The French architect, Le Pantre (1617-82), designed furniture and decoration in the heavy classical style of the Roman antique, mixed with shell-work, grotesques, and little Cupids or “putti,” and also engraved and published a book of studies of Roman ornament from sketches that his master, Adam Phillipon, had made in Italy. He worked with Le Brun, the painter and director of the decoration at Versailles. Le Brun’s own work was heavy and dull, although he aimed at grandeur and gorgeousness of effect. He was director of the Gobelins tapestry manufactory, and his style of work was in harmony with the pompous ideas of Louis the “Grand Monarch.” Madame de Maintenon says in one of her letters to a friend, that Louis was so fond of symmetry and stateliness in his architecture, as in other things, that he would have you “perish in his symmetry,” for he caused his doors and windows to be constructed in pairs opposite to one another, which gave to everybody who lived in his palaces their death of cold by draughts of air. Much of the more artistic kind of furniture was imported from the Continent into England during the seventeenth century, and a feature of this period was the highly decorative silver furniture already noticed in the chapter on metal work. [Illustration: Fig. 245.—Carved Bracket; English; Eighteenth Century. (P.)] In this century and early in the following one, the art of wood carving was greatly developed in England, chiefly owing to the genius of Grinling Gibbons and to the influence of Sir Christopher Wren, the style developed being a more or less realistic or baroque form of the Renaissance (Figs. 245, 246). Gibbons carried out some of his carvings to an astonishing degree of realism: bouquets of flowers, festoons of fruit and flowers, birds, figures, and drapery were executed by him in the highest possible relief, which looked detached from the ground, and yet they usually formed a part of the solid wood with the background. Ornament was carved with a singular crispness, and apparently without any hesitation on the part of the carver. Though we may condemn the florid looseness of the style of Gibbons, we must admire the dexterity of workmanship and general technical excellence imparted to everything he touched. Some of his best work may still be seen at Chatsworth, Petworth House in Sussex, Lyme Hall in Cheshire, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Trinity College Chapel at Oxford. Many of the old English halls and manor houses also contain examples of carving done either by Gibbons or his pupils and immediate successors, namely, Watson, Drevot, and Laurens. [Illustration: Fig. 246.—Mirror Frame; Seventeenth Century. (P.)]