What marquetry is, and how these panels are made

What marquetry is

Marquetry is the art of making a picture or a pattern out of wood veneer. Veneer is wood sliced very thin, usually somewhere between half a millimetre and a millimetre, thin enough that a single log can yield hundreds of sheets and thin enough to cut with a knife.

You take those sheets, cut shapes out of them, fit the shapes together like a jigsaw with no gaps, and glue the whole assembled sheet down onto a stable board. What you end up with is a flat surface where every colour and every line is a piece of real wood rather than paint.

The craft is centuries old. It reached its height in seventeenth century France and Holland on furniture, and for most of its history it has been decoration applied to something else, a cabinet door or a table top or the dashboard of a car. What I do is treat it as the artwork itself.

How one of my panels is made

I start by choosing the veneer, which is the decision that matters most, because the grain is already there and I am not going to improve on it. A sheet of burr or a piece of quilted sapele has a pattern in it that took the tree decades to write, and my job is to find where it wants to be cut.

Then I dye it. I buy natural veneer and colour it myself, so the dye goes all the way through the sheet rather than sitting on the surface, which means the figure of the wood still reads through the colour and a scratch will not show a different colour underneath.

Then comes the cutting, which is all done by hand with a scalpel. Every element, every line, every small square is cut individually and fitted to its neighbours. Book matching, where a sheet is opened out against its own mirror image like a butterfly, is the reason so many of my compositions are symmetrical, and the symmetry is never quite exact because no two halves of a tree are.

Once the whole face is assembled and taped, it goes down onto MDF or plywood under pressure, gets levelled, and is finished. A large panel takes months.

Marquetry, intarsia and inlay, the difference

These three words get used interchangeably and they should not be. Marquetry is a whole surface assembled from veneer and applied to a board as one sheet. Inlay is a shape cut into solid wood with another piece set into the recess. Intarsia, in the modern woodworking sense, is a mosaic of thick solid pieces shaped and often sanded to different heights so the picture has relief.

In Polish the word intarsja covers what English calls marquetry, which is why my Polish pages use it and my English pages do not.

Why it is an endangered craft

Marquetry appears on the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts, which is the UK register of crafts at risk of dying out. The reason is not that people stopped liking it. It is that the training routes closed, the furniture trade that supported it moved to machine cut veneer and printed woodgrain, and laser cutting now does in minutes a version of what took a person a week.

A laser leaves a burnt edge and it cannot read grain. It cuts what the file tells it to cut. The decisions that make marquetry worth looking at, which sheet, which direction, where the join falls, are all made before any cutting starts, and those are the decisions no machine is making.

Why the scale matters

Almost all historical marquetry is small, because it was made to fit furniture. A jewellery box lid, a panel in a cabinet door, a border on a table.

My panels are between a metre and a metre and three quarters tall. At that size the material behaves differently, because you stop reading the surface as decoration and start reading it the way you read a painting, from across a room and then from close up, and the grain becomes landscape rather than texture. It is also considerably harder to keep flat, which is part of why so few people do it.

Living with a marquetry panel

Wood veneer is stable and long lived, and the same rules apply to it as to any good piece of furniture or any work on paper.

Keep it out of direct sunlight, because strong sun will fade dye and darken pale woods over years. Keep the room at a normal, fairly steady humidity, so not directly above a radiator and not in an unheated outbuilding. Dust it with a dry soft cloth and nothing else, because silicone polishes and household sprays leave a film that is difficult to remove later.

Treated like that, a panel will outlive everybody who argues about it.