Baroque Furniture

Baroque furniture, oh, sorry the visual puns. I can't help it. It's dad humor Baroque furniture tends to be again over-the-top and ornate and you're just going to keep hearing those three things horrible puns and Theatrical over-the-top dramatic because it really does capture what we're seeing in Baroque interior design Now first of all, most of the furniture of this period is going to be designed to be anchored to a wall So what does that mean? That means they're leaving the middle of the room open as much as possible They want the rooms to be multi-purpose So for example, it might be a study but then it can be you know Have a party hosted in the same room They wouldn't like the ideas that we have today about subdividing rooms For example with a couch or anything like that So the Baroque tends to anchor to the walls now in this case You see those chairs are not but most everything else is So it depends on the designer, but most pieces are designed that way for that reason many Baroque pieces actually have an undecorated back and the original pieces Generally have an undecorated back. It's one of the ways you can tell a reproduction from an original Baroque piece So it's something to keep in mind and from the craftsman's perspective it makes perfect sense and Oftentimes we'll see things like console tables and such They're actually going to be designed to sit against the wall and they cannot exist without the wall They're supported by it now in terms of woods We will see them turn and shift towards rosewood ebony and tortoiseshell and those have something in common They are either rare or they must be imported rosewood coming primarily from India in the East ebony coming primarily from Africa such as Guyana and Then we will see tortoiseshell where most of it is of course not coming from Europe But coming from the South Pacific and other places where they can find massive sea turtles and that sort of thing or larger tortoises in Africa and Use them for that purpose now tortoiseshell tends to be a veneer you're not building something specifically with tortoiseshell unless it's a comb Those sorts of things tend to be light and fairly Easily used they're not likely to break tortoiseshell is not very strong Ebony, of course is a very heavy wood It is a fairly strong wood and we will see something called ebonizing which I touched on in the Renaissance Which is basically blackening wood to make it look like ebony and rosewood, of course is very heavy It's not known for its grain, but it has a good color and a good resin content So rosewood furniture tends to survive and last longer than many other forms now, of course lower makers lower market makers will use things like maple and ash and other woods But those are only for the working class and maybe the lower middle class they are paying attention to the materials In terms of carving we see a lot of high relief. It's just like building facades and other things during the Baroque They're trying to create drama and this actually goes further Oftentimes the artisans the wood carvers who are working with the carpenters and joiners on these pieces will actually develop oftentimes their own guilds and see themselves as skilled as any other sculptor that you would imagine such as Michelangelo and others and when you look at pieces like that You can really see that and of course when you're carving something like this It becomes far more complex because I need to carve it in such a way that it's light enough to move after all It's a chair but heavy enough that if someone sits in it, they're not going to break it Which means I need to start thinking about engineering makes the whole thing far more complex But we see a lot of high relief or in the round arguably in the round carving in these pieces in Baroque furniture in Terms of legs. There's really three forms that we tend to see during this period. We tend to see straight or Column or columnar legs Columnar would be a leg that looks like a Doric Ionic Corinthian etc Column or straight leg as we see in our example on the left On chess or other large heavy pieces. We will often see a bracket leg Now this is a little different form than what we've seen in the past and basically it's carved out of the apron underneath So here's sort of the construction apron the part that's necessary to hold everything together And then they cut these bracket legs out to fit in the various corners It creates a much heavier leg But by cutting it out It gives it a lightness a grace and then we see Flemish scroll legs where we have that s curve That develops and moves through the form a very curvilinear form something very very common in the Baroque Stretchers now as we move into the Baroque You will notice less and less stretchers on furniture after all look around at the furniture in your home today You don't see them as often as we did in the Renaissance and earlier The reason is the construction methods are changing the materials are changing so it's less necessary But if we do see stretchers, they tend to be X form stretchers So cutting across diagonally underneath the piece Now in terms of Baroque furniture, we're going to deal a little bit with continental Baroque furniture here and of course on the continent specifically in France is often referred to as Louis the 14th style and Here I'm dealing with it primarily as French Baroque style You can break things down far more But here I want to make sure that you're aware of the large movements without hopefully getting you lost in the weeds of Louis the 14th versus Louis the 15th versus Louis the 16th you'll probably lose your head by the time you get to Louis the 16th, but we start out with boule work and this is a form of marquetry Or inlay and it involves the nearing furniture with tortoise shell Inlaid with brass or pewter. So what you're doing is you're taking a piece of tortoise shell or other material You're cutting that and inlaying it with metal and then you're inlaying that whole panel into another piece So we basically have two pieces of inlay the tortoise shell is inlaid and then the metal That's inlaid into the tortoise shell is there as well. This is going to be very elaborate very very Expensive and it tends to be mimicked very easily today by using plastics And some paints or metal foils It's actually fairly straightforward if you want to mimic this style But it is very difficult for the time The materials are rare tortoise shell and some of the metals now brass and pewter are not rare But you will see these with silver and gold which of course have their own value and the designs tend to be Arabesque as we see in our example here Which as I'm going to remind you here in France simply means Arab-like and it may have nothing to do with anything that the Islamic world would ever have created we also see or Molu, which is a gold colored alloy of copper zinc and sometimes tin now This is really really common. We don't tend to use gold We tend to as humans use things like gold leaf or we use metals that are Composites or compositions. In fact, if you use gold leaf You will be asked frequently if you're buying it whether you want 24 karat or do you want comp referring to? Compositional gold leaf which actually contains no gold and so they're doing exactly the same thing You're taking a form you're making a metal that looks gold like sometimes this is gilded more commonly It's an alloy and it's going to be cast into your shape and then applied to the surface This is primarily for decorating furniture as well as making ornaments Sometimes the ornaments that you would find in the middle of a paneled wall, especially when we get to the Rococo