Let Them Make Furniture

Once the height of fashion among collectors, including George IV, pieces by Marie-Antoinette’s favourite cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener are back in the spotlight, reports Rufus Bird

- Rufus Bird

Even if the profligate Queen of France Marie-Antoinette never uttered the words ‘Let them eat cake’, as is famously supposed, she was, without doubt, fond of luxury and beauty. Her rooms at Versailles and at her maison de plaisance, the Petit Trianon, were the height of elegance and comfort. Her taste in interiors came to epitomise the Louis XVI style, itself considered by many as the culmination of all that was excellent in French decorative art in the 18th century. Furniture and textiles were, perhaps, the most important aspects of those remarkable interiors and it was the cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806) that Marie-Antoinette relied upon to create her earthly paradise.

Riesener’s story is a classic tale of rags to riches and back again. He was born in Gladbeck, Westphalia, in 1734, where he probably trained. By 1754, he was in Paris to make his name and fortune. There, he entered the workshop of a fellow German émigré cabinetmaker, Jean-François Oeben (1721–63). In 1767, after the latter’s death, Riesener married his master’s widow, which allowed him to take charge of the business. FrançoiseMarguerite Oeben was three years his senior with four children in tow, one of whose sons became the painter Eugène Delacroix.

Marrying the widow Oeben was a way to promote his skills, but the path to matrimony and commercial establishment was not without incident. In 1765, another German émigré cabinetmaker, Jean-François Leleu, also in Oeben’s workshop, punched Riesener in a fit of pique—probably owing to the fact that his earlier marriage ruled him out of marrying the widow himself.

The mark of a man