 Oh boy, full house. I see people all the way in the back. I'm Caroline Bowman, director of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. And I'm absolutely delighted to welcome all of you to the sixth lecture in the Enid and Lester Moore's Historic Design Lecture Series. Hard to believe it's the sixth lecture, isn't it? The series brings scholars of global stature to Cooper Hewitt to share the latest research on design history from the Renaissance up to the present day, and shed new light on significant works in our extraordinary collection of design objects. This important public program was established in 2011 through a gift from our dedicated trustee, Denny Moore's, and her husband, Lester. Yay. Their tremendous generosity has allowed us to bring renowned historians such as Jules Stern, Carolyn Sargensen, and Cheryl Buckley to Cooper Hewitt as part of our ongoing commitment to expand Cooper Hewitt's contributions to international design scholarship. Tonight, Rainier Barzen, senior curator of furniture at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, will speak to us about the art of marketry and the collaborations among European cabinet makers of the late 17th century to design and craft these elegant and innovative works of furniture. Cooper Hewitt holds 21 works of marketry drawings and furniture in its collection, many of which Dr. Barzen will discuss tonight, and he spent the afternoon in our drawings and prints collection, so all of his observations will be fresh and new, including a magnificent late 17th century cabinet on stand on display in our exhibition Hewitt Sisters Collect. I am absolutely thrilled that Dr. Barzen is with us tonight to share his vast knowledge of this remarkable realm of historic design. Dr. Barzen is among the world's foremost scholars of European furniture and an influential connoisseur who has identified many important pieces over the course of his distinguished career. In addition to serving as curator of the Rijksmuseum, Dr. Barzen is a visiting professor of the history of decorative arts at Leiden University and the author of numerous scholarly works in the fields of 17th and 18th century furniture and decorative arts. His recent tome, Paris 1650 to 1900, tells the story of more than 200 years of French decorative art through objects in the Rijksmuseum collection. Dr. Barzen is also a longtime friend of Cooper Hewitt. He generously arranged the lending of works from the Rijksmuseum that very rarely travel for our 2007 exhibition Pairnaise as Designer and our 2008 exhibition Rokoko, the Continuing Curve, as well as contributed a masterful essay to the exhibition's catalog. This morning, as I mentioned, Dr. Barzen was in our drawings and prints department looking at rare drawings for his upcoming exhibition dedicated to the 17th century phenomenon of the auricular style in the Netherlands and England. The exhibition will take place at the Rijksmuseum in 2017. Please join me in welcoming Rainer Barzen. Thank you very much for that very kind, overwhelming introduction. I hope I can live up to the expectations you've created. And thank you very much for inviting me to lecture here tonight in this series. I didn't know about your mockery drawings, I have to say. So that is something we're going to have to look at tomorrow. And I'm afraid I won't be able to involve you. I'm very interested to see what they are, mockery drawings, that must be a rarity. But what we're going to focus on tonight is this cabinet, which I've long known, which is in your collection, and I've long known it. In fact, I go back here at the museum a bit further because I worked together with Jervis Jackson stops on the exhibition on Quartz and Colonies, which is in 1989, so you were probably not yet born. But... And so, quite excitedly, the people of David McFadden said, well, we've got this cabinet, we think it's Dutch and it's this cabinet. And it's slightly the bail of any Dutch furniture historian. When something has floral mockery, flowers, everybody says, oh, it's Dutch. You must come and see it. It's a Dutch piece of furniture. I used to work at the Victorian Albert Museum for a number of years and went to see a lot of great English houses. And almost inevitably, the owner would say, oh, oh, you're from Holland, that's wonderful. We've got this great piece of furniture, which, in fact, William III gave to one of our ancestors. And I sort of knew you've got this sinking feeling and most of the time it was something like this, which is a very curious phenomenon in the history of furniture, because there is a vast quantity of, and in fact, yesterday somebody here in the audience showed me a comparable piece that is in a collection of an institution in what, or I think of a club here in New York. And everybody always thinks this is 17th century Dutch floral mockery. But in fact, what happened is that Holland in the 17th and 18th century was the richest country in the world because of our tremendous trade in the 17th century. But it was a wealth that was already at that time quite evenly distributed, unusually evenly distributed in European terms. In most European countries there would be a court and then agrarian sort of population. Whereas Holland being a tiny country really had great trading cities very early on. So there was a very wide population of fairly wealthy people who could afford rather good furniture. And so there is a massive amount of good plain Dutch veneered furniture which in the 19th century got exported to a very large extent to England because the English were then furnishing their houses, beginning to furnish their houses with antiques and dealers came over to Holland and bought it at great vast quantities of this furniture which was fairly plain and obviously thought to be too plain by many collectors. And a fashion came into existence to inlay earlier pieces of furniture with so-called old mockery. And this is an example of that. There are many, many, many examples. This is presumably a late 17th century piece of furniture which would have been plain and was then inlaid at a later moment. We don't know when that fashion started. I think quite early on, I think probably in the 1840s or something with 17th century looking furniture. In fact, spoiling the piece of furniture but making it somewhat more lavish. This is another example. You actually see that this is a later piece of furniture, sort of late 18th century with completely incongruous 17th century looking marketry inlaid. This became so fashionable rather oddly that a lot of new pieces then began to be made in England. I'm not sure whether it was happening in Holland as well. Edwards and Roberts were a vast firm in London who were doing this, so you often find pieces like it's stand by Edwards and Roberts. And it's an extraordinary phenomenon which as the pieces aren't particularly attractive, nobody's really worked on, but it should actually. It is in the history of taste is quite something. Now, this morning, Sarah Coffin and I were looking at the cabinet here upstairs and this is not a good photograph. This is a photograph we have to take literally this morning with a telephone practically but this is part of the stretcher of the cabinet here in the museum. And here you actually see, we will see later on the upper register, on the doors and the drawers of the cabinet, the marketry is of very good quality but as was usual in the 17th century and in the 18th century to some extent as well. There where the eye was drawn to, the marketry was of the highest quality and then on legs or on portions that wouldn't be so visible. The marketry was less good, there was less money spent, there was less time spent, the materials were less fine. There was always a gradation within a piece of furniture except for perhaps a very, very grand thing. And this interesting marketry, which is not particularly distinguished whereas the cabinet itself has very good marketry, this is the type of, if you look at the style for instance, here, let me see if I can show you that, this kind of endlessly repeated little pattern sort of derives from this kind, this is slightly finer, derives from this kind of 17th century prototype. As I say, we don't exactly know when this came into fashion but I think certainly by 1850, it had become quite an established type of marketry furniture and what everybody called Dutch marketry. This is a picture by Millet of 1872 of three fashionable sisters in London with antique, surrounded by antique furniture, antique and exotic furniture. And here you see a sort of a car table of a mid-18th century type decorated with this 17th century type marketry and well, this is what I'm always being shown as Dutch marketry furniture. In fact, here is a detail of the cabinet upstairs. Upstairs, yes, for example. We now agree that this is an English piece of furniture. That is based on a number of details, that sort of connoisseurship details that we know. I'm not telling you anything new, it's labeled English in the galleries. This convex upper drawer, the beaded moldings around the drawers, the type of mounts, although Saracoff and I were looking, this is clearly a later mount and it has undergone certain changes. So you don't always know that you're actually looking at the original. But a lot, there are many features in this piece of furniture that clearly mark it out as a late 17th century English piece of furniture. This is another bad photograph, which again we took this morning because I was interested to see there was no photograph on the website or available to see what was behind the little door. And again, this is a type of simpler marketry decoration, which you would get when you get inside the cabinet. The decoration becomes slightly less lavish. And although sort of close to what happens in Holland, this is again something that is quite clearly distinguished as an English feature. Now from a design point of view, this is not a good photograph, you may remember the configuration of the stand with the six legs, which look rather odd and are difficult to arrange. Well, here is a slightly more conventional type, something that people will recognize more easily as English is seaweed marketry piece of furniture, but with the same problem about the stand. The four legs, the four front legs are forward, are directed forward, and then these are done, we will see another image of the Kuba Huey cabinet-dater on. These are put a perpendicular, which is actually, it's one way of resolving it. We have a cabinet like this at the Rijkshusen, where we put all the legs at angles, and that doesn't actually seem to be one successful way of arranging them. You'd think that there would be signs, clear signs in the furniture itself of how to arrange them, but that actually is not the case. This is a more typically English piece of furniture, and there are comparable pieces in the Royal Collection or at Chatsworth, where through archival evidence, it's known that they may have been made by Gerrit Jensen, who is the best known late 17th century English furniture maker, who is of Dutch descent. And so, Dutch, there is a reason for attributing, as we will find out through the talk. There is a reason to attributing floral marketry to the Dutch, but the story is much more complicated than, oh, it's a tulip, it has to be Dutch. In fact, when we look for sources for floral marketry in Holland in the earlier 17th century, they are very difficult to find. I will show you during this talk that there is reason to believe that the Dutch were indeed instrumental in spreading floral marketry throughout Europe, but we miss a phase of Dutch floral marketry that was made in Holland first, so then the specialization was spread out. This is a much earlier cupboard, done probably around 1637, by Hermann Dahmer, who was a German, as the Germans are the furniture makers of Europe. You will very often find wherever you are, whether you're in Florence or in Paris or less so in England, but or in Amsterdam or in The Hague, the finest cabinet makers we often turn out to be of German descent, and the Germans traveled all over Europe. German is full of words. I mean, that seems a simple explanation, but there must be some reason why the Germans somehow are often distinguished as the greatest, technically speaking, the greatest cabinet makers, and then they move to Paris or they move to Amsterdam, and they assimilate the style. We're talking about design here. It's design history, and it's a very complex story. And I think what I'm going to try and show, talking about floral marketry throughout the 17th century, are we looking at designer-less design? I mean, this is not the sort of, it is not the sort of craft. This is not a sort of development where you can actually point at a drawing, as you can in your wonderful collection of design drawings, and say, look, this architect or this artist. Imagined or invented this type of object, this form, well, this technique. You know, it is something that seems to be, there seem to be various layers. There are the layers of people inventing forms, people drawing forms, but just as strong is a tradition in craftsmanship. And craftsmanship that evolves and that is transmitted by traveling people, by workshop practice, which is a much more complex situation than the easy assumption of later periods, of a designer shaping something which then gets executed by people who follow the instructions given in a drawing or in a plan. So a German coming to Amsterdam and introducing a new art, really, the art of what we call Eberhardtwerke, Ebeneerwerke, Ebeneest in French. Because from the early 17th century onwards, exotic woods were imported in quantities to Europe by the Dutch primarily through the East Indies Company. I'm telling you something which most of you obviously know very well. The furniture which from the Middle Ages onwards would have been made in one wood, either in oak or in a simpler wood, is now constructed of a wood and then the wood is hidden by applying another more costly wood, by veneering the core wood with a more costly wood, Ebeneer very often, Ebeneer, typically, because that was the most remarkable new wood, this black shiny wood, which was like a great innovation brought to a continent used to oak for many, many centuries. So it was a startling new art and the actual craft was called, after the wood, Ebeneest, people, traditions coming together in this piece which are not designed traditions merely, they are traditions of use, they are traditions of symbolism and well this is in a way my point in this entire lecture that design is perhaps too reductive a phrase to describe the kind of, well the process by which these innovations and by which the kind of furniture we're talking about comes into being. Thanks, I'm not welcome. Here you see the insight of the little flap and in fact this is properly called marquetry. Here we are looking at a mosaic made up from different materials from Ebeneest, various woods, ivory and mother of pearl in many, many colors. The shell of the mother of pearl, where the shell that mother of pearl comes from, where it's dirtier, it tends to take on more colors, pink, green, blue, et cetera. And although there is some artificial coloring here, most of it is actually in the nature of the shell itself. And this is in a way a first phase of what you might call floral marquetry. Herman Dom, he's next or he's down the road. He was painted by Rembrandt and this is his portrait which is at the Metropolitan Museum which is an incredible rare occurrence for Rembrandt to paint a craftsman and his wife who is now at the Hermitage. They are the only couple of craftspeople known to have been portrayed by Rembrandt. And although Rembrandt scholars tend to say, look, they're very, she's quite plainly dressed and he clearly looks like, he doesn't look like a grand person. But they completely missed the point because in fact, what is very extraordinary and very innovative that in 1640 when Rembrandt was at the height of his power, the height of his fame, extremely expensive, there is this romantic story of Rembrandt being very poor and not having enough money and then of course there was a story in the 19th century that Dommer made his frames and he couldn't pay his bills so in order to do that he painted his portrait. Well, none of that because in 1640 Rembrandt was very, very rich. He's a great collector and was highly demanded by everybody and Herman Dommer clearly was in a position. He was one of these, he had invented a new art. He was on the level of Rembrandt, like some silversmith at that same point. Rembrandt didn't regard a lesser painter. We have grown accustomed now to seeing painting as a very separate art form and a secondary painter like John Fongori or somebody like who paints pretty landscapes but Rembrandt would take no notice of somebody like that. He'd think, well, you better come and take some lessons with me whereas there were silversmiths or furniture makers, somebody like Herman Dommer who was really introducing a new art to Europe. Rembrandt, I'm not making this up. We know from many records. He had a very, very high regard for artists of that calibre who were working in a different medium from him. So this is a very remarkable early instance of furniture makers being portrayed, in fact, by the greatest artists living and working in the city where they were active. To continue the down the road theme, this is a cabinet attributed to Dommer, which the Metropolitan recently, but after we discovered that all these furniture was made by Dommer, it's not something we've known for a very, very long time. The interest grew larger and of course it was interesting for the Metropolitan who have the portrait to try and acquire a piece of furniture by him. Now this is more typically even than the cupboard I was showing you. This is actually coming from an earlier tradition more strongly because if you imagine the doors shut, you're looking at an undistinguished black cabinet that doesn't tell you anything about the surprises that are inside. That's very much a sort of renaissance or if you will, mannerist way of thinking. The surprises come, the knowledge of the piece comes as you slowly discover it. As you open it up, as you open the drawers which may contain works of art, you need to make a voyage of discovery to understand the actual worth of the piece of furniture and in some very complex pieces, the descriptions of the contents and what they were meant to teach you. Here a slightly later piece by Dirk van Rijsweck who was another distinguished artist in Amsterdam who inlaid stone panels, panels of black stone with again this kind of marquetry of mother of pearl which again were perceived as wonders by the public of the time. Van Rijsweck never sold this tabletop which is huge and must have cost a fortune to produce so these were not, Dormer in fact also kept that great cupboard I showed you in his shop, he never sold it and it descended in his family until 1738 and this piece again was mentioned as a wonder by guides of Amsterdam and when the Grand Duke of Tuscany came to Amsterdam he made a point to go and see Dirk van Rijsweck and see this tabletop and Joost van den Wondel who is our greatest poet at that time wrote a poem on it comparing it favorably to painting because he says this is nature painting with the materials of nature itself and it cannot perish. It's a kind of painting that cannot perish like the colors that oil paint or everything they will be different in 100 years time or in 200 years time but this is like a kind of permanent painting and he then compares the artist to God himself who uses the materials given by the creation and puts himself in the shoes, so to speak of the creator to inhomage actually to God and the world he has created inhomage makes something trying to make the most of the materials that can be found in the world. Of course materials but that's a very, that's a different story, I'm not going to go into materials but they're distinguished. Ebéniste, I was telling you about Ebénis workers, Ebéniste in Paris, very often again not Frenchmen the first generation, the first two generations very often either Dutch or again German also work but here you have Ebénis proper. Now there is a lot of decoration on the outside and yet this piece will only really tell you of its secrets when you open it up. Very typically French is that the piece as a whole is conceived as a piece of architecture so the cabinet and its stand are and here we are, here we are approaching design they are conceived as a piece of architecture and there's a famous drawing in Oxford which shows a comparable cabinet. So here yes there must have been an architect perhaps involved in evolving this type of furniture but then the craftsmen take over and although this is already quite in a way a baroque piece of furniture because you know if you see this shut in a palace or in a house that you visit you're very impressed and there's a lot for you to look at there's the beautiful proportion of the pieces as a whole there's the design so to speak then there's the execution with great many carved stories and carved ornaments so you can enjoy it for a long time like you could a painting hanging on the wall discuss it and marvel at it but then if you knew the owner or if the owner really wants to distinguish you he comes with his key and he opens it up and there are various layers so it's a much more private work of art that's why the decorative arts have a hard time in a way in museums because a picture on the wall when you're standing in front of it your relationship with the work of art is more or less the same as it would have been in the time it was made whereas with the decorative arts they're always meant to be handled, turned around regarded under various lights which is why it's so good that there are places like the Cooper Hewitt Museum to take the trouble, to draw people's attention to these works of art that in a way need more explanation but then I think often are much more rewarding so here still in this great piece that is already part of a panacea architecture in that sense like the Dorma cabinet it's a hybrid piece of furniture because it's an art cabinet at the same time and you actually have to open it up to admire its intricacies and then marquetry, that new art which is not visible on the outside is visible inside this may actually have been made by a Dutchman by Pierre Gauil, Peter Gauil who went to Paris and became a famous craftsman there and this very extraordinary attenuated style rather akin to the auricular style which you mentioned that we're preparing an exhibition on is also displayed on the outside of this piece of furniture which may also be by whole or maybe by somebody else and here a big change taking place all of the sudden what you see is what you get the piece of furniture and that's a very essentially baroque feature the piece of furniture is made and this is actually rather a private piece you will see other pieces where it's more strongly the case is made to be part of an interior that overwhelms you when you come in that is an expression of the power of the majesty of the wealth of the position of the person you're visiting and you're not to have the time to open it up you don't get somebody who privately shows you what's inside you're not penetrating into secret after secret after secret suddenly the furniture is much more conceived well it's not that sudden but it's going on throughout the 17th century as part of a grand interior as one of the arts that contribute together with architecture, sculpture, painting to create a tout ensemble gassamd kunstwerk that's a slightly anachronistic use of the term but which really dominates all of 18th century art to create spaces that with all the elements in them overwhelm you make an impression whether it's a church or a palace interior that immediately like a theater overwhelm the visitor and it's like a humble work of art I mean these marquetry pieces are very much part of that this is a piece very close to the one we saw before in style but now again made in Holland, surprisingly when we bought this not so long ago for the right to be even at first I thought it must have been made in Paris although it's very clearly made for a Dutch patron for Amalia van Soms who was the wife when at the time the cabinet was made she was the widow of stat holder Frederick Henry and she lived as a widow at Palais-Nord-Enger which is now the working palace of our king and here as a widow she held court it's a complicated story but her son died quite early and then the state general in Holland said we won't have another stat holder so for a while we didn't have a stat holder although Amalia van Soms who was still there had a grandson and she completely devoted all her energy to creating a situation where that grandson would be stat holder again which in fact happened 22 years after her son died but this is a piece if you open it up it has her monogram and so it's a sort of piece that well this is Baroque in a complicated way again a transitional thing and then we found a poem actually where this piece is described in great detail and the symbolism of the doors is explained I very briefly tell you about it but this is actually the orange tree that these are small oranges this is a tree of orange which will triumph it's now contained by its enemies but in fact there are already breaks and the enemies the snake and the monster are destroying each other and so orange will be triumphant and here the pelican in its party the pelican open sort of stabbing its own breast in order to feed its young with its blood an image of Christ but also an image of a good leader so there's a whole poem to explain the symbolism of this piece of furniture which would like a rebus because Amalia van Soms couldn't actually very proudly proclaim what she was about to what she was hoping to achieve it was politically rather tricky but actually that's not what I want to tell you about really the poem also says that the piece was made in The Hague by Dutchman who looked after Amalia's palaces for her well it's so French looking he must have come back the day before from Paris but of course that happened all the time there was constant communication between the countries and now here as the symbolism is so complicated we are looking at a design it's probably done by Peter Post the main architect for Amalia van Soms because it's such a complex story that it's not to be imagined that a cabinet maker could himself evolve a pattern of such complexity perhaps he could evolve a pattern of such ornamental complexity but not of such symbolic complexity so again various strands coming together back to France and this is Pierre Gaule again this Dutchman who was born in Bergen went to work with his well later became his father-in-law a Dutchman who had a cabinet making shop in Paris which was called Alaville d'Amsterdam in the city of Amsterdam so at that time it was still a good thing an advertisement to say in Paris I'm from Amsterdam about 50 years later the French had completely conquered the world of detective arts and the Dutch cabinet makers then started to call their shops in the commode of Paris but at this time it was still one knew that the actual craftsmanship came from Holland and Pierre Gaule went to Paris early on becomes Ibn Isdourois of the young Louis XIV but we don't actually know what he was doing in the early 1650s this is a piece he made for the brother of the king on an ivory ground very like that piece I showed you before with ivory and of mother of pearl and look here we've got floral marquetry and we think well there is reason to believe Pierre Gaule made things in the 1650s for Cardinal Mazarin the minister of Louis XIV and they are certainly the earliest mentions of floral marquetry furniture and it's this in Paris and it's this sort of mystery that here we see the piece with the door open but again you see that baroque it's a rather modest piece of furniture but incredibly elegant but you see that what is inside okay there is something inside but it's not the essence the essence is outside and actually you might be slightly disappointed opening this up oh no more ivory we're looking at ebony now so it's the outside that is the important feature that's that very baroque element and here another cabinet which is a direct museum certainly also by Gaule probably slightly earlier back to 1655 here is an ivory veneered cabinet made in Augsburg which is set with which is also in the direct museum of the 1660s and it's set with panels of Pietradura panels composed of semi-precious stones which were made in Florence they were a specialty of the Florentine workshops the Grand Euclid workshops I'm showing you a detail here which excelled in choosing in choosing stone in such a way that the actual pattern of the flowers was suggested by the propensity of the stone so this kind of shadowing none of that is added all of that is chosen from the stone itself and this is probably the actual source for Gaule's well let's go back Gaule's floral marketry because really he is using wood as a mosaic of stones probably the actual so again another strand probably the actual inspiration we know Mazarin had a lot of Pietradura furniture Mazarin was Italian himself so the actual inspiration may have come from not so much from Holland but from these Italian examples and down the road a wonderful table by Gaule where one sees what the French do at this point they somehow define they make the definitive version of whatever you're talking about whether you're talking about a table whether you're talking about a cabinet whether you're talking about a piece of silver this is this extraordinary revolution under Louis XIV that the French suddenly absorbing from Holland from Germany, from Italy, from everywhere craftsmen, types of craftsmanship elements of design but they refine it and they come up with solutions that somehow are then perceived by everybody as classical and copied all over Europe and that's something that's really going to go on for about 150 years until the end of the 18th century here at the top again you can see how close this is in a way to Pietradura work this could almost be executed in various hard stones now we see that inspiration comes from Italy to France but curiously the person, Floral Marketry, is also done in Florence from the 1660s onwards this is a cabinet in New Fizzi and this is a tabletop by the same end again by a Dutchman Leonardo van der Vinne so we've got Leonardo van der Vinne going to Florence we've got Peter Gaule going to Paris and we've got Gerrit Jensen I mentioned him before in connection with the seaweed marketry cabinet going to London in the 1660s, 1670s and they introduced Floral Marketry all over Europe this is a piece, this is a table at Ham House a famous house outside London which was between 1672 and 1683 completely redone for the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale and although a huge amount of work has been done on that house we recently did a new book on it and I wrote on the furniture and it's now, I think we can we have more access to the archives although it is surprising because they have been looked at before but if you look at them carefully there's absolutely no doubt there's only one person who's called a cabinet maker which is an Ebennist which is Ebenhardt Werker so somebody making veneered furniture and getting sums like 100 pounds or 200 pounds whereas the joiners get four pounds, five, whatever there is absolutely no doubt that all the marketry furniture made in the 1670s for Ham House is the earliest recorded work by Gerr Jensen here is a tabletop now it's okay but if you compare it to gold it's actually quite plain and quite simple and we're slowly approaching the Cooper Hewitt cabinet you think has he completely forgotten about it but I'm trying to work up into that but if you look at this funny figure here it's quite alive it's very well done it's very effective but it doesn't have the same classic quality of the furniture made in France at the time here another table, a slightly planer one which must also be by Jensen in its historic setting of course that is rather wonderful that's very wonderful at Ham House that you actually see the pieces where they were intended to be and Sarah, look I mean we do have these cushions because Sarah Coffin and I were looking at the cabinet upstairs and wondering what possibly could have been added and what could have been redone but in fact now looking at this one here we were slightly doubtful about those little blocks on the cabinet upstairs but here they are on the Jensen table and a Jensen mirror also at Ham House and even a pair of bellows inlaid with floral marquetry doubtless by him but as I said the quality impulse comes from France by this time so the next step in refinement of floral marquetry again comes from France in the work of André Charles Boulle the great successor to Pierre Gaulle the greatest furniture maker perhaps who ever lived the most famous one certainly the one whose name has never gone out of fashion and his real contribution lies in different fields in the integration of gilt bronze and marquetry furniture on gilt bronze mounts and the invention of many new forms this is quite an early piece by him a great armoire which is now in the Louvre and you see the floral marquetry obtains a completely new level of quality it's like painting in wood in this case on a base of tortoise shell but using the woods in a very painterly very free manner that had not been had not been matched by anybody before and this kind of well there's actually quite a closeness if you look at these flowers here to the Cooper Hewitt cabinet and also to Dutch floral marquetry that we're now beginning to recognize this is a cabinet by the best known maker of the late 17th century of floral marquetry furniture in Amsterdam called Jom van Mekere a Dutchman totally Dutch background Dutch type of furniture very little adornment no gilt bronze mounts the way you did see them on the French piece but the actual floral marquetry the actual idea even of a vase of flowers on the side of a table and the way it's depicted very realistically with this great abundance of different flowers is clearly inspired by France is clearly inspired by the model of André Charboul possibly through engravings by somebody like Manoyer but not necessarily again craftsmanship, again atelier furniture makers traveling from one country to another may have played a bigger role than this actual design that you can point at as a design that makes it so easy it's in the libraries so if you find it somewhere you can say, oh look, this is Manoyer it's probably after him but it's much more they're much more part of a larger movement that is expressed in various media I think at the same time because look at this panel by Dirk van Rijswijk dated 1654 which is in Dresden and now in the exhibition in Amsterdam it's his largest panel and it's very like van Mekeren door so I think people were thinking the same kind of thing at the same time in various media here another cabinet of another group probably also by an Amsterdam maker we think not van Mekeren there were quite a lot of furniture makers we know concentrating on floral marketry furniture and this is actually very similar in its detailing to the cabinet here at Cooper Hewitt in fact a restorer was finding flowers on your cabinet that he finds in exactly the same form on cabinets that are by this Dutch maker now that may mean that they simply send flowers across the channel we know that that happened later on we know that people sent marketry to another country or somebody in Paris sent marketry to his brother in Marseille who was making marketry furniture van Mekeren we discovered in 1684 worked for a year in London it's a very international moment and what we haven't found and that's in a way a sort of mystery is here the side of the cabinet at the Rijksmuseum by this maker whose name we don't know but who is close, very close to what you find on the Cooper Hewitt cabinet here is a door of your cabinet it's almost as if you're looking at the same man now of course what the English do when something is very high quality they say immigrant craftsmen because they feel we can't have done that ourselves it's either a Huguenot or before that it must be a Dutchman well we don't know it may well be that there was an Englishman who came and trained in Holland William and Mary were joined King and well after 1689 they were joined King and Queen of England and Statholder and the wife of the Statholder in Holland we know that they had craftsmen traveling from London to the Hague and Amsterdam all the time but what is interesting is that this is clearly higher quality than the marketry that we find on Gerrit Jensen furniture on this identifiable group of English floor marketry furniture from this most famous maker and here we are I think one generation on I would date this cabinet around 1700 we've done a lot of dendrochronology on which is dating the furniture by the structure of the oak on the marketry furniture in Holland and the cabinet with us that is this one here dates from between 1690 and 1775 you can date it on the felling of the wood so I think your cabinet, the cabinet here is probably that same sort of moment and here is I think the in its side we're really very, very like the side of that Amsterdam cabinet with us here the drawers again and as I say some of these flowers are found in identical pattern you can take a drawing, put the drawing on tracing paper, put the drawing on a flower on a Dutch piece of furniture and it's the identical one but I think flowers were sent across the channel so again here we're not talking about design here we're talking about the organization of craft in a way, the organization of trade this is another cabinet on a Dutch stand curiously which doesn't actually belong which was recently restored in Holland clearly by the same man look it's very, very similar so I think we're actually looking and Sarah Coffin knows of another example in Copenhagen or Oslo which is again clearly by the same man so we're looking at an important English workshop sorry this is not a good slide but this is this piece that was being restored in Amsterdam recently and of course his idea he takes design no he really imitates Japanese lack of cabinets the idea of doors opening to an interior which we don't have in Holland in that way to an interior filled with drawers comes to complicate matters from Japan the shape in a way comes from Japan the technique comes from Holland but probably the man executing it may well be an Englishman here a design for a cabinet of that same moment by Jean Le Porte in Paris and I think you'll probably agree that what we were looking at that kind of furniture and this is my last slide you'll be happy to hear and here you see that very funny arrangement of the leg you see it very clearly those back legs I don't think this can be the right arrangement I don't know how it would have been but this is this is not satisfactory somehow and but as you can see it's a very different thing from an architecture you can see piece of furniture thought in one go invented in one go by a designer working on paper and that's what's so great about your collection here you can confront these designs on paper with what then actually comes out in practice which I think I hope well I hope to raise a few questions I think is the result of a very complicated history involving many countries, many crafts and a lot of inspiration from many sides thank you very much so I think we're going to take a few questions if anyone had any before you start speaking let me turn down the volume just to show there are Dutch marketary cabinets that have panels of glass in them so that porcelain can be displayed how do they fit in I believe these are earlier but can you tell us something about how they fit in I'm afraid that on the whole they would fit in with the story I started off with with the story of well A, everybody wanted a porcelain cabinet a display cabinet which is a rare form in the 18th century in Holland so what you get often is that cabinets have their doors changed in order to have glass in them I don't think what I know of one marketary what we call porcelain cast glass cabinet to show China of the 1760s which is a very exceptional silver mounted piece but I think the ones we normally see are part of that 19th century story of either an 18th century existing piece enriched with floral marketry or something made in the 19th century and there are many about so you may want to have seen one of those thank you very much I just had a quick question we see a lot of these cabinets within the domestic sphere especially within Holland and in Paris and in France just had a question about how much did royal patronage also play into this cabinet making and in bringing these craftspeople to the Parisian area well royal patronage plays a role certainly I mean Pierre Gault worked for Louis XIV in Holland marketry furniture doesn't seem we find very little marketry furniture at the court of Stathoda William III he has gilded pieces mainly and so by that time you begin to get a sense that marketry furniture is possibly not really royal so much Louis XIV had later on I mean Louis XIV lives forever so it's confusing to talk about Louis XIV style because 1660 is a very different moment from 1715 when he dies but later on Louis XIV furnishes Versailles essentially with silver furniture which he then has to melt down and replaces with gilded wooden furniture so veneered wooden furniture is a slightly lesser layer has a slightly different status and it's actually not often not really royal furniture it does become that later on I mean Louis XV obviously and the Réjean even with Crescent they have marketry furniture but marketry furniture royal marketry furniture at the time of Louis XIV is boule furniture which is not wooden furniture but tortoise shell and brass in there so I think in the hierarchy of materials wood is clearly something fairly modest so the early history and as you see the piece made for the brother of the king has an ivory ground so they are in that early phase still attuned to a sort of to a Schatzkammer attitude of wanting to have really costly materials so again it's a difficult question I think certainly the early goal furniture was made for Cardinal Mazarin and is made for Louis XIV but as you see there are modest pieces there are small modest pieces which may play a role in an intimate cabinet room but the great palace interiors marketry furniture doesn't very much play a role and you talk about the legs perhaps not sure how some of them were intended to be situated were they taken apart early on and were parts of some of the furniture like this one here intended to be taken apart in pieces to be moved to a different house or up and down stairways well I don't think they would I mean they don't come apart that easily that you know that they were actually intended to be taken apart in order to move them but the way the way the legs are attached doesn't actually there's no fixed manner in which the leg will fit because it has a sort of screw a screw with which it or a peg with which it fits into the superstructure and into the stretcher so you can actually turn it you can turn it there is no actual indication how it should be assembled and of course everything always gets restored I mean Serakoff and I were looking at this this morning the big drawer of this cabinet was in the 19th century refigured to become a writing desk and probably at that time it was raised slightly the ball feet may have been replaced at that time we were looking at these we weren't sure about them but I'm looking at the table just now I mean that does seem to be the way they were constructed but these ball feet certainly are later so it may have been raised slightly and now of course it's standing on casters which it wouldn't normally and obviously and but it sort of means you move them about and when at the back of these now there's a sort of raised this is going into a lot of detail but there's a raised element which we conclude it has to be later and was probably put into protected when it was being wheeled about you know once you have something on casters it sort of it becomes more movable but it's a very odd and slightly awkward shape and there is no satisfactory way to arrange these legs which is very odd so I think we just have time for one more question thank you very much the museum library has a copy of a book by Jan Christian SEP with hand colored wood samples from 1753 and then it shows wood from all over the world colonies and exploration and I'm wondering at this period in the late 17th century were these mostly native woods European native woods or were they coming from all over the world they were coming from all over the world but for instance with Vamaika and I haven't investigated this piece of furniture carefully but usually the vast majority of wood used for this slightly later marketry furniture late 17th century marketry furniture is indigenous, is European, is not they don't use that much exotic woods that many exotic woods surprisingly in a way but and they of course they color them they are artificially colored to get a more naturalistic effect