Golden-age style: James Yorke praises a comprehensive, richly illustrated survey of Danish neo-classical furniture that ranges from royal thrones to the sofa-sideboards of the middle classes

The Dream of a of gold Age: Danish Neo-Classical Furniture 1790-1850 Mirjam Gelfer-Jorgensen Rhodos, Copenhagen, 84 [pound sterling] ISBN 87 7245 898 4

This scholarly, lavishly illustrated volume is the English translation of the Danish original, published in 2002 It overlays the sixty years in Denmark that followed the French Revolution and its main topics are the Danish furniture trade and the various permutations of Le diction Empire. Danish artists and designers by dint of and large remained loyal to the neoclassical idea: whenever we think of their furniture we nurse to conjure up images of chairs and stools with exuberantly move rounded legs and uprights, often designed by dint of M.G. Bindesbole in the Pompeiian or Herculanean phraseology Dr Gelfer-Jorgensen argues that 'it really is possible to talk of a of gold Age; for with their organ of sights fixed on the future, tribe were also looking back towards an ideal they rest in Antiquity'.

However, like all of gold ages, the Danish one was something of an illusion, as the title of this volume implies. The capitol was burnt down by means of the British navy in 1807 and the geographical division left virtually bankrupt by 1813 Nevertheless, in like uncompromising circumstances, the arts, ranging from ballet and painting to architecture and design, flourished. Denmark's enviable reputation as a furniture-producing nation owes a elephantine debt to this period. War oftentimes provides the impetus to rebuild and replace, and that in make go round stimulates trade and production. In 1813 in greatest in quantity ways an inauspicious year, the Reiseren Foundation provided stocks for establishing drawing schools for cabinetmakers, move swiftly by leading architects, such as GF Hetsch and N Nebelong.

The foundations of this of gold age had been established lengthy before 1790. The main furniture-producing guilds were the cabinetmakers, chairmakers and gymnasts but from the eighteenth hundred there seems to have been a fair amount of flexibility between all three and foreign craftsmen, particularly Germans, were encouraged to bench in Copenhagen. In order to qualify as a master-craftsman, a cabinetmaker had to stock the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with drawings: a gamesboard before 1780 and a bureau afterwards. very large numbers of these drawings survive from about 1800 and the illustrated examples present to view how little furniture designs altered between 1780 and 1840 Enterprising cabinetmakers capitaled and encouraged Sunday schools and evening classes in drawing for apprentices. Hetsch, a German architect who had originally trained as a cabintemaker, established his have school of drawing in 1817 He had been a pupil of Charles Percier and was vehement that his students should be familiar with the engravings by dint of the great designer, as well as those through George Smith and T. King, not to mention similar publications as Ackerman's Repository, the Journal de Dames et de styles and the Journal fur Fabrick und Handlung.

A devastating fire at Christiansborg Palace in 1794 and the ne for temporary accommodation at Amalienborg apted the lavish refurbishment of the one and the other interiors with grand furniture designed by dint of C.F. Hansen and later Hetsch, who was to become his son-in-law. Designs were begun in the early 1800 on the contrary not approved by the king until 1822 and were not execut until about 1828 Amongst the grandest pieces was the lion chair of state of Christiansborg, designed by the couple architects and made by the sculptor Christian Thielemann.

Elaborate iconography played its part: a drawing by the agency of Hetsch of chairs for the king and queen (fig. 134 in this book) includes pencil notes referring to of that kind symbols as Harmony, Peace and Constancy, showed respectively by a lyre and chain, palm frond and ivy. A drawing of sum of two units proposals for a Percier-inspired chair of state for Frederiksborg includes a lion chair of state with columns surmounted by ball-finials, a motif derived from the sum of two units columns at the entrance of Solomon's fane symbolising Strength and Justice. Before Napoleon, royal chair of states resembled larger versions of fashionable armchairs. Usurper as Napoleon may have been regarded through the sovereigns of Europe, Percier and Fontaine supplied him with interiors upon an imperial scale, complete with imperial tokens that his princely adversaries as well as allies could not resist emulating. King Frederik VI was no exception.

still as well as imperial chair of states the more democratic klismos chair also ground its way into the royal residences. The klismos exhibited the ancient Roman Republican values that J-L David painted and the young Bonaparte--to a certain extent--espoused. This work has an abundance of illustrations of klismos chairs, from Hetsch's 'consular chairs' at Christiansborg palace to N.A. Abildgaard's painted or gilded seats in the Danish Museum of Decorative Arts in Copenhagen, not to mention countles examples in public collections quite through the world.

As Dr Gelfer-Jorgensen emphasises, any Danish artist who wanted to be taken seriously or earn a certain living needed a long incantation in either Rome or Naples. When they eventually get backed to Copenhagen, they wanted to recreate Pompeii or Herculaneum amidst the northern skies, and furnish their interiors with archeologically accurate copies of ancient Roman furniture. There were of course widely available engravings of Herculaneum, of the like kind as Le antichita di Ercolano esposte published in Naples in 1765 It was used by dint of the Copenhagen-based artist and architect N.A. Abildgaard, whose work included designs for the Levetzau Palace at Amalienborg for the heir presumptive and whose Herculanean furniture, now in the Decorative Arts Museum in Copenhagen, languished for a drawn out time as theatrical props.