Louis XVI

When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette came to the French throne in 1774, the curvilinear excesses of the Rococo were already giving way to a new taste for Neoclassical order. The transformation was driven by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum (which began in the 1740s), the theoretical writings of Winckelmann, and the fashionable interest in antiquity that swept European aristocratic culture in the 1760s and 1770s. Louis XVI furniture is the French result: the S-curve of the Louis XV cabriole leg replaced by the straight tapered leg with fluting or reeding; the bombé front replaced by the rectangular case with plaques of Sèvres porcelain or pietra dura; and the organic scrollwork of Rococo ornament replaced by the vocabulary of antiquity — laurel wreaths, rams' heads, Vitruvian scrolls, fluted pilasters, and paterae (rosettes). The great ébénistes of the Louis XVI period — Jean-Henri Riesener (who had succeeded his master Oeben and completed the Bureau du Roi for Louis XV), Adam Weisweiler, Guillaume Beneman, and the German-born David Roentgen — produced furniture of extraordinary technical refinement. Mahogany, which arrived in France from the Caribbean colonies in the 1780s, became the prestige wood of the period, alongside satinwood, tulipwood, and harewood for the lighter pieces associated with Marie Antoinette's taste. Lacquer panels from Japan and China were incorporated into the most luxurious pieces, framed by ormolu of the highest quality. In Texas and Louisiana estates, Louis XVI-style furniture most commonly appears as quality 19th-century French reproduction pieces — the same workshops that produced Louis XV reproductions were equally prolific in the Louis XVI manner — and as American reproductions in the Louis XVI taste made for the luxury domestic market of the early 20th century.