Pair of armchairs with curved-backs
and medallion-adorned frames,

18th century. Gilded wood, silk.

 

 

Furniture overlaid with tortoise shell and metal

 

Of all sovereigns, Louis XIV is certainly the monarch who best knew how to surround the royal majesty with the most dazzling splendour. He required sumptuous buildings for his habitation, and if Versailles as a palace realised his dreams, he still required that the furniture destined to fill those galleries with glittering mirrors, gildings, paintings and sculptures, should be worthy of such companionship and should exhibit a magnificence unknown until that day. Logical in his conceptions, the king understood that he must entrust the manufacture of the carpets, furniture and silverware to real artists. In order to gather the most talented, he initially granted apartments in the Louvre to each of those who had distinguished themselves by works of uncommon merit. In 1662, to create a necessary harmony amongst the different works and create a common thought throughout, he centralised the various workshops at the Gobelins, placing them in 1667 under the direction of Le Brun, his first painter. Le Brun was succeeded by Pierre Mignard after his death in 1690.

Amongst those whose conceptions of furniture were such as Louis XIV and Le Brun desired, we must mention above all André-Charles Boulle. Had he previously tried his skill in styles already known, as he would afterwards try those which were to become the fashion after him? This is probable; however, he did not find the splendour he aimed to attain. Instead, he conceived the idea of constructing furniture in ebony and covering the large surfaces with inlaid tortoise shell, cut out and coated with arabesques, branches of foliage, and ornaments in thin brass and white metal, and sometimes enriched by elaborate chisel engraving. This brilliant mosaic work was also accompanied by ormolu bas-reliefs, masks, scrolls, mouldings, entablatures and encoignures, forming a framework for the whole and distributing luminous points of attraction to prevent the eye from being disorientated by a dangerous glare.

To give the inlay the desired exactness, the artist imagined the plan of superimposing two plates of equal size and thickness, one of metal, the other of tortoise shell, and after tracing his design, cutting them out with the same stroke of the saw. Thus, he obtained four proofs of the composition, two at the base where the design appeared in hollow spaces, and two ornamental which, when placed in the spaces of the opposite ground piece, inserted themselves exactly without any perceptible joining. The result of this practice was seen in two different and simultaneous pieces of furniture. One, designated as the first part, was the tortoise shell bottom with metal applications; the other, called the second part, was appliqué metal with tortoise shell arabesques. The counterpart, therefore, being still richer than the prototype, the pieces were arranged with crossed effects. Boulle did more and found in his great compositions means to add to the splendour of the effect by simultaneously employing the first and second parts in suitably balanced masses.

While acknowledging the overall positive effect of the two styles invented by André-Charles Boulle, we must insist on the point that the first part should be more highly valued because it is more complete. Let us take for example one of the beautiful types issued from the hands of the artist, and we will see how smartly the elaborate engraving corrects the coldness of certain outlines. The shells trace their paths of light, the draperies of the canopies fall in cleverly disordered folds, the grotesque masks grimace, the branches of foliage are lightened by the strongly marked veins of the leaves according to the importance of the masses; everything lives and has a language. Observe the counterpart; it is but the reflection of the idea, the faded shadow of the original.