High-End Hand Painted Furniture

At Patina we like to make a distinction between fine hand painted furniture and just plain hand painted furniture. The distinction, we believe, is a crucial one.

You've probably seen nice examples of hand painted furniture in folk art museums, mountain craft shops or in trendy galleries. These pieces, though created by talented artists, are usually not fine painted furniture. Often, folk art furniture frames, for example, are antiques with ruined finishes that have been primed and then painted over.

By contrast, in Patina's furniture, the difference is the quality of construction, the craftsmanship, and the paint surface preparation. Painting and decoration are only the final steps. It is the preliminary steps that distinguish fine painted furniture.

For example, Patina builds all its furniture frames using local wood from the forests of Northern Italy. These frames are built by fourth-generation furniture makers who learned their craft from their fathers. The furniture workshops are not particularly high-tech. The craftsmen use basic woodworking tools and hand carve decorations. For the most part, furniture is built in the old way and built with one purpose in mind: hand painting it.

Once a frame is produced, it is covered with several layers of traditional gesso, which is the ultimate primer for hand painted furniture. Furniture prepared with gesso holds up well because the surface is durable and holds the paint—or the gold leaf.

Gold leaf, in fact, requires the use of gesso so that the gold bonds to the surface. Because of the use of gesso, gold and painted designs remain intact while developing a warm patina, even for hundreds of years, like Renaissance paintings and illuminated manuscripts—which, yes, also used gesso as their base.

Maybe that should be the first question when asking is this fine hand painted furniture. That is: Is traditional gesso used as a primer so that the gold or the paint remains intact after many years of use?

Durability is, after all, the ultimate difference between folk gallery hand painted and fine painted furniture. Patina's furniture is built to last as long as a Renaissance painting because it is produced using the same techniques.

The chest shown here is a Tivoli Nightstand, model number C43 / LG / 3D / 53IV. See our online gallery of furniture, starting with our Introduction to Patina furniture.