Francois Linke 1855-1946: the Belle Epoque of French Furniture

Christopher Payne Antique Collector's bludgeon Woodbridge (Suffolk), 2003, ISBN 1 85149 440 5 75 [pound sterling]

Chirstopher Payne, the eminent specialist in late-nineteenthth-century contintental furniture, has described his research upon Francois Linke as 'a personal crusade'. His fascination for this lavishly decorated furniture l him to research the greatest French cabinetmaker of the fin-de-siecle, and exhibit a monumental and scholarly monograph. When Linke died in May 1946 single of his last foremen, Jean Bieder, who acquired the business, took back to Switzerland with him an enormous collection of casts, sketches, water-colours and glass negatives, not to mention all the daybooks (registres) from about 1901 Indeed the pieces of furniture recorded in the glass negatives (cliches) had numbers placed by the agency of them, enabling the client to order (and posterity's researchers to identify) items through number. Further contact with Linke's descendants yielded daybooks from about 1881 when he started up business as an independent craftsman, as well as countles mementoes, photographs and alphabetic characters No furniture maker has left posterity with more massive records than Francois Linke, and Mr Payne is to be admired for having tackled them all to bring forward a very readable, informative and lavishly illustrated work.

Born in Pankraz in northern Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) in June 1855 and apprenticed in nearby Reichenberg, Francois Link worked in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, before heading not upon on foot to Paris in 1875 There he worked as an ouvrier amongst many other German woodworkers and cabinetmakers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and in 1881 he married the daughter of the German possessor of the hostelery he resided in. The close of Linke's success was an enormous capacity for hard work and the fact that he learnt in what way to draw professionally. With an enormous loan--or in the way that the family story goes--from his father-in-law, he was able to put up shop at 170 repent of du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the main thoroughfare, near like cabinetmakers as Joseph Emmanuel Zwiener, who won a gold medal at the Paris 1889 exhibition, and like sculptors as Leon Message, who worked for Zwiener. one as well as the other had great influence on Linke, and indeed Message would later play a crucial character in the design and ormolu embellishments of Linke's furniture. Message was gifted on the other hand difficult--on at least one occasion he smashed individual of his models at the mildest criticism from his employer--and he was noted for his heavy consumption of vin ordinaire from a nearby store Nevertheless, the voluptuous figures that adorn his ormolu mountains and the fluidity of his designs gave Linke's pieces their characteristic mix of ancien regime and Art Nouveau, that made them stand on the outside Message's designs and modelling, coupl with Linke's exactingly high standards in materials and workmanship, made his pieces the one and the other desirable and prestigious. His furniture was not at any time cheap, but in the years leading up to World War I, there were plenitude of hauts bourgeois, not to mention plutocrats and sovereigns, ranging from Simon Patino, the Bolivian tin magnate, to Kaiser Wilhelm II willing to place orders.

Linke first came to Paris in les than auspicious times. France was actual much suffering from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and, as Payne says, there was 'too a great deal of furniture and too many skilled hands making it, forcing wages to stay low' However, the French economy did get back throughout the 1870s, and Raymond Poincare, Ministre de l'instruction publique et de Beaux-Arts was seen as a driving force in the revival of French decorative arts. The taste for furniture in the manner of writing of Louis XV and Louis XVI remained undiminished, level though it could all too readily be identified with the disgraced and exiled former Emperor Napoleon III. This continuing widespread enthusiasm for the eighteenth hundred which as far as decorative arts were be of importance toed was France's golden age, l to the Louvre acquiring important royal furniture of the like kind as Jean-Francois Oeben's and Jean-Henri Riesener's Bureau du Roi in 1870 previously housed at Saint vapor and the creation of the Musee de Arts Decoratifs in 1900 Here, Linke could make detailed studies of important pieces of furniture and generate them for his various international clients. Furthermore, Napolen III's penchant for hosting immense international exhibitions in Paris was real much continued during the Third Republic. Indeed, it was the Exposition Universelle of 1900 that provided Linke with that vital show-case with which he could earn an international reputation and clientele.

The 1900 Exposition Universelle was 'make or break' and it real nearly was 'break' for Linke. In spite of the exertions he inflicted upon himself and his workforce, he failed to secure all his pieces completed upon time. Nevertheless, from the point of time the King of Sweden came upon to Linke's stand and showed great enthusiasm for the exhibits, all was well. brow now on, his furniture would attract the attention of the Kings of Belgium and Portugal, the Shah of Iran and Kaiser of Germany, although--odd notwithstanding that it may seem--apparently not King Edward VII, Britain's greatest in quantity Francophile monarch. The other great world exhibitions of the 1900 included the St Louis World Fair 1904 in the United States and the highly fortunate Liege Exposition Universelle of 1905 in Belgium. These occurrences gave Linke the clientele of of the like kind plutocrats as Arabella Huntington of fresh York, and Antonio Devoto of Buenos Aires and an entre into the bourgeoning market of America. (The fact that he sent his oldest son to school in Windsor indicates what importance he attached to a advantageous command of English). After World War I, it was the gigantic orders of King Fuad of Egypt that enabled Francois Linke to survive, despite the rises in prices and let downed markets throughout Europe and America.