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When an artist or craftsman is designing or planning a painting or object, the choice of materials has a big impact on the finished product. All sorts of things have to be thought about. Is the object to be used, or is it just for decoration? If it is for use, the surfaces have to be fairly tough. Is a painting to be hung, or is it permanently attached to the wall? And where is it to be placed? A huge ceiling painting, for example, will need to be made of several pieces of canvas stitched together, and great care has to be taken with the preparation of the surface so that the paint doesn’t flake and fall off when hung face-down.
What if an object has curved or patterned surfaces? The way the decoration is laid out will need to take this into account, or the perspective will be wrong, particularly is an architectural scene is involved, when geometry may be important. Many materials, such as wood or textiles also react to changes in temperature or if they become damp, which can have terrible effects on decoration. If a canvas shrinks, the paint will crack. Marquetry decoration will pop out of furniture.
Colour is also important. Naturally-derived colours, dyes on fabrics and wood veneers all fade over time as they are exposed to light. Ceramics, on the other hand, do not, and so porcelain plaques were used with great success as decoration on furniture. But they are fragile, which brings another set of problems.
Let’s imagine that Jean-Henri Riesener, one of the greatest furniture-makers in 18th-century France has just received an order for a writing table from Queen Marie-Antoinette. She wants something in the latest fashion, that reflects her status as Queen, and she doesn’t really mind how much she pays for it. But she does want to use it for writing her letters, and she needs to be able to keep private papers in it, away from prying eyes. Also, she wants it to fit in with other furniture in her private sitting room.
So Riesener starts with a solid construction, a frame and carcase made of oak He fits a solid lock, but then also designs a secret compartment, disguised by the decoration, which opens when a hidden spring is pressed.
He then decorates the outside with a Chinese-inspired landscape (because the Queen is mad about anything to do with China), in which the detail of the picture is assembled from cut out pieces of inlaid veneers (thin sheets) of different woods, chosen for their colour (rosewood and tulipwood, for example).
Where the colour he wants doesn’t exist naturally, he stains the wood, blue or green perhaps, and creates effects of light and shade by scorching the veneers very carefully in a box of hot sand. This work, the marquetry, is exquisite and takes many hours to complete, but then, in order to make the desk look even more glamorous and fashionable, Reisener adds metal mounts to the legs and around the edges of the desk. These are made of bronze, cast in a mould, but then gilded to look like gold. To use gold itself would be too expensive, even for a queen.