Essential general survey for enthusiasts and specialist alike. Superb colour illustrations. Will provide many insights to the neglected area of art history

The Art Deco movement - with its emphasis on up-to-date individuality combined with good taste, fine materials and exquisite workmanship - became all the rage in France. Other countries produced their own versions of the style, but in furniture especially, the French predominated: the world had not seen such creative design for 125 years; on the one hand, the virtuoso cabinet-making of Ruhlmann, on the other, the brilliant originality of Gray and Legrain. Alastair Duncan introduces us to the work of over eighty architects, furniture makers and interior designers. The colour and monochrome photographs - almost all of them specially commissioned for this book - form a valuable portfolio of Art Deco furniture which should be of special value to those seeking comprehensive information about a design movement which has proved of lasting appeal both to collectors and to the general public.

"Each object is described and analyzed in terms of its provenance and published history, as well as its construction, materials, and conservation. With its painstaking attention to detail, this volume is the definitive catalogue of the Getty Museum's collection of French Baroque furniture and will be of interest to scholars, conservators, and all students of French decorative arts."--BOOK JACKET.

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture. This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste. The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

This beautifully produced volume is the first to survey the Metropolitan Museum's world-renowned collection of European furniture. One hundred and three superb examples from the Museum's vast holdings are featured. They originated in workshops in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, or Spain and date from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. A number of them belonged to such important historical figures as Pope Urban VIII, Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Napoleon. The selection includes chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, commodes, settees and sofas, bookcases and standing shelves, desks, fire screens, athéniennes, coffers, chests, mirrors and frames, showcases, and lighting equipment. There is also one purely decorative piece, a superb vase made for a Russian noble family who, according to one awestruck viewer, "owned all the malachite mines in the world." The makers of some of the objects are unknown, but most of the pieces can be identified by label, documentation, or style as the work of an outstanding European designer-craftsman, such as André-Charles Boulle, Thomas Chippendale, David Roentgen, or Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Francois Linke (1855-1946), born in Pankraz, Bohemia, is considered by many as the greatest Parisian cabinetmaker of his day, at a time when the worldwide influence of French fashion was at its height. His exquisitely finished, richly made furniture was produced for potentates and industrial magnates from Paris to New York, London to Buenos Aires, the Far East and the Cameroons. Astonishingly, at the age of seventy and during the depths of the Great Depression, he secured a series of commissions to furnish over one thousand pieces for the King of Egypt. The son of a subsistence gardener, Linke trained under the strict disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and as a young man, travelled penniless, on foot, via Vienna to Paris in 1876. There he married the daughter of a local innkeeper and started a business in the days before electricity and the motor car, a business that continued, despite the loss of his two sons, through two world wars and the invention of atomic power. His early work is not signed, but can be traced to the great houses such as the New York townhouse of Arabella Huntington. He then gambled all on the Exposition Universelle de Paris, 1900 and was rewarded with not only a Gold Medal but also important private commissions that brought him both fame and fortune. The ancien regime has always been the greatest source of inspiration for artistic design in France and, influenced amongst others by the de Goncourt brothers, the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles were revived to wide popular appeal. During the Second Empire these styles were so eclectic that they became debased. Linke wanted to create a fresh new style and his association with the enigmatic sculptor Leon Message resulted in a highly original series of designs, based on the rococo style fused with the latest fashion in Paris, l'art nouveau. This style, known as le style Linke, was received with critical acclaim at the 1900 exhibition and remains popular today amongst the worldwide clientele for Linke's exquisitely made furniture. The book, with 140,000 words of text and over 700 unique photographs, many previously unpublished and drawn from Linke's own archive and private collections, has ten chapters showing the development of this exacting and prolific man's life work. It traces his early life and apprenticeship and his comfortable family life in Paris, culminating with the award of the Legion d'honneur. Appendices on Metalwork and Wood add to the technical expertise of this book, giving a unique insight into the workings of any designers recorded to date. 266 colour & 48 b/w illustrations