Published to coincide with the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Chippendale, England’s most famous cabinetmaker, this issue of the Bulletin addresses the history of Chippendale works at The Met. Morrison H. Heckscher recounts the designer’s meteoric rise from rural obscurity to the heights of the London luxury trade, crediting that remarkable success to the publication of the Chippendale Director, an instructive book on furniture design and ornament. The text analyzes the Museum’s rare collection of drawings by Chippendale, revealing a gifted and highly imaginative designer who mastered what today would be called branding. Illustrating a wide selection of the Director drawings alongside furniture inspired by the Director or actually made in Chippendale’s shop, this Bulletin features works of art that attest to the museum’s century-long infatuation with drawing, prints, books, and furniture in the Chippendale style.

During the second half of the 18th century, the workshop of Abraham and David Roentgen at Neuwied on the Rhine was among Europe's most successful cabinetmaking enterprises, employing at its height nearly two hundred specialized artisans. The Roentgens' ingenious inventions combined innovative designs with intriguing mechanical devices that revolutionized traditional types of European furniture. Key to their success was the pairing of the skilled craftsman Abraham with his boldly entrepreneurial son David, whose clients included the most prominent sovereigns of Europe, among them Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Frederick William II of Prussia. In addition, the Roentgens perfected the practice of adapting prefabricated elements and elaborate trompe l'oeil marquetry panels to the specifications of their customers. Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens is the first comprehensive English-language survey of the firm in nearly fifty years, from its founding in 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s. Detailed discussions explain the intricate workings of these extraordinary pieces and are complemented by illustrations showing them in their contemporary interiors. Design drawings, portraits of the cabinetmakers and their patrons, and previously unpublished historical documents from the Roentgen estate further illuminate the work of these master craftsmen. An essential contribution to the study of European furniture, this fascinating book firmly establishes the Roentgens as the principal Continental European cabinetmakers of the ancien régime.

As the central feature of its year-long Centennial the Metropolitan Museum has mounted a spectacular exhibition of American decorative arts of the nineteenth century. Federal, Empire, Gothic, Rococo, Renaissance, Art Nouveau, Reform—the century's principal styles succeed one another in a series of lavish room settings and galleries that display the 300 prime pieces illustrated and discussed in this book. More than 200 of these objects, including furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, and metalwork, are treasures of the Museum's American Wing, some of them accessioned during the Museum's early years, a substantial number acquired only recently and never shown before. The rest of the material has been lent to the exhibition from other museums, institutions, and private collections. A show of this magnitude dealing entirely with American works of the nineteenth century is without precedent. The historical line begins with the cabinetry of New England (a superb chest of drawers of about 1796 from Salem, Massachusetts), proceeds through the sedate European-influenced styles of the Empire, takes into account the medley of revivals in the decades before the Civil War, sets forth the splendid eighties, when decorative arts became an expression of American success and optimism, and ends with the elegant simplicity of furniture by the architect brothers Charles and Henry Greene. Among the outstanding furniture makers represented are Duncan Phyfe (with an entire parlor suite), Charles-Honoré Lannuier (with a bed as elaborately ornamented as any made in America), Joseph Meeks and Sons, and the Rococo master John Henry Belter. Other craftsmen and manufacturers include the silversmiths Chaudron and Rasch, Fletcher and Gardiner, Gorham Manufacturing Company, Tiffany and Company, the Boston and Sandwich and New England Glass companies, the Tucker Porcelain Company, and the great decorating firms of LePrince and Marcotte, Herter Brothers, and Louis Tiffany's Associated Artists. Berry B. Tracy, Curator of the American Wing and organizer of the exhibition, has justly called it a "hundred-year chronology of the best of American taste." This description can equally well be applied to the present volume, one of two devoted to the exhibition. Its more than 300 illustrations (sixty-six in color), its comprehensive historical introduction (by Mr. Tracy), its authoritative discussion of the pieces (by Marilynn Johnson, Marvin D. Schwartz, and Suzanne Boorsch), and its extensive bibliography of the pieces themselves and the craftsmen who produced them make it an important addition to a still little-documented field.

This Bulletin presents new discoveries and historical documentation on the preeminent New York cabinetmaker George A. Schastey, illuminating his life and his under-appreciated body of work while providing the first in-depth analysis of the Worsham-Rockefeller house and its patron Arabella Worsham.

During the reigns of Louis XV (1723–74) and Louis XVI (1774–92) fashion and furniture merged ideals of beauty and pleasure through their forms and embellishments. With their fragile surfaces and delicate proportions, tables, chairs, and other pieces of furniture enhanced the elite's indulgence in leisurely pursuits, fostering highly complex standards of etiquette and performance. Men and women restated the splendor of the Rococo and Neoclassical interiors of the period in their opulent costumes. For the eighteenth-century libertine and femme du monde, a refined elegance and delicate voluptuousness infused their world with a mood of amorous delight. Dangerous Liaisons takes its theme from this era, when trifling in love propelled the energies of elite men and women, providing almost daily stimulating encounters, and when, as has been written, "morality lost but society gained." In Choderlos de Laclos's novel of the same name, Cécile, a young girl, is praised by her tutor in the worldly arts: "She is really delightful! She has neither character nor principles ... everything about her indicates the keenest sensations." Valmont, her seducer, notes the following morning, "Nothing could have been more amusing." Valmont has won a game in the contest of lovemaking. The beautifully photographed and handsomely reproduced images on the following pages bring these amorous adventures to life. The vignettes, staged for the widely praised exhibition "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004, feature eighteenth-century costumes in the Museum's spectacular French period rooms, The Wrightsman Galleries. The artfully composed scenes include: a woman sitting for her portrait while her husband flirts with her friend; a man being granted an audience with a woman in a peignoir who is having her hair dressed; a vendor embracing the wife of an old man, his back turned, examining a table for sale; a girl receiving more than a harp lesson from her teacher, while her oblivious chaperone reads an erotic novel; a woman giving up her garter as a memento of a very private dinner. The entertaining and knowledgeable texts set the scenes perfectly.

Following the adoption of the Federal constitution in 1788, the newly united states of America, still basically agricultural, entered upon a period of growth and expansion, and of increasing concern with manufacturing, commerce, and trade. Changes in the craft system reflected a gradually changing society, while new tastes from Europe paralleled the evolving concepts of government and of national destiny. Ideals of Grecian democracy and Roman republicanism were mirrored in neoclassical styles that took hold in architecture and the decorative arts throughout the Union. Symbol of the Union was the eagle found upon the great seal of the United States, formally adopted by Congress in 1789. With its shield-shaped body, its banner for motto of unity, and its talons clasping on one side thirteen arrows, on the other an olive branch, it was often abstracted and simplified. In small oval paterae or flamboyant large patterns, it was inlaid by early Federal cabinetmakers on the surfaces of desks, tables, and chairs made in the new styles. Each regional inlay, like the center that produced it, had its own character. One of the most important of these centers was a settlement named for the Irish title of the Englishmen who had founded the Maryland colony in the seventeenth century, the Barons Baltimore.

This beautifully produced volume is the first to survey the Metropolitan Museum's world-renowned collection of European furniture. One hundred and three superb examples from the Museum's vast holdings are featured. They originated in workshops in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, or Spain and date from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. A number of them belonged to such important historical figures as Pope Urban VIII, Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Napoleon. The selection includes chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, commodes, settees and sofas, bookcases and standing shelves, desks, fire screens, athéniennes, coffers, chests, mirrors and frames, showcases, and lighting equipment. There is also one purely decorative piece, a superb vase made for a Russian noble family who, according to one awestruck viewer, "owned all the malachite mines in the world." The makers of some of the objects are unknown, but most of the pieces can be identified by label, documentation, or style as the work of an outstanding European designer-craftsman, such as André-Charles Boulle, Thomas Chippendale, David Roentgen, or Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

The 2024 reinstallation of the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art of The Met’s American Wing elevates a pivotal moment in American furniture design between 1720 and 1770. This fresh installation encourages us t…