The Furniture Gazette (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 Excerpt: ...there is far less to complain of than is the case with that produced in Paris and Vienna. It is, indeed, but very lately that Parisian workmen were complaining that England and other countries were interfering seriously with their trade by their successful competition, and by the superior beauty of the work; and we do not wonder at this, for as long as Paris, with characteristic complacency, adheres to a style of furniture that is calculated to please alone those whose taste is blinded by a savage love of shoddy splendour, they cannot expect to retain their old celebrity for the sole possession of that kind of knowledge which is called "taste," and which, indeed, is nothing more than, or rather which is, in fact, only the result of, a knowledge of the well-studied efforts of past thinkers and workers in the direction of the beautiful. Not a day passes in Paris, says the Builder, that the commissaires-priseurs, the auctioneers, do not dispose of hundreds of lots of modern furniture such as would find, if any purchaser at all in London, those only who are about to furnish a tenth-rate hotel or boarding-house, calculated in the mind of the speculator to attract the colonial, the Continental, or the uncultivated American stranger, and although it is not uncommon for the critic in London--and who nowadays is not a critic?--to quiz, or at least to cavil at, the want of taste in the furniture of our friends' houses, it is safe to say it would be impossible to find, either in BelgTavia, Tyburnia, South Kensington, or Villadom, any single instance of exaggerated vulgarity in furniture such as is commonly to be met with in self applauding Paris. When, as is now and then the case, we see at an exhibition in the Palais de 1 Industrie, or in some expensive sho...