The furniture of the Louis XV period (1715–1774) is characterized by curved forms, lightness, comfort and asymmetry; it replaced the more formal, boxlike and massive furniture of the Louis XIV style. It employed marquetry, using inlays of exotic woods of different colors, as well as ivory and mother of pearl. The style had three distinct periods. During the early years (1715–1730), called the Regency, when the King was too young to rule, furniture followed the massive, geometric Style Louis XIV style. From 1730 until about 1750, the period known as the first style, it was much more asymmetrical, ornate and exuberant, in the fashion called rocaille. From about 1750 to the King's death in 1774, a reaction set in against the excesses of the rocaille. The Louis XV style showed the influences of Neo-classicism, based on recent archaeological discoveries in Italy and Greece. It featured Roman and Greek motifs. The later furniture featured decorative elements of Chinoiserie and other exotic styles. Louis XV furniture was designed not for the vast palace state rooms of the Versailles of Louis XIV, but for the smaller, more intimate salons created by Louis XV and by his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame DuBarry. It included several new types of furniture, including the commode and the chiffonier, and many pieces, particularly chairs and tables, were designed to be moved easily rearranged or moved from room to room, depending upon the kind of function.
History With the death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715, his grandson, Louis XV, born in 1710, became King. Because of his young age, France was ruled by a Regent, Philippe of Orleans, until 1723. During this period, the style of furniture changed little from the Louis XIV period; it was massive, lavishly decorated and solemn, designed for the gigantic state halls of the new Palace of Versailles. In 1722 Louis XV moved from Paris, where he had lived with the Regent, to Versailles, began his own rule, and gradually imposed his own taste on the arts, architecture, and furniture. Louis left the exterior of Versailles and the other palaces largely unchanged, but beginning in 1738 he extensively redesigned the interiors, creating the petits apartments, or smaller apartments and salons for himself, the Queen, Marie Leszczyńska, whom he married in 1725, and later, for his primary mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry. In these salons the traditional etiquette and formality of Louis XIV was abandoned. These new suites of smaller rooms were furnished in a new style that met the needs of comfort, intimacy and elegance. Beginning in about 1730, His preference was for the style called rocaille, a term which referred to an ornamental decoration resembling a stylized seashell, a style which expressed gaiety and fantasy. The ornament appeared rarely on the exteriors of the new buildings, but lavishly in the interiors, on the walls, ceilings, and furniture. The architects Robert de Cotte and Ange-Jacques Gabriel remade the interiors of the Palace of Versailles, the Palace of Fontainebleau, and the Château de Compiègne in the new style. Palatial residences with rocaille interiors soon appeared In Paris. They included the Hôtel Soubise in Paris, (now the National Archives) in 1705; the Hôtel Matignon (now the residence of the French Prime Minister) in 1721, by Jean Courtonne; and the Hôtel Biron (now the Musée Rodin) by Jean Aubert. They also appeared in the French provinces, the royal residence by Emmanuel Héré in Nancy, and also in Aix-en-Provence and Bordeaux. All of these buildings featured rooms arranged in the new style; the bedrooms took on new importance, and were surrounded by smaller anterooms and cabinets, including an entirely new kind of room, the dining-room. All of them needed new furniture to match the new style and arrangement. For a quarter of a century, the furniture designs of the rocaille style was dominant, particularly under the influence of Juste-Aurèle Meissonier (1695-1750), the Italian-born architect who became royal architect and designer of Louis XV, and the ornament designer Nicolas Pineau (1684-1754). Under their influence, straight lines disappeared, replaced by curves, ornaments lost all symmetry, and garlands of flowers appeared everywhere. Designs inspired by Chinese art and other exotic sources appeared in profusion, though the rocaille style never reached the excess of exuberance of the Rococo style that appeared in Italy, Austria and Germany. In the 1740s, the style began to slowly change; decoration became less extravagant and more discreet. In 1754 the brother of Madame de Pompadour, the Marquis de Marigny, accompanied the designer Nicolas Cochin and a delegation of artists and scholars to Italy to see the recent discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and made a grand tour of other classical monuments. They returned full of enthusiasm for a new classical style, based on the Roman and Greek monuments. In 1754 they published a manifesto against the Rocaille style, calling for a return to classicism. Marigny, after the death of Louis XV, later became director of buildings for Louis XVI. Between 1755 and 1760, the forms of furniture and interior decoration began to change into what became known as the Second Style Louis XV, or the Style Transition. The rocaille decoration remained, but became more discreet and restrained. Secondly, the new wave of enthusiasm for ancient Greece and Rome brought a series of new decorative themes, though the lines of the furniture were not much changed. This marked the beginning of what became French neoclassicism or Louis XVI style.
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