Victorian Furniture - neo-Rococo (final part)

The style was only taken up in Germany from the 1840s, when the Biedermeier styles were dying out. Even on the level of the middle-class market, it attracted many excellent practitioners, most of whom also operated in the other fashionable styles. These included Karl Leistler, better known for his work in the Gothic idiom, and Michael Thonet, who made a great many pieces in the neo-Rococo style before his total involvement with bentwood furniture. The largest of the manufacturing centres in Germany was Mainz, which supplied both the home and the export markets. The most important of the makers there was Bembe, who began working in the style in the early 1840s and Wilhelm Kimbel, who included such pieces in a partwork design book that he published as early as 1835. Both of these continued to manufacture in this and other currently fashionable styles throughout the century.

France did not revert to the taste until some five years after Britain, although still ahead of Germany. The real impact of the style was not, however, felt until the beginning of the Second Empire, when it and other Louis styles once more became popular, reflecting an upsurge of national pride and a belief that the great days of France were returning. Pieces of handmade furniture that owed little to any of the Louis  other than a passing resemblance began to appear everywhere in the profusion and clutter beloved of Victorians: occasional tables, stools, work-tables, whatnots and embroidery stands all took their place in rooms that became so crowded that it could be difficult to cross them without knocking something over.

These debased forms of the 'Louis' styles were made alongside more accurate representation of the originals, which never went totally out of fashion. Indeed, during the Second Empire, when the Empress Eugenie was refurnishing the Imperial Palaces, not only did she have copied made but she also had new and original pieces constructed that blend in with the Louis XVI masterpieces.

Other monarchs. such as Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose nostalgia for a grandiose past was even greater than that of the French court, also had numerous pieces executed in the manner, his fairytale castles of Herrenchiemsee, Neuschwanstein and Schloss Linderhof being entirely furnished in the taste. This pure re-creation was however, mainly confined to the royal houses or those of the excessively rich, as indeed it had been during the original period. Thus, while the fitted and non fitted furniture fully exhibits the capabilities of the craftsmen, it is both less typical of its period and less relevant to the history of the development of furniture than the other, less expensive and more mass-produced styles, most of which were equally or even more retrospective.