Veneers (thin sheets of highly polished woods of different colours) applied to furniture in ornamental patterns, frequently of fruit, flowers, and foliage. A popular technique throughout W Europe in the later 17th18th-c, it became particularly widely used in England after the accession of William and Mary in 1688. The finest examples were by French cabinetmakers of the reigns of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. Parquetry is marquetry arranged in geometrical patterns, sometimes to give an effect of perspective. It was popular in England in the second half of the 17th-c.
Marquetry is the craft of covering a structural carcass with veneer forming decorative patterns, designs or pictures. Marquetry using colored straw was a specialty of some European spa resorts from the end of the 18th century.
The simplest kind of marquetry uses only two sheets of veneer, which are temporarily glued together and cut with a fine saw, producing two contrasting panels of identical design, (in French called partie and contre-partie, "part" and "counterpart").
Marquetry as a modern craft is most commonly knife-cut: the knife used is therefore of paramount importance.
History
The technique of veneered marquetry had its inspiration in 16th century Florence (and at Naples). Marquetry elaborated upon Florentine techniques of inlaying solid marble slabs with designs formed of fitted marbles, jaspers and semi-precious stones.
Techniques of wood marquetry were developed in Antwerp and other Flemish centers of luxury cabinet-making during the early 17th century. Early masters of French marquetry were the Fleming Pierre Golle and his son-in-law, André-Charles Boulle, who founded a dynasty of royal and Parisian cabinet-makers (ébénistes) and gave his name to a technique of marquetry employing tortoiseshell and brass with pewter in arabesque or intricately foliate designs. The most famous royal French furniture veneered with marquetry are the pieces delivered by Jean Henri Riesener in the 1770s and 1780s.
Marquetry was not ordinarily a feature of furniture made outside large urban centers. At the end of the 17th Century, a new influx of French Huguenot craftsmen went to London, but marquetry in England had little appeal in the anti-French, more Chinese-inspired high-style English furniture (mis-called 'Queen Anne') after ca 1720. Cabinet-makers associated with London-made marquetry furniture, 1765-1790, include Thomas Chippendale and less familiar names, like William Linnell and his more famous son John Linnell, the French craftsman Pierre Langlois, and the firm of William Ince and John Mayhew.
Although marquetry is separate from inlay, marquetry-makers were called "inlayers" throughout the 18th century. In Paris, before 1789, makers of veneered or marquetry furniture (ébénistes) belonged to a separate guild from chair-makers and other furniture craftsmen working in solid wood (menuisiers).
At Royal Tunbridge Wells, England, souvenir "Tunbridge wares"— small boxes and the like— made from the mid-18th century onwards, were veneered with panels of minute wood mosaics, usually geometric, but which could include complicated subjects like landscapes.
Marquetry was a feature of some centers of German cabinet-making from ca 1710. The craft and artistry of David Roentgen, Neuwied, (and later at Paris as well) was unsurpassed, even in Paris, by any 18th Century marquetry craftsman.
Marquetry was not a mainstream fashion in 18th Century Italy, but the neoclassical marquetry of Giuseppe Maggiolini, made in Milan at the end of the century is notable. The most thorough and dependable 20th century accounts of marquetry, in the context of Parisian cabinet-making, are by Pierre Verlet.
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