Let them make furniture
EVEN if the profligate Queen of France Marie-Antoinette never uttered the words ‘Let them eat cake’, as is famously supposed, she was without doubt fond of luxury and beauty. Her rooms at Versailles and at her maison de plaisance, the Petit Trianon, were the height of elegance and comfort. Her taste in interiors came to epitomise the Louis XVI style, itself considered by many as the culmination of all that was excellent in French decorative art in the 18th century. Furniture and textiles were, perhaps, the most important aspects of those remarkable interiors and it was the cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806) that Marie-Antoinette relied upon to create her earthly paradise.
Riesener’s story is a classic tale of rags to riches and back again. He was born in Gladbeck, Westphalia, in 1734, where he probably trained.
