My most recent blog entitled ‘Regency mainstream’ has begged a number of questions that basically boil down to ‘What’s the difference between Regency style and Empire style?’ This may spark controversy, but that they are hard to distinguish might perhaps be because they are often indistinguishable. Mind you, English joinery and French joinery are not the same, but forms, motifs, and surface decoration frequently are. And, Paris continued to be the style center, with one of the upshots of the cessation of the Wars of Napoleon that moneyed English, with demand pent up the result of nearly 20 years of intermittent hostility, flocked to Paris to buy whatever wasn’t nailed down. And enjoy the sites of what had become an imperial city. Not just the Arc de Triomphe, but the living spaces of the recently deposed Emperor and Empress were prime tourist destinations. Consequently, it is not surprising that English grandees, many of whom were made wealthy in the recent wars, then sought to emulate in their own domestic spaces an ostensibly Napoleonic aesthetic.
While direct commercial exchange may have been uncertain, intellectual exchange seems to have been more frequent. The designs of Thomas Hope published in 1807 heavily influenced those of Percier and Fontaine in their Recueil des décorations intérieures published in 1812. Ironically, this volume was then introduced into England with a popularity that at least temporarily eclipsed the influence of Hope, George Smith, and others. Well, we all know, then as now, if it is from Paris, it has to be better.
Fortune follows fashion, of course. The London merchant E H Baldock, amongst a number of others, did an extensive business in furniture that was in the French style, and Baldock most prominently had pieces made in France for the English market. The pair of boulle cabinets shown is an example. Interestingly, the Regency period found renewed interest in what became Anglicized as ‘buhl work’, and this sadly resulted in a number of earlier French pieces scavenged for their boulle and marquetry elements.