Allusion has been made to the furniture of Boulle. It began to be made somewhere about 1660, and was perhaps the earliest start taken in the more modern manufacture of sumptuous furniture. I have already called it a great advance and improvement, rather than an absolutely new invention, for pieces are found of a date too early to have been the actual work of Boulle. When the tortoiseshell is dark and rich in hue, the brass of a good golden yellow, and the designs carefully drawn, Boulle work seems to equal in splendour, though not in preciousness, the gold and silver furniture of the ancients, and the inlaid work of agates, crystals, amethysts, &c., with mounts of ivory and silver made in Florence in the sixteenth century.
Boulle work is made occasionally by French and other foreign houses, and by Wertheimer of Bond street, but it is costly, and the rich relieved portions, such as the hinge and lock mounts, the salient medallions, masks, &c., set in central points of the composition, are either copies or imitations of old work. They lack the freshness, vigour, and spirit of the old French metallurgy.
A spurious kind of Boulle is made with a composition in place of the tortoiseshell.
Parquet floors are made by Messrs. Howard as follows: Slices of oak, varied sometimes with mahogany, walnut, and imitation ebony, are laid out and put together on a board. If rings, circles or other figures are introduced, these portions, patterns, and cavities as well as angular pieces are cut in the machine. The thickness of these pieces is a quarter of an inch. They are then laid on three thicknesses of pine, the grain of each thickness being laid crosswise to the one below, so as to keep the wood above from warping and opening. These are glued together, and kept for twenty-four hours under an hydraulic press. It is, in fact, coarse marquetry, and the whole is laid down over a rough deal floor. Messrs. Howard also glue up their quarter inch hardwoods without a pine backing, and lay them down with glue and fine brads on old deal floors, a less expensive method, and which can be adopted without raising the level of an old floor.
It is remarkable that English cabinet makers should so rarely make these floors, or architects lay them down in rooms of modern houses. The French, Germans of all states, Swiss, Belgians, in short most continental nations have these floors, and Swiss and Belgian flooring is imported into England. That of the Belgian joiners is in large pieces four feet or so square, of seasoned wood, moderate in price, and easily laid down.
In this country, our costly modern houses are barely provided with a border of a foot or so round the edges of the reception rooms. Even that is but an exceptional practice. Yet oak flooring is not a costly addition to important rooms, while the habit of keeping floors always covered with Brussels carpet tacked down is not the cleanest imaginable.
Another application of veneered wood practised by Messrs. Howard is called by them "wood tapestry." Very thin slices are arranged geometrically in large patterns, and fastened with glue on staircase and passage walls, or made into dado panelling to the room, in this case capped by mouldings.
An ingenious method of inlaying thin veneers on flat surfaces of wood by machinery has been patented by the same firm. Veneers or slices of wood about the thickness of coarse brown paper are glued on a board, e.g. a table top. A design punched out in zinc, of a thickness somewhat greater than that of the veneer, is laid over it, and the board is then placed under a heavy roller. The zinc is forced into the surface of the board by the roller to about the thickness of the veneer. A plane cleans off the rest of the veneer, leaving the portion only that answers to the zinc pattern, thus forced into the surface of the board. If soaked, the grain of the wood would push up the thin veneer, no doubt, but this is no greater risk than that to which all marquetry is exposed.
Neither of these inventions have as yet been carried beyond the simplest disposition of arrangement. What can be done in either method remains to be shown.
All the woodwork passed under review thus far in joinery and cabinet-work, is of hard woods. Much, however, of our modern furniture is of a less valuable description, and is made of pine, American birch, Hungarian and other ash. Pitch-pine, an exceedingly hard wood, difficult to dry, and with a disagreeable propensity to crack if not very well seasoned, is also used, and a beautiful material it is. Some small quantity of bedroom furniture in beech, oak, and ash is made in the workshops that I have been describing. As a general rule, however, this manufacture of soft woods is a separate branch of the trade. To see soft wood, such as pine, made up into admirable bedroom furniture, and French polished till the grain of it shows much of the delicacy and agreeableness of satin-wood, we should pay a visit to the works of Messrs. Dyer and Watts, in Islington, and to other houses that occupy their time exclusively in work of this kind. It is clean, cheerful, and, by comparison, cheap; is ornamented (in the works of Messrs. Dyer and Watts) with neat lines of red, grey, and black, some of the lines imitative of inlaid wood. It is popular, and if we proceed from the workshops of Messrs. Graham, Holland, and others, to their showrooms and warehouses, we shall find this deal furniture for sale, though they do not profess to make any of it. Less costly pine-wood furniture is painted green, or white, or in imitation of other woods.