Antiques: A Straighter Bourbon

To those who treasure taste, Louis is the label for some of the world’s greatest antiques. France’s Louis XVI lent his name to a revival of Greco-Roman décor. Louis XV ruled in a time when furniture makers shunned the straight line, and Louis XIV, the Sun King, is still a synonym for sumptuousness. Now antiques addicts are turning back to an even earlier Louis—the 13th—whose style furnished France when it was becoming the first great nation in Europe.

Louis XIII furniture is much like the King’s rule: cosmopolitan, craftsman-like and built for the ages. The second of the Bourbons, he ruled from 1610 to 1643 (a reign that roughly parallels England’s Early Jacobean period), generated the power that elevated France into the splendor of the baroque. It was a period that saw both the dissolving of the parlements and the founding of the Académic Française.

Pulpit Bar. What the shrewd King and his crafty sage Cardinal Richelieu lived with has for years been tucked away in dark corners of French provincial manor houses. Tastemongers used to consider Louis XIII too ponderous by comparison to the more delicate, later Louisiana that most people are afraid to plump down on. But no longer, for a revival of Louis XIII antiques has tripled their prices in the past five years; they are now the freshest item on the French market. Scarce, perhaps, but a perfect Treize chair runs to $2,000, compared with the $5,500 that a great Quinze plotzer costs. Original gateleg tables cost little more than Swedish modern.

Louis XIII furniture is dark, heavy and austere, and as such has much in common with massive Spanish cabinetry, which is also coming back into vogue. Both mix well with the trim structural look of modern furnishings. Painter Pierre Soulages took a fancy to Louis XIII, and Manhattan Art Collector and Banker Robert Lehman uses it to accent his apartment. Dior’s top designer, Marc Bohan, redecorated his apartment in the period. “I like things simple, austere even,” he says. “It’s my style. Also the soft, neutral colors of Louis Treize suit me.” As different a type as Novelist James Jones also has decorated his Paris duplex with Louis XIII. “Yeah, I just like old medieval furniture,” he says. He has turned a real pulpit into a bar and a prie-dieu into a barstool. “I like big, heavy stuff,” Jones says.

High Epoch. Louis XIII furniture was modern in its day; it marked the point when hand-carved Renaissance woodwork gave way to all the sensuous, symmetrical turnings that a cabinet-maker’s lathe could serve up. Finials, banderoles, and swags of fruit and flowers appeared, to give essentially stiff, straight-backed woodwork an animate touch. Table and chair legs ceased to butt into the floor, instead rested on gentler bun feet, but H-form stretchers low to the floor held the frames rigidly intact. Furniture of walnut and ebony supplanted oak because these woods take on a finer finish, and it was more likely that brocaded damsels rather than ironclad knights would plounce into it.

The age of Louis XIII was an age yearning for gentility. Interiors with paneled walls, beetle-browed fireplace mantels and massively beamed ceilings still lacked the airiness of the Sun King’s era. But historians call the earlier Louis’ reign the “High Epoch,” a period when Frenchmen culled ideas from the cultures of other European countries and refined them with their own innate good taste. Navigation had proved the world rounder and more compact than even Columbus thought. Rembrandt was mastering the play of light and shade, or chiaroscuro, as the baluster lathework of Louis XIII furniture tried to imitate. Louis XIII knew art lent dignity to the Crown. His style was spreading, iron hand in velvet glove with nationalism, while France pioneered the idea of the modern, absolute state. Something of this marriage of vigor and elegance remain the style’s touchstone to this day and the underlying reason for its appeal.