English Furniture Of The Eighteenth Century

Donated: The Margaret A. Bailey Art Collection.

The Georgian period was one of disciplined designs and the published pattern books regulated the basic

The late Pierre Verlet, conservateur en chef du Departement des Objets d'Art at the Louvre, was the unquestioned expert on pre-Revolutionary French decorative arts. His definitive book French Furniture of the 18th Century (Les Meubles Francais du XVIIIe Siecle) has now been translated into English for the first time by Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, noted specialist in 18th century French furniture and former student of Verlet. The book contains a vast amount of information on the art of furniture in 18th century France. It examines the tools and techniques used in furniture making during that period; defines the various types of furniture developed; explores the organisation of the furniture industry, the working of the guilds and the relationships among makers, dealers, and clients; lists the outstanding makers and reproduces their marks; and discusses the market, restoration, forgeries, and the growth of public collections. Since the book was first published in 1955, previously unknown pieces of furniture have been discovered, and new documents and analyses have been taken into account in this augmented text.The book is enhanced by 16 pages of full colour and 174 black-and-white illustrations. The illustrations range broadly to allow for the juxtaposition of elegant and simple furniture and to include a variety of types, forms and decorations. This book is a valuable research tool for all curators, collectors, dealers, and art historians.

The eighteenth century has been seen as a Golden Age of design and craftsmanship. This book goes well beyond these ideas and investigates the various developments in the infrastructure of the eighteenth-century furniture world.

English furniture of the eithteenth century has never been more admired or sought after than it is today. This is largely because it possesses a simplicity, a sober elegance and a practical usefulness which make it ideal for modern houses. Such furniture owes as much to good design as to the craftsman's skill, and that is why, in this book, the Victoria and Albert Museum has made an attempt to carry out--for the first time--a systematic survey of the great mass of eighteenth-century designs which has come down to us. The Museum is in a good position to embark upon such a venture, because it possessess one of the largest collections of English furniture designs in existence, a collection which includes copies of nearly all the relevant pattern books, some of them very rare, and a considerable number of original drawings, which tend to be rarer still, because they were all too often lost or destroyed, once they had served their purpose. --back cover.