The book discusses in detail the creation and contents of many such interiors, including some that have never been photographed before. Using contemporary inventories, letters and journals it brings to Life the tastes and preoccupations of their creators - the Royal family, the aristocracy, the fashionable tourists and the nouveaux riches, the dealers and craftsmen who worked for them, and the artists, designers and architects.

The eighteenth century was a period of great inventiveness and originality in French decorative arts and interior decoration and its crowning achievement was the creation of the domestic interior. Using the craftsmen and skills originally brought into France from Italy and the Low Countries to serve the Sun King, French aristocrats and financiers created in their Paris Hotels and country chateaux interiors of an unprecedented elegance and sophistication. The same can be said of the works of art that completed these roomsfurniture decorated with marquetry or lacquer,gilt-bronzes, silver, the finest porcelain, of which none was finer than Sevres, tapestries and carpets from the Savonnerie, the Gobelins, Beauvais and Aubusson, and beautiful silks and upholstery.

The book discusses in detail the creation and contents of many such interiors, including some that have never been photographed before. Using contemporary inventories, letters and journals it brings to Life the tastes and preoccupations of their creators - the Royal family, the aristocracy, the fashionable tourists and the nouveaux riches, the dealers and craftsmen who worked for them, and the artists, designers and architects. In addition,it explores the wider context of the different styles of decoration, the effect upon them of changes in etiquette and social behaviour and the effect they had in turn upon the function and arrangement of rooms within the French interior.

Introduction

1 Clientele

2 Designers, Guilds and Dealers

3 StTles and Influences

4 The Distribution, Use and Content of Rooms

5 Architectural Decoration

6 Furniture

7 Gilt-Bronze

8 Porcelain

9 Lacquer, TOle and Wallpapers

10 Textiles

11 Silver

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Citation of Sources

Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index