Starting to Collect Antique Furniture

Description

This concise yet wide-ranging survey of collectable antique furniture, illustrated throughout in full colour, guides the new collector through almost three centuries of Western Furniture with clarity and authority. Invaluable as a reference tool, it offers collectors the means to identify key features of a wide variety of pieces, ranging from the Gothic and Renaissance period to Art Nouveau, and the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is structured chronologically by century and, within each time period, by country. Existing collectors will find all titles in the series act as a handy and portable reference, and beginners will welcome a reliable, accessible starting point from which their interests can develop. Readers will find succinct sections detailing all major phases in Western Furniture, with full-colour coverage of English, American, French, Italian, German, Austrian, Low Countries, Spanish and Portuguese pieces. The work of important furniture designers is discussed, from the French ebenistes and Chippendale, through key 19th century figures such as Biedermeier, Pugin and Stickley and the mass producers of bentwood such as the Austrian Thonet, to the Belgian and French Art Nouveau designers.

John Andrews has been associated with Antique Collectors' Club since its inception thirty years ago. His original price guide to antique furniture, now available as British Antique Furniture, has been reprinted and revised many times. It is a standard work of reference. He is also an active businessman and author of numerous art-antique crime novels under the pseudonym John Malcolm.

"Suffice to say that this book is small enough to be toted around the auction rooms and galleries. Like all Antique Collectors' Club offerings, it is chock full of splendid photographs and illustrations, with a huge amount of information expressed in an invitingly readable manner on its well laid out pages" Furniture & Cabinetmaking