The Empire Style - England - Part 5

This latter type had been among the luxury items imported to Europe through the East India companies during the 18th century. Magnificent cabinets, desks, mirrors and other furniture made of ebony or coromandel wood were intricately decorated with all-over patterns of inlaid and incised ivory. They were, of course very costly, and besides, supply could never keep up with demand, so the expedient of imitating the technique with black and white 'pen-painting' was hit upon. Predictably, most penwork designs - mainly on small pieces such as work boxes, tea caddies, chess tables, firescreens and miniature cabinets, but occasionally on quite large pieces of handmade furniture - were of chinoiseries and oriental plant motifs, but Neoclassical scenes were also favoured. Penwork was taken up by ladies amateurs often very skilfully, and was a popular pastime well into the Victoria period.

Simulated rosewood and bamboo furniture was generally made of beech and then painted and varnished appropriately. Japanning on furniture had by this time degenerated into a form of painting with varnish and chinoiserie was mostly superseded by painted flowers or Neoclassical motifs in a variety of colours. Japanned tin plate was used for some small pieces of furniture. The Pontypool factory produced dressing tables in this material, about 1805. This factory, which produced the very best japanned tin plate in Europe, closed in 1822, although many other factories, chiefly in Wolverhampton and Birmingham, flourished until the mid 19th century. The japanning done at Pontypool was a complex industrial process, with handpainted decoration burnt in. Rather similar decoration appears on examples of furniture made from various forms of papier-mache, but this material reached its heyday in the early part of the Victorian period.

Brass inlay, as we have seen, was a favourite form of embellishment for the rosewood furniture of the Regency period. The technique was French in origin (it is known as boullework after Andre-Charles Boulle who first perfected it in the later years of the 17th century) and was practised in London to a large extent by emigre craftsmen from the French Revolution. The most famous of these was Louis Le Gaigneur who set up his 'Buhl Manufactory' in Edgeware Road in the second decade of the 19th century. Another expert in the field was John Bullock, some of whose pieces are recorded. He made a pair of cupboards inlaid with brass for Blair Castle, Perth, in 1827. Brass, sometimes backed with pleated silk, was also used in decorative trellis patterns on the doors of cupboards or for small ornamental grilles round the tops of cabinets and side tables. Indeed, one of the most pronounced characteristics of fitted and non fitted furniture of the Regency period was the use of metal for all sorts of decoration.

Although the Grecian style persisted for many years - even into the pages of J. C. Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture, a comprehensive record of vernacular furniture published in 1833 - the elegant lines of the Regency began to give way, after around 1820, to the international hotch-potch of ideas and styles that characterised the greater part of the 19th century. By then, improvements in communications, changes in class structure and, above all, the extraordinarily rapid development of mechanical technology, had begun to change furniture making forever.