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If I had only filled my barns with Jacobean and Stuart oak and walnut, William and Mary, and Queen Ann marquetry, and Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite mahogany, instead of wheat for an unsympathetic British public, and at the end of my time at Aldington offered a few of the least interesting specimens for sale by auction, I might still have carried away a houseful of treasures which would have cost me less than nothing.
Dutch marquetry is seen in cabinets and smaller household antiques in the manufacture of which panels were applicable. There was a change in design about the year 1695, just after Mary died, the characteristic seaweed following the floral, as if the very flowers had been banished after the Queen's death.
The pantaloons or what, by courtesy, I called such, were a monument of careful and ingenious, but hopeless, patching, that should have called forth the admiration of a Florentine artist in mosaic. I have been shown in later years many table tops, ornamented in marquetry, inlaid with thousands of little bits of wood, cunningly arranged, and patiently joined together.
The shell was a common form of ornament, and all crowns and cherubs had disappeared. Inlay and marquetry came to be generously used, but there had been many cabinets of Dutch marquetry brought to England even before the time of William and Mary. Flower designs in dyed woods, shell, mother-of-pearl, and ivory were used.
People here in Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French and German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a collector's business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years' time, the Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty years, will fetch twice the price of Sevres pata tendre."
It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown and gold decoration but modern enough and walled in old tapestry. The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless leisure class.
Seats were broader at the front than at the back, and all furniture showed a real desire for comfort and convenience. Marquetry and lacquer were both in great favor, and there are wonderful examples of both reproduced, but especially lacquer. Petit-point, damask, velvet, and chintz were all used for upholstery and hangings.
Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in Christendom.
There was a boudoir, bedroom, dressing-room, and bath, all fitted up in the prettiest, daintiest manner. The ivory-tinted walls showed panels of rose-coloured brocade, ornate with gilded decorations in Empire style. The marquetry furniture and bisque ornaments carried out the scheme, and though elaborate, the rooms were most attractive and comfortable.
"Yes," she repeated, smiling, "some one who loved me." Winfield fitted a story to every object in the room. Each rug had a different history and every bit of tapestry its own tale. He conjured up an Empress who had once owned the teakwood chair, and a Marquise, with patches and powdered hair, who wrote love letters at the marquetry table.
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