French furniture comprises both the most sophisticated furniture made in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 for king and court, aristocrats and rich upper bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and French provincial furniture made in the provincial cities and towns many of which, like Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

 and Liège

Liège

Liège is a major city and municipality of Belgium located in the province of Liège, of which it is the economic capital, in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium....

, retained cultural identities distinct from the metropolis. There was also a conservative artisanal rural tradition of French country furniture which remained unbroken until the advent of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century.

Provincial furniture

Furniture made in provincial centers such as Blois

Blois

Blois is the capital of Loir-et-Cher department in central France, situated on the banks of the lower river Loire between Orléans and Tours.-History:...

 and Orléans

Orléans

-Prehistory and Roman:Cenabum was a Gallic stronghold, one of the principal towns of the Carnutes tribe where the Druids held their annual assembly. It was conquered and destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt under the Roman Empire...

 in the Loire valley, and at Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

 or Liège

Liège

Liège is a major city and municipality of Belgium located in the province of Liège, of which it is the economic capital, in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium....

 (never part of France politically but within its cultural orbit), followed at some distance the design innovations that were initiated in the luxury trades of Paris, often with a time lag that could amount to decades.
Features typically associated with French Provincial furniture include cabriole legs, and simple scalloped carving. Dining chairs often have a wheat pattern carving reflecting the country surroundings of the maker. The ladder back chair with a woven rush seat is the typical French Provincial dining chair. Finishes vary though common to all colours is the accumulation of polish or grime in the carving over time resulting in an aged patina and emphasis on the carving regardless of whether the furniture is painted or stained.

Parisian furniture

In the metropolitan culture of France

Culture of France

The culture of France and of the French people has been shaped by geography, by profound historical events, and by foreign and internal forces and groups. France, and in particular Paris, has played an important role as a center of high culture and of decorative arts since the seventeenth...

, French furniture, connoting Parisian furniture, embodies one of the mainstreams of design in the decorative arts of Europe, extending its influence from Spain to Sweden and Russia, from the late seventeenth century to the last craft traditions in workshops like Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, which came to an end only with the Second World war. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French furniture of the classic period 1660-1815, has been collected as passionately by non-French amateurs, with the English in the historical lead, and has set record prices consistently, since the Hamilton Palace sale of 1882, with the result that it is represented in many national museums.

In Paris, an unbroken tradition of apprenticeship

Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...

, already fully formed when the design center for luxury furnishings shifted from Antwerp to Paris in the 1630s, was slowly disrupted by the Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

 after the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps the last of the Parisian ébéniste

Ébéniste

Ébéniste is the French word for a cabinetmaker, whereas in French menuisier denotes a woodcarver or chairmaker. The English equivalent for "ébéniste," "ebonist," is never commonly used. Originally, an ébéniste was one who worked with ebony, a favoured luxury wood for mid-seventeenth century...

s working from a traditional atelier was Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann , his first names often seen reversed as Jacques-Émile, was a renowned French designer of furniture and interiors, epitomising for many the glamour of the French Art Deco style of the 1920s....

 (1879-1933).

French royal furniture

The grand tradition of French royal furniture received its impetus from the establishment of the Manufacture royale des Gobelins

Gobelins manufactory

The Manufacture des Gobelins is a tapestry factory located in Paris, France, at 42 avenue des Gobelins, near the Les Gobelins métro station in the XIIIe arrondissement...

under the organisation of the arts in the service of Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

 that was controlled and directed by his minister of finance, Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French politician who served as the Minister of Finances of France from 1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His relentless hard work and thrift made him an esteemed minister. He achieved a reputation for his work of improving the state of French manufacturing...

. Favoured craftsmen would be eligible for premises in the galleries of the Palais du Louvre

Palais du Louvre

The Louvre Palace , on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, is a former royal palace situated between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois...

, a practice that had been initiated on a small scale under Henri IV

Henry IV of France

Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....

. At the Gobelins, much more than tapestry

Tapestry

Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...

 was made for the furnishing of the royal palaces and the occasional ambassadorial gift: the celebrated silver furnishings for the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles

Palace of Versailles

The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....

 was produced by silversmiths working to designs by Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun , a French painter and art theorist, became the all-powerful, peerless master of 17th-century French art.-Biography:-Early life and training:...

 at the Gobelins.

In Paris, the furniture trade was divided among craft guilds with jealous regard for infringements. Menuisiers were solely occupied with carved furnishings, which included beds and all seat furniture, as they were for the carved boiseries of the interiors they were destined to occupy. Carver

Carver

-People:*Bob Carver, American physicist and audio equipment designer*Caroline Carver , thriller writer, award winner and adventurer*Dante Carver , American actor*George Washington Carver , American botanist and inventor...

s and gilder

Gilder

Gilder may refer to :* A craftsman who performs gilding* A character in the video game Skies of Arcadia; see Skies of Arcadia characters.* A program by MDY designed to assist players in World of Warcraft in collecting in game valuables.-People:...

s worked directly for them. Ébéniste

Ébéniste

Ébéniste is the French word for a cabinetmaker, whereas in French menuisier denotes a woodcarver or chairmaker. The English equivalent for "ébéniste," "ebonist," is never commonly used. Originally, an ébéniste was one who worked with ebony, a favoured luxury wood for mid-seventeenth century...

s, who drew their name from the ebony

Ebony

Ebony is a dense black wood, most commonly yielded by several species in the genus Diospyros, but ebony may also refer to other heavy, black woods from unrelated species. Ebony is dense enough to sink in water. Its fine texture, and very smooth finish when polished, make it valuable as an...

 that they worked into cabinets that were carved in shallow relief and incorporated veneers of tortoiseshell

Tortoiseshell material

Tortoiseshell or tortoise shell is a material produced mainly from the shell of the hawksbill turtle, an endangered species. It was widely used in the 1960s and 1970s in the manufacture of items such as combs, sunglasses, guitar picks and knitting needles...

 and ivory

Ivory

Ivory is a term for dentine, which constitutes the bulk of the teeth and tusks of animals, when used as a material for art or manufacturing. Ivory has been important since ancient times for making a range of items, from ivory carvings to false teeth, fans, dominoes, joint tubes, piano keys and...

, a specialty of Paris furniture in the mid-seventeenth century, retained their control over all carcase furniture that was intended to be veneered, often with elaborate marquetry

Marquetry

Marquetry is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs or pictures. The technique may be applied to case furniture or even seat furniture, to decorative small objects with smooth, veneerable surfaces or to freestanding pictorial panels...

. The bronze mounts that decorated these high-style case-pieces, from the 1660s to the abolition of guilds in the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

, was furnished, and even carried to the ébéniste's workshop by separate guilds of foundrymen.

French furniture of the Ancien Régime, often characterised by dealers and collectors by reign-names, as "Louis Quinze

Louis Quinze

The Louis XV style or Louis Quinze was a French Rococo style in the decorative arts, and, to a lesser degree, architecture.Datable to the personal reign of Louis XV , the style was characterised by supreme craftsmanship and the integration of the arts of cabinetmaking, painting, and...

 furniture", etc., can be seen as representative, even formative, manifestations of broader European styles: French Gothic furniture, of which so little has survived; French Renaissance furniture of the sixteenth century; Early Baroque furniture associated with Louis XIII, comparable to what was produced at Antwerp; sculptural and tectonic High Baroque furniture associated with Louis XIV; Rococo furniture, associated with the Régence

Régence

The Régence is the period in French history between 1715 and 1723, when King Louis XV was a minor and the land was governed by a Regent, Philippe d'Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV of France....

 and the reign of Louis XV; and Neoclassical furniture, associated with Louis XVI.

French furniture of the Revolution and the First French Empire

First French Empire

The First French Empire , also known as the Greater French Empire or Napoleonic Empire, was the empire of Napoleon I of France...

 is imbued with a more severe, self-consciously archaeological phase of Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

, which began to lose its grip on styles in the 1830s, with Gothic and Rococo revivals, leading to the eclecticism of the French Second Empire. Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

 provided one form of reaction to the battle of the historicist styles

Historicism (art)

Historicism refers to artistic styles that draw their inspiration from copying historic styles or artisans. After neo-classicism, which could itself be considered a historicist movement, the 19th century saw a new historicist phase marked by a return to a more ancient classicism, in particular in...

, and Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 marked a more rigorous break with the past. Art Deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 offered a decorative version of Modernism.

Since the Second World War, the manufacture of furniture in France, devolved from the prominence of the capital itself, has been part of the increasingly international world of industrial design

Industrial design

Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...

.

For a selection of outstanding Parisian

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 ebénistes: see Ébéniste

Ébéniste

Ébéniste is the French word for a cabinetmaker, whereas in French menuisier denotes a woodcarver or chairmaker. The English equivalent for "ébéniste," "ebonist," is never commonly used. Originally, an ébéniste was one who worked with ebony, a favoured luxury wood for mid-seventeenth century...

.

Sources

• Pierre Verlet
• Peter K. Thornton
• Francis J.B. Watson
• Salverte
• Nicolay
• Denise Ledoux-Lebard
• Nadine Neilson