Illustrated History of Furniture: From the Earliest to the Present Time

A journey through two thousand years of human creativity, told through the objects we sit, sleep, and store our lives in. Litchfield traces furniture from ancient Egyptian tombs and Greek symposia through the ornate courts of Louis XIV to the workshop of Chippendale himself, revealing how each era's furniture encodes its values, ambitions, and contradictions. The book shines brightest when examining the great English cabinetmakers and the French meubles de luxe that commanded fortunes at auction, but Litchfield never lets readers forget the human cost behind the artistry: the lives and sustenance of the workers who produced beauty they could never afford. Written in 1892 with the confidence of Victorian scholarship, this remains an invaluable window into material culture, essential for anyone who wants to understand how we lived before we lived as we do now.