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(b Aberdeen, 1740; d Philadelphia, PA, March 5, 1795).

American cabinetmaker of Scottish birth. He trained as a cabinetmaker in Edinburgh and London. In 1763 he arrived in Philadelphia on the same boat as John Penn, the new Governor of Pennsylvania and a future client, to join Quaker friends. He opened a shop on Union Street and eventually moved to Second Street in the Society Hill area. He made stylish mahogany furniture (sold 1788; e.g. Philadelphia, PA, Cliveden Mus.; armchair, Winterthur, DE, Mus. & Gdns) for the governor’s mansion at Lansdowne, PA, and many of the most prominent families in the city owned his work, including the Mifflins, the Whartons, and the Chew family at Cliveden. The parlour suite he made for John Cadwalader carved by James Reynolds and the firm of Bernard and Jugiez in 1770–71 was among the most elaborate ever produced in the colonies (pole screen, Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.).

A Quaker and Loyalist, Affleck refused to participate in the Revolution (...

(d Paris, March 22, 1772).

French cabinetmaker of German birth. About 1749 he became Marchand Ebéniste Privilégié du Roy Suivant la Cour et Conseils de Sa Majesté. He was active during the reign of Louis XV and was the only French cabinetmaker who was equally competent in both the Louis XV and Neo-classical styles. His pieces were few but of an extremely high standard; he employed fine wood marquetry, Japanese lacquer and Boulle marquetry, as well as producing rigorous bronzes. Although he was little known to the general public of his own day, such leading dealers as Léger Bertin, Hébert, Charles Darnault, Lazare Duvaux, Poirier and Claude-François Julliot gave him commissions, and through them he was patronized by a fashionable élite. His extant works in the Louis XV style include desks fitted with porcelain plaques, a series of sumptuous marquetry commodes (e.g. c. 1755; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.) and an astonishing upright writing-table (1758...

(b Lacochère, Orne, April 29, 1764; d Paris, March 26, 1843).

French cabinetmaker and silversmith. The silver and silver-gilt produced in his workshop rivals that of his contemporaries Henri Auguste and Jean Baptiste Claude Odiot. By 1789 Biennais had established himself at 283, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, as a cabinetmaker and tabletier (a dealer in and maker of small objects). After 1797 Biennais, no doubt encouraged by the dissolution of the guild system, expanded his business to include the manufacture of silver. During the Consulate Biennais became Napoleon’s personal silversmith, although he may have provided Napoleon with silver as early as 1798, when it is said that he supplied him with a nécessaire de voyage prior to his Egyptian campaign (1798–1801) and trusted him to pay for it on his return.

Biennais produced large amounts of silver for Napoleon and his family, including, in 1804, the crown and sceptre for his coronation and a number of nécessaires of different types, remarkable for the combination of forms of varying shapes and sizes that are ingeniously accommodated in a restricted space. One (...

Norwegian architectural and furniture design partnership formed in 1922 by Gudolf Blakstad (b Gjerpen, 19 May 1893; d Oslo, 1986) and Herman Munthe-Kaas (b Christiania [now Oslo], 25 May 1890; d Oslo, 5 March 1970). Blakstad was awarded his diploma as an architect at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1916. He collaborated with Jens Dunker on the New Theatre, Oslo, from 1919 to 1929. After a preliminary training in Christiania, Munthe-Kaas finished his education at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1919.

From the beginning of their careers Blakstad and Munthe-Kaas played a leading role in Norwegian architecture. After studying in Italy in the early 1920s, they advocated Neo-classicism in architectural projects, furniture designs and writings. In 1922 they won the competition for the new Town Hall in Haugesund (1924–31), a major work of 20th-century Norwegian Neo-classicism. Above a powerfully rusticated basement, the long office wing with its regular fenestration contrasts with the higher City Council Hall, accentuated by pairs of monumental, free-standing columns. In general the effect is of robust strength and an exciting interplay of horizontals and verticals....

(b Montignac, Dordogne, Dec 16, 1771; d Poland, 1850).

French painter and designer. He came from a family of shopkeepers and tailors and he served in the Republican army during the wars of the Vendée. By 1798 he was a student of Jacques-Louis David, who provided a small apartment in the Louvre where Broc often lived. With a group of David’s students and some writers, Broc formed a dissenting sect called Primitifs, Les, Barbus (bearded ones), Méditateurs or Penseurs. Broc was typical of the Primitifs in finding inspiration in Greek vase painting and Italian 15th-century art.

The School of Apelles (1800; Paris, Louvre) was Broc’s first Salon entry and the first exhibited work by a member of the Primitifs. The picture represents Apelles speaking to his students about his unfinished allegory of Calumny. The composition derives from Raphael’s School of Athens (Rome, Vatican, Stanza Segnatura), and the picture on the easel is based on a drawing of Calumny...

(b 1750-29-09 or 1782–3; d London, May 1, 1818).

English cabinetmaker and sculptor. He seems to have acquired an early training in sculpture from his mother, who made a display of life-size waxwork figures, exhibited in and around Birmingham from 1794. By 1798 he had gained a reputation as a portrait sculptor and soon set up independently as a ‘Miniature-painter and Portrait-modeller in Rice-paste’. His brother, William Bullock, opened a ‘Cabinet of Curiosites’ in Birmingham in 1800, moving to Liverpool in 1801. Bullock joined him there and by 1804 had gone into partnership with a looking-glass maker, William Stoakes of Church Street, Liverpool. They advertised themselves as ‘Cabinet Makers, General Furnishers and Marble Workers’ and in 1805 supplied Gothic furniture designed by Bullock to Cholmondeley Castle, Ches (in situ). The following year Bullock set up on his own in Bold Street, Liverpool, selling furniture and bronze ornaments. By 1806 he had acquired the Mona Marble quarries in Anglesey and sold ‘fashionable and elegant Sculptured and Plain Chimney Pieces’ at a separate showroom in Church Street....

English family of cabinetmakers. Thomas Chippendale (Otley) probably learnt his craft in Yorkshire before establishing a cabinetmaking firm in London in the mid-18th century. His fame rests on his designs for Rococo and Neo-classical furniture. His son Thomas Chippendale (London) continued to run the family firm into the 19th century....

(b c. 1715; d ?London, Aug 1778).

English cabinetmaker and upholsterer. Little is known about him before 1751, when he formed a partnership with William Vile, but it is assumed that he was the John Cobb apprenticed in 1729 to Timothy Money (fl 1724–59), a Norwich upholsterer. In 1755 he married Sukey, a daughter of the cabinetmaker Giles Grendey, and is said to have acquired a ‘singularly haughty character’, strutting ‘in full dress of the most superb and costly kind…through his workshops giving orders to his men’, and on one occasion earning a rebuke from George III. When Vile retired in 1764, Cobb carried on in business with the assistance of his foreman, Samuel Reynolds (fl 1751–85). He made furniture to very high standards and earned a reputation for exquisite marquetry: Hester Thrale, the writer and friend of Dr Johnson, compared the inlaid floors at Sceaux, France, to ‘the most high prized Cabinet which Mr Cobb can produce to captivate the Eyes of his Customers’. Inlay in tropical woods, particularly satinwood, was an important element of Neo-classical furniture. In ...

Term used to describe the continuation in the decorative arts of the Neo-classical style (see Neo-classicism) in France between 1800 and 1805 under Napoleon Bonaparte (First Consul; 1799–1804). His Consulate was an era of renewal in the furniture, porcelain and metalwork industries in France (see France, Republic of, §VI, 4), greatly encouraged by the patronage of Napoleon, who sought a model for his position in the magnificence of ancient Rome. While little actual building took place, the period was important for such changes in interior decoration as the lavish use of draperies—begun during the 1790s—that established the Consulate and the Empire styles (for illustration see Empire style); although these terms were invented by later art historians to denote the change in political systems, in fact the styles to which they refer are virtually indistinguishable. Furniture was similar to that of the preceding Directoire style...

(b Paris, c. 1715–20; d after 1783).

French cabinetmaker and dealer. He was the most famous member of a family of cabinetmakers; his father, François Faizelot Delorme (1691–1768), and his brothers Jean-Louis Faizelot Delorme and Alexis Faizelot Delorme were all maîtres-ébénistes. Adrien became a maître-ébéniste on 22 June 1748 and was a juror of his guild from 1768 to 1770. He stamped his work delorme. He made and sold luxury furniture in the Louis XV style, decorated with japanning either in imitation of Chinese lacquer (e.g. Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) or with European decoration (e.g. Waddesdon Manor, Bucks, NT). He also carried out sumptuous floral marquetry (e.g. Paris, Petit Pal.). His most distinguished work consisted of small pieces of furniture (e.g. Paris, Louvre; London, V&A; Washington, DC, Hillwood Mus.) embellished with floral marquetry or inlays of scrolls and foliation executed in end-grain wood on a dark-veined, light-wood ground forming a chevron pattern (e.g. Lyon, Mus. B.-A.). His work in the Neo-classical style, however, failed to impress connoisseurs....

[Dürr.]

German family of sculptors and stuccoists. Johann Georg Dirr (b Weilheim, Ober-Bayern, 2 April 1723; d Mimmenhausen, nr Konstanz, 9 Oct 1779) and his brother Franz Anton Dirr (b Weilheim, 8 June 1724; d Überlingen, nr Konstanz, 15 June 1801) were sons of the sculptor Martin Dirr (1674–1733). They were taught in Weilheim by their stepfather, Franz Xaver Schmädl, whose training left its mark on their style, especially on that of Johann Georg Dirr, whose work is very sensitively executed. There is evidence that the brothers worked in Mimmenhausen as journeymen in the workshop of Feuchtmayer, Joseph Anton from 1749 and 1752 respectively. In 1753 Johann Georg Dirr moved to Stockach, but in 1756 he went back to the workshop in Mimmenhausen and in 1759 was mentioned as being in joint charge there together with Feuchtmayer. The two men collaborated on commissions in the pilgrimage church at Neubirnau (...

Neo-classical style of architectural and interior design; as Egyptomania or Egyptiennerie it reached its peak during the late 18th century and early 19th. Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (1798) coincided with emerging tastes both for monumental and for richly ornamental forms, enhanced by the literary and associational concerns of Romanticism. Unlike its Greek and Gothic counterparts, the Egyptian Revival never constituted a coherent movement with ethical or social implications. Indeed, since its earliest manifestations occurred in the later Roman Empire, the Revival itself can be seen as one in a series of sporadic waves of European taste in art and design (often linked to archaeological inquiry), acting as an exotic foil to the Classical tradition with which this taste was and remains closely involved (see fig.). On a broader plane of inquiry, the study of Egyptian art and architecture has continued to promote a keen awareness of abstraction in design and a decorative vocabulary of great sophistication. These are among the most enduring contributions of ancient Egypt to Western art and design. ...

Type of delicate, painted Neo-classical decoration, derived mainly from the shapes, motifs and colours of antique vases. It was part of the quest in Europe in the last quarter of the 18th century for a contemporary expression in interior design and the applied arts. The term is applied loosely to various schemes of decoration inspired by Classical sources, involving Renaissance Grotesque ornament, as well as themes inspired by discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii (see Pompeii, §VI) in the 18th century, or frequently a mixture of these sources. This fact serves to underline the complex antecedents of this style, which was originally based on the misidentification of imported Greek vases dug up in southern Italy and thought to have been made by ancient Etruscans (see Etruscan §VIII), a culture promoted in some quarters as having been the original fount for the whole of Classical antiquity. Indeed, the Etruscan style derived little direct artistic influence from that culture as such, except for certain potent historical associations promoted by the controversies concerning cultural debts. Initially represented by ...

(b Linz, Oct 15, 1889; d Vienna, March 27, 1957).

Austrian architect, furniture designer and teacher. He trained first in Linz and from 1909 at the Technische Hochschule, Vienna, under the Neo-classicist Karl König (1841–1915). He completed a year in Josef Hoffmann’s studio at the Wagnerschule in 1913–14, and after World War I he returned to work with Hoffmann, rising to be his senior assistant and helping with the development of the Wiener Werkstätte. In 1926 he left to work in Clemens Holzmeister’s studio, teaching with him at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Active in the Österreichischer Werkbund during the 1920s and 1930s, Fellerer built two houses (1932) for the Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna. In 1934 he was appointed Director of the Kunstgewerbeschule and succeeded Hoffmann as head of its architectural section until he was dismissed by the Nazis in 1938. From 1934 he was also in private practice with Eugen Wörle (b 1909) and won a Grand Prix at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in ...

French family of bronze-founders. Etienne Forestier (b Paris, c. 1712; d Paris, 1768), who became a master bronze-founder in 1737, supplied bronze furniture mounts to Jean-François Oeben, André-Charles Boulle and Gilles Joubert. He cast Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplessis’s models for bronzes on the Bureau du Roi by Oeben and Jean-Henri Riesener (1769; Paris, Louvre). The Forestiers feature in the accounts of the Bâtiments du Roi from 1755 until the Revolution. After Etienne’s death his widow and sons Etienne-Jean Forestier and Pierre-Auguste Forestier (b Paris, 1755; d Paris, 1835) continued the Parisian bronze-founding business from a workshop in the Rue Ste Avoie, Etienne-Jean having become a master in 1764. Their customers included Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. The Forestiers also appear frequently, particularly from 1784 to 1788, in the accounts of the Garde Meuble de la Couronne under the directorship of the sculptor Jean Hauré, regarding bronzework for King ...

(b Paris, c. 1720; d Paris, 1800).

French cabinetmaker. He was trained in the workshop of his father, François Garnier. His early work, however, was indistinguishable from that of many of his contemporaries. He became a maître-ébéniste on 31 December 1742. He was quick to incorporate the principles of the Neo-classical style, and these ideals governed his furniture during his second period of production. In 1761 he made a table based on designs by the architect Charles de Wailly, which was shown at the annual Salon at the Louvre organized by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. His furniture displayed architectural lines with uprights in the form of fluted pillars, and in general he rejected marquetry in favour of such fine veneers as ebony, mahogany or even Japanese lacquer. His bronze mounts were in the Neo-classical style and included laurel wreaths, triglyphs, lion heads and spiral ferrules. Many pieces survive, among them writing-tables (e.g. 1762–5...

(b St Ouen, nr Paris, June 7, 1737; d Paris, Dec 29, 1818).

French architect and designer. He was the son of the gardener at the royal château of Choisy-le-Roi and attended Jacques-François Blondel’s school of architecture, the Ecole des Arts, winning third place in the Prix de Rome competition of 1759. He spent five years in Rome (1761–6) on a bursary granted by Louis XV, and he made friends there with Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He returned to France via Holland and England. In 1769, at the suggestion of the King’s surgeon Germain Pichault de la Martinière, he was commissioned to design the new Ecole de Chirurgie (1771–86; now the Faculté de Médecine, Paris). The layout is in the manner of an hôtel particulier, with a court surrounded by an Ionic colonnade and closed off from the present Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine by a columnar screen. It was this feature that made a great impression on Gondoin’s contemporaries, lacking as it does the usual inflections by projecting end pavilions and central ...

Stylistic term for the first phase of French Neo-classicism. Contemporary usage was loose as regards both the objects referred to (even coffee and hair lotion were advertised as ‘à la grecque’) and their style (which might only have the faintest classicizing flavour). It is correctly applied only to those examples of French decorative arts and architecture dating from the mid-1750s to the late 1760s that are severely rectilinear, with chunky classical details, such as Vitruvian scrolls, Greek-key frets and geometrical garlands. The style was effectively inaugurated by a set of furniture, comprising a combined writing-table and cabinet (for illustration see Louis XVI style) and a clock (Chantilly, Mus. Condé), made for the Parisan financier Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully from designs (1756–8) by the painter and amateur architect Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain. The monumental and unfrivolous style of these pieces, executed in ebony-veneered oak with heavy gilt bronze mounts, was quite different from the current Rococo idiom. The Comte de Caylus, Europe’s foremost antiquary and Le Lorrain’s influential mentor, praised the furniture extravagantly. Another key role in the creation and dissemination of the ...

Term used to describe a style inspired by the architecture of Classical Greece that was popular throughout Europe and the USA in the early 19th century, especially for the design of public buildings; it was also employed for furniture and interior design. Its gradual spread coincided with and was dependent on the growth of archaeology in Greece in the 18th and 19th centuries. Such archaeologist–architects as James Stuart (known as ‘Athenian’ Stuart in his lifetime) and Nicholas Revett, William Wilkins and C. R. Cockerell in England, Jacques-Ignace Hittorff and Henri Labrouste in France and Leo von Klenze in Germany were responsible for generating a remarkably self-conscious architectural revival; Cockerell used the term ‘Greek revival’ at least as early as 1842 in his lectures delivered as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. The style was first used in mid-18th-century England for garden buildings in such houses as Hagley Hall (Hereford & Worcs) and ...

Expression of 18th-century Swedish Neo-classicism during the reign of Gustav III (reg 1771–92; see Holstein-Gottorp, House of family, §2). As a cultured man and an advocate of the European Enlightenment, the King’s patronage of the visual arts was linked with patriotic ambition and an admiration for the French courtly life at Versailles. He spent part of 1770–71 in France, where he acquired a passion for the Neo-classical style. During his reign numerous palaces and country houses were built or refurbished in the Neo-classical style, either for himself or for members of his family and court. Early Gustavian interiors (c. 1770–85) were light and elegant interpretations of the Louis XVI style, with echoes of English, German and Dutch influences. Rooms were decorated with pilasters and columns; walls were applied with rich silk damasks or rectangular panels with painted designs framed in carved, gilded linear ornament and laurel festoons. Damask, usually crimson, blue or green, was used to upholster benches, sofas and chairs. Other rooms were panelled in wood, painted light-grey, blue or pale-green; the dominant feature was a columnar faience-tiled stove, decorated with sprigged floral patterns. Klismos-style chairs upholstered in silk were very popular, as were oval-backed chairs with straight, fluted legs, and bateau-shaped sofas were common. Rooms were embellished with long, giltwood-framed mirrors, crystal chandeliers, gilt ...