Catalogue of French furniture 1640-1800 at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The French collection of French furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum is especially strong in pieces dating from 1640-1800, which were last catalogued in 1930. Amongst these are pieces by the most well-known cabinet-makers (including Boulle, Cressent, Oeben, Riesener and Roentgen), several of which have royal provenances. These all fit very well the established category of 'fine French furniture', which is exceptionally highly-valued on the art market. This catalogue of 143 pieces of veneered case furniture will fully document these pieces, bringing in-depth knowledge about them into the public domain for the first time. It will both add to the knowledge of the practices of individual workshops and extend our undertsanding of object types, such as chests of drawers, writing desks and music stands.

However, it will go further than that, by including the history of those objects which were pieced together in the nineteenth century on the art market, and acquired by the Museum in the nineteenth century as authentic seventeenth and eighteenth-century pieces. These entries are not relegated to the back of the catalogue, or given any less attention than ornate cupboards owned by Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette. They will be fully documented and analysed so that readers can see (from text and photographs) how distinctions can be made between cabinet-making work of different periods, including the practices of sevententh and eighteenth-century French workshops and later English reproduction work. These pieces have long been relegated to store, and no published record of them exists, which means that all scholarship to date has ignored them.

Each entry includes a great deal of physical evidence about the object, as follows:
Title; object type; maker; date and place of manufacture; materials; marks and labels; dimensions.
Provenance and publication history.
Physical description, describing the arrangement of materials and its construction, with a focus on alterations.
Finally, the commentary gives a full history of the piece, including an assessment of its importance, which might include its stylistic attributes, such as an advanced type of neoclassical ornament in the cast, chased and gilded brass decoration to a commode, or its place in the development of a particular form, for example, noting the first known integration of an inkwell into the drawer of a writing desk.
The catalogue entries will be supported by over 800 photographs, taken at various stages during the research, often while the objects were dismantled. They include views of the entire object and its marks, and extend to details of construction and evidence of alteration and transformation.

This catalogue project won a Getty Foundation grant of approx. $182,000, which paid for the research of the applicant, a research assistant, a conservator, and consultant reports from a clock historian, wood identification specialists, an expert in stones, and a report from the British Museum on the material composition of over twenty porcelain plaques used to decorate the exterior of some of the furniture. This proved that, contrary to the opinions expressed by several experts on Sevres porcelain, all of these plaques were in fact soft-paste, probably dating from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Most of them were cut down and re-decorated in the nineteenth century to add value to French furniture on the London art market.

The V&A will publish this volume, and volume II, on the carved and gilded furniture collection, which will be completed by another author by September 2007. Both will appear in 2009. The V&A is seeking funds to subside the large number of illustrations (over 800). £10,000 has been pledged, and the V&A will apply to grant-giving and commercial bodies for further grants.