was one of the first to design furniture which attempted to reproduce, using reproduction furniture techniques of the day, as exactly as possible actual pieces of Ancient Roman and Greek work - couches on turned feet, tripod stands, chairs of klismos form with sabre legs, stools of Roman curule shape on X-curved supports.
Many of these ideas were no doubt derived from Greek pots, of the red-figure or black-figure kind, which often depicted figures of people using furniture; it may be significant that in having these designs executed for his own use and for the Comte d'Artois, David's colour scheme was mainly black and red. David was trained by J.M. Vien (1716 - 1809), with whom he went to Rome, and who was a pioneer of Neoclassical painting. It is perhaps not altogether irrelevant that some of those - David among them - who adopted this later, more pedantic Neoclassical style in France were equally revolutionary in their politics, supporting the anti-monarchist movement and going on to serve the Directoire and the Empire of Napoleon.

David's furniture a la grecque was made for him by Georges Jacob (1739 - 1814), who was of Burgundian peasant stock. He was appointed a maitre of the guild in 1765 and acknowledged as a leading maker of seat furniture by c.1780. His chairs in the earlier Louis XVI style have rectangular backs, and the frames are finely carved with flowers and classical motifs. He was especially fond of carving a marguerite on the seat-rail. He avoided painting and gilding whenever possible, preferring natural wood, particularly mahogany, which had not previously been fashionable in France.

It was well suited to the later, more severe Louis XVI style initiated by David, and Jacob employed it for X-framed stools and chairs, lyre-backed chairs, sabre-legged seats of various kinds and for furniture other than seats. Although not much employed by the court, he was owed large sums of money by the aristocracy when the Revolution began; he was never paid, many of his clients having gone to the guillotine. Thanks to the support of David, he was given an entree into the austere world of the new regime.