Extraordinary French Daybed: Prelle Silk & Period Antiques (Decorative Arts & Fabric Sourcing)

Hello everybody. So this is a very special piece from the 1820s. It's in the daybed family, a very romantic type of furniture from the past. And decorative art that is seating can be seen as a type of frame for some very excellent silk. Not only because the silk takes up most of the visual space as opposed to the actual furniture, but because the silk was always the most significant part of the cost of a piece. So we should thank the worms that produced this silk and also the fabric company Prel, which was opened in 1752 in Lyon, the capital of French silk, and which first rewove this exact Napoleonic pattern in 1984 for use at Fontainebleau Palace. But in any case, the actual pattern dates to 1802 when it was first ordered during Napoleon's time. And then it was first used in 1807 in the Grand Cabinet de l'Empereur aux Tuileries, the Grand Office of the Emperor in the Tuileries Palace, which burned, but which used to be right in front of the Louvre. Now, if we take a look at the French government's archive at Mobilier National, we can see that they still actually conserved some of this original fabric, this neoclassical sunflower. Anyway, of course we will discuss the piece, but I would be remiss to omit a little history of French silk, particularly in Lyon and the company Prel here, as I did have to go down quite a rabbit hole to figure out how to find fabric this beautiful. And covering pieces is not something I often do as a dealer, not only because it costs $6,000, but simply because sometimes a client might want the exact same thing, but in white. And then what do you do? Because Prel is hired regularly for major museum or government redecoration projects in France, if you're lucky, sometimes you can buy from their boutique in Paris leftovers from silk that was made for these much larger projects. I only needed 10 meters of this to cover this daybed, and thankfully they happened to have a spool of it in the back. It's actually designed to be along a chair back. I decided we would see how it looks across here to use the palmette in a much more profuse way across the front of the piece. You know, we had to do a little cutting, but it all worked out well. And so the point is you can go into Prel in Paris and you can sometimes buy what's left over of these beautiful historic recreations, or you can have them made if you need a larger amount. Of course, they have things like this in their regular collection that you can just buy. And here's a photo of some of the historic fabric that they recreated to recover a series of late Charles X Italian pieces, which were made in 1842 for the King of Sardinia, and which are now displayed primarily in the Getty Museum and then the Met as well as Detroit's Museum of Art. There's a bird out there that just keeps squawking. I have, I should grab a shotgun and just fire it off in the air, not at the bird, but just to disperse the blue jays a little bit. So anyway, this particular pattern actually predates the piece by 10 or 20 years, but it aligns well with the warm and tropical neoclassical spirit of this piece of furniture with these wonderful water plants here, scrolling around, coming to rest on the claws, exotic claws of this daybed, sofa, banquette de boudoir. So if the exact type of the piece remains a mystery, we actually saw this very interesting design, the scrolls here, which rest on these claws on a pair of chairs circa 1820 as well by the master furniture maker, Jean-Jacques Werner. They were in a lighter burled ash and Werner, Jean-Jacques Werner, Werner, is considered to be responsible around his time for the increase in use of lighter woods. He pioneered the cultivation of those types of trees for fine furniture. And furthermore, we saw an inlaid version of that exact chair that was featured in a previous video published. And those chairs were interesting enough to look at because they were very much equivalent to a set of three chairs from the McIlheny Collection conserved in Philadelphia's Museum of Art. At least we can say that when this rare scroll shows up, occasionally it appears to show up on pieces signed by Werner. And I do like how they went to the trouble to scroll and to finish the backs of these armrests, even though the back of the piece really hasn't been conceived to be away from the wall. One might think that this is a middle of the room piece, a meuble de milieu, but upon examination, we notice that the front is decorated with this beautiful plinth traverse of striated red mahogany. And it's only this positive side that has the decorative claw feet. In the back, there is a space which is designed to be covered as to not leave it totally unfinished back here. But the back feet are these simple quasi-hexagonal blocks with some woodworm holes there, typical of age. And this foot seems to have been replaced, I guess. It also has woodworm holes in it, so I guess that's an old replacement. The back is also not designed with this tufted section here that I think we can agree received this frieze of palmettes quite well. Palmettes and arrows, not just palmettes. Now, some of you will be absolutely outraged by the absence of the fringes that should be dangling here, sort of adding to the Roman Empire in a warmer, sunny, if we were being true to the period, the fringes would be here. The ones which were previously on it had been cooked by the sun. They had to go, and then through a logistical tragedy, my upholsterer did not get them, and now here it is without the fringes. But I will assure the next owner of this sort of outrageous piece of furniture that I will oversee the application of the appropriate fringes if forced. So this is the third daybed type piece I've had on the channel, the first being a late Regency one. Maybe it was Italian, maybe English, maybe American. The jury is out. But by the end of the very long-lived and multifaceted English Regency style, Regency work became so exotic and widespread throughout the continent that it becomes difficult to nail down exactly where the most eccentric examples of it are from. This is one that I was really thrilled to show you, not just because this is one of the most dreamlike and romantic types of pieces from the past, and they're very rare. We have to remember that it was only the most marginal, or if we want to be more positive, the most eccentric people at the time, both financially and in terms of taste, who would have owned something like this. This wasn't usual furniture by any stretch of the word, and I think that you had to have a little bit of flair, even among the clientele for very fine and rare pieces, I think you had to have a certain amount of personality to want something like this at the time, and that's why you really don't see too many. And perhaps that's part of why some of them are seemingly unique, as this is in a gray area between a type of a bench, a sofa. I've called it a boudoir bench. Boudoir, these little intimate and over-designed rooms, and who knows if this was really ordered for a boudoir, but that name covers how something like this seems more like a special ordered element of decor for a special room, much more than it seems like your typical model of peace of which you might encounter numerous iterations today. Now, as we very briefly resume the history of the art of French silk upholstery weaving, Prell really is outstanding in their ability to faithfully recreate these period fabrics. Now, they do that because they've been running the looms so consistently since 1752 that they've accumulated generations of expertise, and they have a wonderful historic archive that a lot of designers will actually go and look at, especially for historic monument restoration. If you're scraping around in the old building looking for paint colors, you might end up finding some of the original wall fabric or upholstery fabric in a cupboard, and you can go to Prell and try to find in their archives the exact same one that they might've made, and you can have it recreated. And in fact, Prell silk is not just displayed in my secret farm warehouse. You can also see it on the walls of Paris' Opéra Garnier, and over here in America, the walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which was the site of that horrible heist with Rembrandt's Sea of Galilee that is still missing. There was a wonderful documentary on that on Netflix that everyone should check out. This type of fabric is ubiquitous among important cultural institutions, whether it's the Wallace Collection, the Louvre, Versailles, the Biltmore Estate, and even the throne room of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, to name a few. Very briefly, to discuss the history of the French silk industry, it was established during the Renaissance under the reign of French King François I. And by the early 1600s, they had improved the looms enough to be able to make patterned fabric. And then during the time of Louis XIV, later on in the century, there was an initiative to take over the European market, which became successful by the 18th century. So it's important to know that France was literally draining Europe of its money, selling this type of a product. And naturally so, because the French were such leaders in taste and beauty. But the end of the 18th century was a difficult time for this silk industry in Lyon, as revenues had been halved before the French Revolution. And then they managed to survive the revolution, at which point Napoleon came around, and he understood the economic potential of the market. And he and his entourage placed some very important commissions for their various imperial redecoration campaigns. I think the most important one was 2 million francs, whatever the time value translation of money that is today, 2 million francs for 80,000 meters of silk fabric, which was a commission overseen by the head of the Royal Furniture Reserve at the time, the Imperial Furniture Reserve. It was such an important expense that they were sending delegates to Lyon to oversee the production. Similar to how I harass Prel when I make these piddly little orders from them, you know, six and a half yards at a time for a little bench. But again, to come full circle, that was the point of a piece like this. It was meant to be a frame for this wonderful artwork, which is this woven material. Please subscribe to the channel if you find these videos interesting or perhaps even useful. My goal is to create an online period furniture library that gives everyone access to a fundamental orientation in furniture history that should improve their discernment when they're faced with so many everyday antiques out there. And thank you as well to all of my clients who make these videos possible. Certainly wasn't the government who financed this fabric. And I'll see you all at the next video.