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Lit et Deux Tables de Nuit Art Print Dalí, Salvador 31.4375 in. x 23.5625 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted Chests and cupboards are the earliest surviving specimens of furniture; tables, beds, desks and chairs are later in date. Furniture, in early days, had to serve many functions. Very little furniture survives from Antiquity. Some wooden chairs and chests from Ancient Egypt, and some Roman bronze and marble furniture found in Pompeii are preserved in museums. For the rest, all our knowledge of early furniture comes from vases and wall paintings. Early medieval household furniture -- in contrast to church fittings -- was very modest indeed. The most important piece was the chest, which was also used as a seat, a travelling trunk, a table and often a bed. The first chairs had box seats and clearly derived from the chest. The increasing wealth of Late Gothic times created a demand for more elaborate furniture.
The hollowed-out tree trunks, of which the earliest chests were made, gave way to framework and panelling. Next, craftsmen learned to veneer, or to use thin layers of rare woods to face the more ordinary kinds and to decorate furniture with marquetry. Aesthetic, rather than purely utilitarian, considerations became increasingly important from the Renaissance onwards. Architectural forms were used for chests, court cupboards, sideboards and tables. This is very characteristic of English 16thand 17th-century furniture. It is heavy, solid and, with few exceptions, not particularly elegant. Motifs were widely and sometimes unsuitably copied. During the Baroque, craftsmen began to specialize in various branches.
Next to the 'ébénistes' (ebony workers), the makers of solid furniture, there were the 'chalsistes', or makers of chairs. Pieces were no longer made in their entirety by one craftsman, but parts, made elsewhere, were now assembled to a pattern. The middle-class furniture (e. g. the Danzig Baroque cupboard ) of the time with its carvings and sculptural forms was already far more elaborate than its Renaissance predecessor. The making of French furniture -- dictated by Court fashions -- demanded even greater skill.
The most celebrated 'ébénistes' were Boulle, Roentgen, Oeben, and Riesener. The Wallace Collection in London probably contains more examples of their work than any other museum outside France. Forms were continually changing between the time of the 'Roi Soleil' and the French Revolution. These changes are characterized by the names of the different rulers as the styles of Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI. In England, Thomas Chippendale created furniture of elegant forms in the Chinese and Gothic manner and was famous for his chair-back designs, particularly the ribbon back. Other English furniture makers, whose names have become by-words, were Hepplewhite and Sheraton.
The great tradition of the 18th century lingered on in the Empire, Regency and Biedermeier periods. But while the Empire, as the 'Imperial' Napoleonic style, and the Regency, inspired by the taste of the Prince Regent, have the characteristics of a Court style, the German and Viennese Biedermeier furniture is essentially middle-class. With them, originality in furniture design had come to an end. The 19th century saw veritable orgies of imitation, to which Art Nouveau, or the Jugendstil, tried to offer an alternative. In England, William Morris and his circle, to whom Art Nouveau is so greatly indebted, made various attempts to return to good, wholesome craftmanship. Yet recently a number of small craftsmen have appeared both in England and on the Continent in whom the old traditions have not yet died and who are yet open to new impulses. The followers of the Dessau Bauhaus tried to approach problems of design in the spirit of our century and also experimented with new materials such as chromium steel.
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