Francois Linke 1855-1946: the Belle Epoque of French Furniture

Apollo, April, 2004 by James Yorke

Christopher Payne Antique Collector's Club, Woodbridge (Suffolk), 2003, ISBN 1 85149 440 5, 75 [pounds sterling]

Chirstopher Payne, the eminent specialist in late-nineteenthth-century contintental furniture, has described his research on Francois Linke as 'a personal crusade'. His fascination for this lavishly decorated furniture led him to research the greatest French cabinetmaker of the fin-de-siecle, and produce a monumental and scholarly monograph. When Linke died in May 1946, one of his last foremen, Jean Bieder, who acquired the business, took back to Switzerland with him an enormous collection of casts, sketches, water-colours and glass negatives, not to mention all the daybooks (registres) from about 1901. Indeed the pieces of furniture recorded in the glass negatives (cliches) had numbers placed by them, enabling the client to order (and posterity's researchers to identify) items by number. Further contact with Linke's descendants yielded daybooks from about 1881, when he started up business as an independent craftsman, as well as countless mementoes, photographs and letters. No furniture maker has left posterity with more massive records than Francois Linke, and Mr Payne is to be admired for having tackled them all to produce a very readable, informative and lavishly illustrated work.

Born in Pankraz in northern Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) in June 1855 and apprenticed in nearby Reichenberg, Francois Link worked in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, before heading off on foot to Paris in 1875. There he worked as an ouvrier amongst many other German woodworkers and cabinetmakers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and in 1881 he married the daughter of the German owner of the hostelery he resided in. The secret of Linke's success was an enormous capacity for hard work and the fact that he learnt how to draw professionally. With an enormous loan--or so the family story goes--from his father-in-law, he was able to set up shop at 170 rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the main thoroughfare, near such cabinetmakers as Joseph Emmanuel Zwiener, who won a gold medal at the Paris 1889 exhibition, and such sculptors as Leon Message, who worked for Zwiener. Both had great influence on Linke, and indeed Message would later play a crucial role in the design and ormolu embellishments of Linke's furniture. Message was gifted but difficult--on at least one occasion he smashed one of his models at the mildest criticism from his employer--and he was noted for his heavy consumption of vin ordinaire from a nearby shop. Nevertheless, the voluptuous figures that adorn his ormolu mounts and the fluidity of his designs gave Linke's pieces their characteristic blend of ancien regime and Art Nouveau, that made them stand out. Message's designs and modelling, coupled with Linke's exactingly high standards in materials and workmanship, made his pieces both desirable and prestigious. His furniture was never cheap, but in the years leading up to World War I, there were plenty of hauts bourgeois, not to mention plutocrats and sovereigns, ranging from Simon Patino, the Bolivian tin magnate, to Kaiser Wilhelm II willing to place orders.

Linke first came to Paris in less than auspicious times. France was very much suffering from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and, as Payne says, there was 'too much furniture and too many skilled hands making it, forcing wages to stay low'. However, the French economy did recover throughout the 1870s, and Raymond Poincare, Ministre de l'instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts was seen as a driving force in the revival of French decorative arts. The taste for furniture in the style of Louis XV and Louis XVI remained undiminished, even though it could all too readily be identified with the disgraced and exiled former Emperor Napoleon III. This continuing widespread enthusiasm for the eighteenth century, which as far as decorative arts were concerned was France's golden age, led to the Louvre acquiring important royal furniture such as Jean-Francois Oeben's and Jean-Henri Riesener's Bureau du Roi in 1870, previously housed at Saint Cloud, and the creation of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in 1900. Here, Linke could make detailed studies of important pieces of furniture and reproduce them for his various international clients. Furthermore, Napolen III's penchant for hosting huge international exhibitions in Paris was very much continued during the Third Republic. Indeed, it was the Exposition Universelle of 1900 that provided Linke with that vital show-case with which he could earn an international reputation and clientele.

The 1900 Exposition Universelle was 'make or break' and it very nearly was 'break' for Linke. In spite of the exertions he inflicted on himself and his workforce, he failed to get all his pieces completed on time. Nevertheless, from the moment the King of Sweden came on to Linke's stand and showed great enthusiasm for the exhibits, all was well. Front now on, his furniture would attract the attention of the Kings of Belgium and Portugal, the Shah of Iran and Kaiser of Germany, although--odd though it may seem--apparently not King Edward VII, Britain's most Francophile monarch. The other great world exhibitions of the 1900s included the St Louis World Fair 1904 in the United States and the highly successful Liege Exposition Universelle of 1905 in Belgium. These events gave Linke the clientele of such plutocrats as Arabella Huntington of New York, and Antonio Devoto of Buenos Aires and an entre into the bourgeoning market of America. (The fact that he sent his eldest son to school in Windsor indicates what importance he attached to a good command of English). After World War I, it was the huge orders of King Fuad of Egypt that enabled Francois Linke to survive, despite the rises in prices and depressed markets throughout Europe and America.