Small pieces of carefully selected wood were inserted into darker wood panels to produce fanciful devices or pictures, with perspective and even tone. This intricate art resembled that of the mosaic-worker, whose more ambitious works have taken from fifteen to twenty years to execute. Some of the tesseræ in this technique are hardly larger than a pin's head. Day by day they were patiently laid on the cement to form the design. Similarly in the old intarsia days the workers did not heed time. They selected their delicate little pieces of coloured wood and proceeded to lay their panels and stalls for posterity.
The German school of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attracted considerable attention, at Nuremberg, at Augsburg, at Dresden, and at Munich. In North Germany intarsia was principally employed on smaller articles, such as cabinets, chairs, coffers, although Lübeck and Danzig furnish fine examples in the panelling of the town-halls. In South Germany, in closer touch with Italian influence, the practice was more diverse; sideboards, doors, bedsteads, panelling, friezes, and even gables to châteaus, received this ornamentation.
Augsburg and Nuremberg developed an industry and exported their marquetry. This suggests the first attempt at duplication. Black on white and white on black, male and female as they are termed in the trade, or later, in France, Boulle and counter-Boulle, were exported. The slicing of design and the manipulation of the knife, and later the saw, came into operation to fret out the pattern. In its subsequent development marquetry left the inlaying, piece by piece, and as tools became more perfect easier methods were employed. Whether André Boulle, in his atelier under Louis XIV, invented the process or whether he got it from Germany through Holland is immaterial to the present argument. His brass and tortoiseshell marquetry set a fashion to all succeeding craftsmen. He has given his name to his particular style; though it has been "defamed by every charlatan and soiled with all ignoble use" and corrupted to "Buhl," but there is no reason why Boulle should not stand, although Webster's Dictionary knows him not.
Practically, nowadays marquetry is the cutting of thin sheets of wood which have been superimposed upon each other, and when taken apart, after the desired pattern has been cut away, fit into each other to produce the desired colour effect. For instance, a sheet of walnut, dark brown, placed over a sheet of sycamore, light yellow, has a pattern pasted on it in paper. The delicate fret-saw traces this pattern and cuts through both light and dark woods. The result is that the light-wood surface is left with a perforation ready to receive the piece cut from its fellow, the dark wood, and vice versa. That is just what the marquetry-worker does. He transposes the piece of sycamore to the walnut surface and fits it in, showing a yellow design on dark brown, and similarly the walnut piece, fitted in place or the sycamore ground, shows a brown design on a yellow surface. This is only a simple outline of the process, as more than two sheets are placed together. In its intricacies it represents one of the most delicate and highly skilled crafts in connection with cabinet-making. The adept at jig-saw puzzles may draw a seemly parallel between his pastime and the patient artistry of the artist-craftsman.
The Use of Veneer and Marquetry.—In its decoration and in its form the long-case or "grandfather" clock is as Dutch as the tiles of Haarlem. Derivative as is English art, the sharp line of a new introduction is rarely so clearly defined as in the instance of the late seventeenth-century long-case clock. As a long wooden case it was itself an innovation. Being new, it was never at any previous time English, and it started its history under Dutch auspices, as in similar manner the pendulum was introduced into England by Fromanteel. There is no mistaking its origin. It comes straight from the placid canals and waterways, the prim and well-ordered farmsteads, or the richly loaded burghers' houses of the Low Countries. It has become as thoroughly English as the Keppels and the Bentincks.
LONG-CASE CLOCK.
With fine marquetry decoration.
Maker, Jas. Leicester (Drury Lane). 1710.
Height, 8 ft. 2 in. Width, 1 ft. 7½ in. Depth, 10 in.
(By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq.)
