Painting furniture

The Germanic people were known for their interest in decorated furniture as far back as 2,000 years ago. There were various reasons for painting on wooden furniture: to protect it, to imitate the more expensive timbers and hide poor quality, and to decorate it by emulating carving and inlay. In the sixteenth century, the earliest techniques of decorating furniture were carving, followed by a combination of carving and painting. Very simple stencil designs were used initially in muted earth colours, and then inlay work that attempted to imitate the more expensive furnitures. The two main techniques used for this inlay work were: intarsia, in which the timber was chiselled out and the spaces filled with variously coloured pieces of wood or other materials such as ivory and mother-of-pearl: and marquetry, the glueing of different coloured small pieces of veneer onto the timber surfaces, which allowed for more detailed work that often included ivory, metal, mother-of-peartl, tortoiseshell, horn or sesmi-precious stones.