Antique Sideboard

French Empire Style Sideboards
Empire sideboards were first hand made in 1802 of the Voyage daps la Basse et Haute Egypte, a collection of drawings by Baron Vivant-Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon on his excursion to Syria and Egypt in 1798-1801, heightened the interest in Egypt that Napoleon’s campaign had itself generated.
Sideboards designed by Napoleon’s architects, Charles Perrier (1764-1838) and Pierre Fontaine (1762-1853), including those at the Tuileries and the Chateau de Malmaison, and pieces produced by makers such as F. H. G. Jacob-Desmalter and L. F. and P. A. Bellange, developed the Empire style. This drew on Greek, Roman and Egyptian furniture, and became popular from England and North America to Germany, Italy and Spain.
This grand, imperial style achieved much of its effect through massive forms and rich ornament. Although an ornate, propagandistic style, it derived great dignity from its clear forms and classical restraint. Motifs such as eagles, lions, caryatids, griffins and sphinxes, taken from Roman, Greek and Egyptian antique examples, appeared on sideboards as ornaments and supports. Tables with monopodia legs, gilt eagle supports, or lion’s paw feet, elegant sofas and ’sleigh’ beds with sweeping S-curved arms and endboards, and klismos and curule chairs, presented classical motifs on a much larger scale than in earlier classical styles. Rich woods such as mahogany, gilt carving and ormolu mounts of anthemions, stars and medallions, characterized Empire oak sideboards.
English Regency Style Sideboards
The English version of this style, known as the Regency, lasted from about 1790 to 1830, when the vogue for relics of antiquity popularized sideboards ornamented with sphinxes, griffins, classical mouldings and other Empire style elements.
Although it reached its peak early in the 19th century, Empire and Regency sideboards represented merely one phase in the evolution of the classical style that would take place in the course of the century when a variety of past idioms would be continually reinterpreted and renewed.

XVIII Century Antique French Sideboards. 1700`s  Rococo Louis XV Sideboards.

18th Century French sideboards were handmade after accession of Philip of Orleans as French Regent upon the death of Louis XIV in 1700 marked the beginning of a transition from the unaccommodating formalities of the Baroque towards the more animated Rococo. The migration of the French court from Versailles to Paris, where aristocrats and the bourgeoisie began to refurbish their townhouses elaborately and with great
concern for Rococo style of early xviii century, ushered in an age which focused unprecedented attention on comfort in private life and antique Louis XIV furniture style.
In 1700`s France especially, rooms became smaller : throughout Europe social hierarchies were more relaxed and entertainment more intimate. Rising standards of living and the expansion of the middle classes made
the ceremonies of the Baroque passe, and removed the complicated network of symbols of rank that had been incorporated into everyday social interaction.
The release from Baroque court circles, which had been primarily preoccupied by the immediacies of their own pomposity, sparked off in the 18th century a series of quests for the exotic, the whimsical and the
refreshing. These yearnings were satisfied in the fine and large of Louis the 15th sideboards by such light-hearted schemes as Jean Honore Fragonard’s painting of The Swing, and the tapestry scenes of the
Loves of the Gods, woven after Francois Boucher’s example at the Gobelins manufactories. Continuing trade heightened European taste for things oriental, from tea and porcelain tea-services to the lacquered mahogany and oak sideboards that went with them. In France, comfortable salons, where ladies of the ancien regime conducted conversations between dandies and philosopher, were increasingly fitted through the century with small and serviceable pieces of elegant sideboards. Walls were hung with tapestries, silks, or velvets, or wainscoted with fluidly-moulded panels painted in combinations of colours, such as mint green, pale pinks and yellows.
The softening of the rectilinear Louis XIV style furniture was initiated by the designer Jean Berain and the craftsman Andre Charles Boulle, with the influence of the Regent’s own architect A. J. Oppenord (c.1639-1715), the architects Robert de Cotte (1656-1735) and Pierre le Pautre, and the designers Nicolas Pineau (1687-1757) and Jacques Caffieri (1678-1755).
After the turn of the century, Berain replaced his earlier scrolling designs with lighter, linear arabesques and fanciful singeries. Chairs, tables, bureaux and commodes assumed serpentine lines, stretchers became fluid
and were gradually discarded ; and chairs became lower. Rich ormolu mounts highlighted the curves of cabriole legs, the edges of drawers and the tops of sideboard buffets. On the elegant, increasingly curvaceous
buffet of Charles Cressent (1685-1768), the edging around drawers gradually disappeared, giving way to large compositions spreading over the lacquer or marquetry design of the facade. Cressent became ebeniste to the Regent in 1719 and was one of the finest ebenistes of all time. It was not until late 18th Century though that ebenistes were required to sign their sideboard with an estampille and as a result no pieces actually signed by Crescent are known. Many antique French sideboards have been subsequently attributed to him, often on little evidence, but dining room sideboards in many collections, including the Wallace 18th Century Antique Collection and the Gulbenkian , are undoubtedly by him. He designed his own gilt-bronze mounts many of which were inspired by the designs of Berain, Gillot and Robert de Cotte, and stand as masterpieces of sculpture. 2 door claw foot sideboards of Juste Aurele Meissonnier (1695-1750) led the early designs of the Regence into the exuberant asymmetries and curvaceous naturalism of the Rococo, or Louis XV style. Derived from the lively, cave-like, and sometimes aquatic decorations inside Italian landscape grottoes, French Rococo sideboards were characterized by illogical combinations of the peculiar rocaille scroll, C- and S-curves, shells, foliage, branches and animals, water and flame motifs, and even Chinese figures. Commodes, tables, cabinets and beds assumed fluid shapes. Ormolu mounts became more swirling and elegant, and delicately carved flames and sprays of foliage emphasized the curves of knees, elbows, edges and crests.