Christophe Huchet de Quenetain - Pierre Garnier - 2003

Conclusion
Notes

Annexes
- Family tree of Pierre Garnier
- Chronology of Pierre Garnier
- Manuscripts and printed sources
- Catalogue of furniture
Bibliography

This great 18th-century cabinetmaker, whose output spans more than fifty years, illustrates the evolution of styles, from Rococo to Neoclassicism. Moreover, an exceptional fact: his reputation was so prominent that it would survive the Revolutionary period. Thanks to his undeniable talent and his ability to adapt to fluctuations in taste, Pierre Garnier will count among his very wealthy royal patrons who will place significant orders: the Receiver General of the Finances Germain Baron, the Marquis de Contades, the Duchess of Mazarin, and especially the Marquis de Marigny, Director General of Buildings. During his Louis XV period, while he seems to make little use of floral marquetry, Garnier greatly appreciates geometric marquetries of diamonds, lattice patterns, as well as veneers arranged in leaves laid out in various ways. These veneers are sometimes compartmentalized, as in “surimpression,” by very sinuous and very interlaced frames.

But with Leleu, Oeben, Montigny, Riesener, Garnier remains above all one of the promoters and one of the most original masters of the style “à la grecque,” the first step in the return to the antique broadly designated today under the name of the Louis XVI style. Powerful forms, constant borrowings from architecture, decoration rather sumptuous but above all of great rigor: all these elements are found in Garnier’s neoclassical work. With the fluted pilasters forming almost a “signature” of Garnier and concurrently or not with them, another element may pass for a kind of exclusive hallmark of the cabinetmaker: the turned-ball feet in the shape of a screw, in gilded bronze.