There is a graceful Louis XV sofa in the Petit Trianon that I have copied many times.  The copy is as beautiful as the original, because this sort of furniture depends upon exquisite design and perfect workmanship for its beauty.  It is possible that a modern craftsman might not have achieved so graceful a design, but the perfection of his workmanship cannot be gainsaid.  The frame of the sofa must be carved and then painted and guilded many times before it is ready for the brocade covering, and the cost of three hundred dollars for the finished sofa is not too much.  The original could not be purchased at any price.

Then there is the Chinese lacquer furniture of the Chippendale period that we are using so much now.  The process of lacquering is as tedious to-day as it ever was, and the reproductions sell for goodly sums.  A tall secretary of black and gold lacquer may cost six hundred dollars.  You can imagine what an Eighteenth Century piece would cost!

The person who said that a taste for old furniture and bibelots was “worse than a passion, it was a vice,” was certainly near the truth!  It is an absorbing pursuit, an obsession, and it grows with what it feeds on.  As in objects of art, so in old furniture, the supply will always equal the demand of the unwary.  The serious amateur will fight shy of all miracles and content himself with excellent reproductions.  Nothing later than the furniture of the Eighteenth Century is included in the term, “old furniture.”  There are many fine cabinet makers in the early Nineteenth Century, but from them until the last decade the horrors that were perpetrated have never been equaled in the history of household decorations.

I fancy the furniture of the mid-Victorian era will never be coveted by collectors, unless someone should build a museum for the freakish objects of house furnishing.  America could contribute much to such a collection, for surely the black walnut era of the Nineteenth Century will never be surpassed in ugliness and bad taste, unless—­rare fortune—­there should be a sudden epidemic of appreciation among cabinet-makers, which would result in their taking the beautiful wood in the black walnut beds and wardrobes and such and make it over into worth-while things.  It would be a fine thing to release the mistreated, velvety wood from its grotesqueries, and give it a renaissance in graceful cabinets, small tables, footstools, and the many small things that could be so easily made from huge unwieldy wardrobes and beds and bureaux.

The workmen of to-day have their eyes opened.  They have no excuse for producing unworthy things, when the greatest private collections are loaned or given outright to the museums.  The new wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York houses several fine old collections of furniture, the Hoentschel collection, for which the wing was really planned, having been given to the people of New York by Mr. Pierpont Morgan.  This collection is an education in the French decorative arts.  Then, too, there is the Bolles collection of American furniture presented to the museum by Mrs. Russell Sage.