There has been a renewed interest in Boulle marquetry Napoleon III furniture in the last years.
Most of the time, unfortunately, the cost of restoration is too high for a lot of customers or even compared to the value of the piece. It is sad as those pieces need to be well maintained.
Here is a little story on restoring a 1860-1880 decanter with almost all the original Baccarat crystals.
It arrived with the usual loose and missing brass, but also it had been meanly sanded, without losing the engraving though, and sprayed with lacquer.
First thing to do is to lift the loose brass and assess the damage.
Epoxy is not the way to re-glue Boulle. It is usually used without cleaning under and therefore the brass is bulging and is extremely difficult to remove when you want to do a proper restoration.
Neither is contact cement. In fact you can not imagine how many pieces we have to restore that have been “repaired” with contact cement. It is not long term efficient on any kind of veneering.
After cleaning the substrate and the inside of the brass of any glue and oxidation
The piece is re-moisturized and the pieces that are not too damaged are rehydrated; new glue is inserted and pieces are re-glued in a vacuum bag.
Another way to re-glue what can’t or is not easy to re-glue in the vacuum bag is sand bags
or hard foam can be used also
The top was really in a very bad shape, especially as those pieces are made with wood that are steeped in acids and other chemicals to achieve the ebonizing
New brass pieces are engraved
Then the reopened kerfs and the engraving line are filled using the traditional pore filling method but with soot black and charcoal to get a real nice black
You can see I was doing the black at the same time than a clock for which you can see the story there.
After a bit of polish the hinges and all the hardware is put back on et voilà!! Much better!!!
