City Furniture

Antique Victorian Furniture – Who Was Alexander Roux?

by admin

Alexander Roux (pronounced “Roo”) was one of the top cabinet makers of the Victorian era in America, and today his name inspires great respect in the world of antique Victorian furniture.

Born in France in 1813, Roux Guild was formed in his home in the Rococo Revival. In the 1830s he emigrated to the United States. And 1836 (presumably 1837), he opened a store in New York. Because French furniture was in vogue in New York at the time of Roux himself, both in its advertising and its furniture as “French cabinet maker.”

His business flourished. In 1850 he had 120 craftsmen in his employ. Roux uses advanced technologies such as steam saws and routers, which allows him quickly to the wood form. It gave him more time to work his sculptures adorned fantastic.

Roux is renowned for its rococo pieces known, but it hardly limited this style. In fact, he brought his mastery of the changing pattern of the day: Gothic Revival in the 1840s, Elizabethan and Renaissance and rococo style more in the 1850 Greek Revival in the 1860s.

Roux quality parts for Elite customers as William B. Astor designed. In 1853 he exhibited his works at the Crystal Palace exhibition in New York. Business Roux was enormously profitable. He would have earned as much as $ 500,000 in the 1870s, an enormous sum for the day.

Roux was married three times and had six children. For a year, in 1847, joined his brother Frederick the company. Roux himself finally retired in 1881 and transformed the business to his son, Alexander J. Roux, who carried out until 1898.

Roux business had a number of locations in New York, including five different locations on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Nineteenth century America, with its wealth and new technologies, proved to be an ideal place for Roux to develop its know-how.

His work shows an individuality of thought and freedom of form that makes it highly desirable among today’s collectors of antique Victorian furniture. His rococo pieces include a variety of unusual sculptures naturalists like pomegranates and pineapples, the heads of deer, wolves and dogs, crabs, lobsters and other marine animals. Roux preferred fancy wood such as walnut, with even the same as secondary wood interior.

In 2000, became one of the lavish buffets Roux at the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York, the exhibition “Art and Empire City, issued from 1825 to 1861.