French and English furniture distinctive styles and periods described and illustrated

Boulle’s furniture is exclusively de luxe, or apparat, and only harmonizes with rich surroundings. It consists almost exclusively of consoles, armoires, commodes, cabinets, tables, desks and clock cases—forms that present large surfaces for the decoration that he carried to such perfection. His designs are very heavy. Occasionally they take the curved, or bombé forms. This swelling curve is especially found in the commodes tombeaux (tomb-commodes) and commodes à panse (paunch chests).

goldsmith work (orfèvrerie)

Sir Henry Wootton gave about 1600: “Every man’s proper mansion house and home being the Theatre of his Hospitality, the seat of his self-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his own Life, the noblest of his Son’s Inheritance, a kind of Private Princedom—nay, the Possession thereof an Epitome of the whole World, may well deserve by these attributes, according to the degree of the Master, to be delightfully adorned.”