Few figures in the history of French furniture are as colourful, or as candid, as André Mailfert. Cabinetmaker, industrialist, painter, poet and aviator, he built in Orléans one of the most remarkable workshops of the early twentieth century, where some two hundred craftsmen produced furniture in the great eighteenth-century manner with a mastery of wood, gilding and patina that could deceive the most seasoned eye. His witty memoir, a classic of the antiques world, has made him a legend, and his pieces, many of them proudly stamped with his own name, are today appreciated for their craftsmanship and for the irresistible story they carry.
André Mailfert founded his business in Orléans in 1904. His great insight was that a subtly worked patina, applied to furniture built according to the traditional techniques of cabinetmaking and from carefully chosen old timber, could make the line between old and new almost impossible to draw. At its height his enterprise employed some two hundred cabinetmakers, joiners, gilders, painters and patinators, and turned out hundreds of commodes, tables, trumeaux, chairs and buffets. Many were sold through antique dealers in France and abroad, and their buyers never imagined they had left the workshop only the day before.
Mailfert's audacity knew few limits. He went so far as to invent an entire "École de la Loire", complete with an imaginary eighteenth-century master cabinetmaker, Jean-François Hardy, and in 1932 he published a richly illustrated catalogue, Les Meubles de l'École de la Loire, whose descriptions of the models on offer remain a delight to read. His establishment was housed in the so-called Hôtel François Ier in Orléans, a Renaissance building whose own romantic legend, a pure invention of a nineteenth-century historian, made it a fitting setting for his collection of furniture signed Mailfert.
In 1935 he published his memoirs with Flammarion under the title Au pays des antiquaires : confidences d'un maquilleur professionnel. Brimming with anecdotes, the book settles scores with members of the Orléans bourgeoisie and boasts of the experts and dealers he claimed to have fooled. Among its stories is that of a joiner named Dubois in his employ, whose name, shared with the great ébéniste Jacques Dubois, served to stamp all manner of Louis XV chairs, even though the real Dubois was a cabinetmaker who never made seat furniture at all. The photographs reproduced in the book, however, allow the reader to weigh the author's boasts against the true quality of his work. Frequently reprinted, the memoir was republished in 2018 by Corsaire Éditions in an annotated edition by Josiane Guibert.
Mailfert's talents reached well beyond the workshop. An aviator himself and the brother of Lieutenant Georges Mailfert, a pioneer of military aviation, he paid tribute to the pilots of the First World War in Les Aigles, a collection of poems published in 1929 with a preface by Edmond Rostand. He also wrote and painted, publishing in 1938 a work devoted to the gorges of the Verdon. He died in 1943, leaving behind a body of work, and a book, that continue to fascinate collectors, dealers and anyone who has ever wondered what makes a piece of furniture truly old.
