by Tod Carson | Sep 9, 2026 | All things Antiques
I’ve watched a client walk away from one of the most beautiful bergères I’ve ever sourced — a pristine Louis XV piece with a caned back and its original gilt-wood frame — because I couldn’t hand her more than a bill of sale from the dealer I bought it from. She wasn’t being difficult. She was right. A piece can be exquisite and still be a question mark, and in this business, the paper trail is what turns a question mark into an asset.
Provenance isn’t just “who owned it before.” For 18th-century French furniture, it starts with the maker’s stamp itself, the estampille that guild law required ébénistes to strike into their work once they were accepted into the Jurande des Menuisiers-Ébénistes. No stamp, or a stamp that doesn’t match the construction techniques underneath it, and you’re already asking harder questions. From there it’s inventory records, auction house chain of custody, restoration invoices, even old insurance appraisals — every document that lets you trace a piece backward instead of just trusting the story you were told at the point of sale.
I always tell clients this matters for two reasons, and only one of them is money. Yes, a documented Boulle-attributed commode with an unbroken chain back to a named 19th-century collection will out-appraise an unstamped lookalike every time — pastiche pieces built from genuine period parts are common enough that auction houses now run them through the same scrutiny as outright fakes. But the other reason is quieter: knowing exactly whose hands a piece passed through, what rooms it sat in, what history it witnessed, is half of why we collect furniture provenance at all. Strip that away and you’ve just bought old furniture.
My practical advice, especially for designers specifying pieces for a client’s home rather than their own collection: ask for the dossier before you ask for the discount. A reputable dealer should hand you stamps, invoices, and any prior appraisals, and be honest about the gaps. Keep that paper trail with the piece for its entire life — it travels with the object every time it changes hands again. It’s also exactly what we build for every piece in our collection before it ever reaches a client.
A piece without its papers is a rumor wearing good furniture. Get the paper, and you’ve got history you can actually stand behind.
-Tod Carson
by Tod Carson | Sep 2, 2026 | All things Antiques
Clients ask me all the time how to tell Louis XV vs Louis XVI at a glance, and I always tell them to start at the foot and work up. It sounds too simple, but furniture history really does hinge on that one detail. Louis XV, roughly 1730 through the 1760s, is the reign of the curve — asymmetrical rocaille carving, serpentine cabriole legs that seem to bend under their own weight, no straight line in sight if the ébéniste could help it. Louis XVI, which took hold after 1774, is the reign that put the ruler back on the workbench. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had just reintroduced Europe to classical antiquity, and cabinetmakers responded by squaring everything off: tapered, fluted legs, often finishing in a little spinning-top foot the French called a pied toupie.
The mounts tell the same story in miniature. On a Louis XV commode you’ll find gilt bronze that mimics rockwork and shell forms, applied asymmetrically because symmetry was considered stiff. On a Louis XVI piece the ormolu turns disciplined — paterae, ribbon-and-swag, husk garlands, everything mirrored down the centerline. I think about Georges Jacob a lot when I explain this, because he’s the craftsman who proves the shift wasn’t just fashion, it was survival. Jacob trained under the old guild system as a menuisier, built his early reputation on Louis XV seating full of movement and shell carving, and then pivoted his workshop almost overnight when Marie Antoinette’s taste for neoclassicism took over Versailles. The chairs he made for her at the Petit Trianon are about as far from rocaille as furniture gets, and he never missed a beat.
I had a client last year send me photos of a bergère she’d bought at an estate sale, convinced it was Louis XV because someone at the sale told her so. I didn’t even need to see the maker’s stamp — the leg was straight and fluted, tapering to a toupie foot, which put it a good generation later than she thought. That’s not a small distinction when you’re pricing a piece or specifying it for a room with a particular architectural language. A Directoire-leaning interior with crisp millwork will fight with a serpentine Louis XV settee every time, and a designer who can read the silhouette from across the room saves everyone a lot of second-guessing.
None of this is trivia for its own sake — it’s the difference between decorating a room and understanding one. I keep several pieces from both periods in our collection specifically so clients can put a hand on the actual curve or flute and feel the difference themselves, which teaches the eye faster than any photograph. Read the leg first. The rest of the piece will tell you if you were right.
-Tod Carson
by Tod Carson | Jul 17, 2026 | All things Antiques
For anyone assembling a serious collection of 18th-century French furniture, learning to authenticate a commode is not optional homework, it is the foundation everything else is built on. The difference between a museum-quality piece and a well-made later copy often comes down to details most buyers never learn to look for. Start with the stamp: after 1743, French guild law required master cabinetmakers, the maitres-ebenistes, to stamp their work with their name, typically on the back rail or underside of the carcass, alongside the JME mark of the Jurande des Menuisiers-Ebenistes guild. Names like Riesener, Leleu, and Carlin still command attention today precisely because their stamps can be verified against guild records. A crisp, correctly placed stamp is reassuring, one that looks too fresh, or sits somewhere a genuine maker never signed, is a signal to look closer.
Construction and hardware tell the rest of the story. Genuine 18th-century case pieces were built from solid oak or pine carcasses, hand-cut dovetails, and veneers laid by hand, irregular, slightly uneven, honest. Machine-cut dovetails, uniform veneer thickness, or plywood backing are 19th or 20th century tells, no matter how convincing the surface looks. Run a hand along the underside and the back, that is where restorers rarely bother to disguise their work. The bronze mounts deserve the same scrutiny: mercury-gilt ormolu, hand-chased and fitted individually to each piece, has a warmth and depth electroplated reproductions cannot replicate. Hand-fitted mounts show slight individual variation from piece to piece, while cast reproduction sets are often identical to the millimeter.
Then there is provenance, which matters as much as the physical evidence. A documented chain of ownership, prior auction records, a published catalogue raisonne, a family history that can be traced, does more than support value, it corroborates everything the stamp and construction are telling you. I always tell clients to buy the paper trail as seriously as they buy the piece. A commode without provenance can still be genuine, but one with a strong provenance is a piece you can defend for the next fifty years.
None of this replaces expertise. A trained eye, ideally one that has handled hundreds of pieces across decades, will catch what photographs and checklists cannot. But knowing what to look for changes the conversation you have with a dealer, and it should. A great commode does not need convincing. It simply needs to be understood. If you’re drawn to pieces like this one, browse our current collection to see what’s in the showroom now.
-Tod Carson
