Eugenio Quarti, the "Prince of the Cabinet-Makers"

Eugenio Quarti, known as the "prince of the cabinet-makers", was born in 1867 in Villa d'Almè, a small village in the province of Bergamo, from an artisan family of woodworkers.

At the age of 14 he was sent to his father in Paris where he worked as trainee in a cabinet-making shop. At the end of 1880s he came back to Italy and he settled in Milan where he worked with Carlo Bugatti for a brief period. In the same year he opened his own workshop in via Donizetti.

His first designed and produced pieces of furniture were strongly influenced by Bugatti's style.

From 1894 when he took part to the Exposition Internationale d'Anvers held in Antwerp and the International Labour Exhibition held in Milan to 1898, Eugenio Quarti developed his personal idea of design vintage furniture thanks also to the encouragement of Vittore Grubicy and he made himself free from Bugatti's influence permanently managing to find new shapes in order to define his own personal style. In the same year he took part to the Exhibition in Turin submitting design and vintage furniture made of mainly dark wood decorated with metal, ivory, turtle and pearl settings. By that time he was totally emancipated from the past stylistic features and he established himself as an artist with a strong unique and developed personality. Pieces of furniture made of refined woods such as teak, mahogany, rosewood, maracaibo, New Guinea walnut, natural or stained maple were embellished with thin inlays, metal filaments and valuable materials used to adorn the outlines in which vegetable or stylized animal ornamental motifs were included. In 1900 he took part to the International Exhibition in Paris where he won the "Grand Prix" award of the jury. After becoming an unquestioned famous and successful artist, his range of customers grew including also the aristocracy and the upper middle class. The pieces of furniture he produced were increasingly luxurious and very expensive. Once he left his workshop in Via Donizetti, he opened a new bigger one (100 m2) in Via Palermo, where he remained until 1904.

From that moment on, Eugenio Quarti, who manufactured exclusively isolated pieces to be inserted in already furnished settings, began a production suitable for creating complete often complex and impressive environments.

At the end of 1904 Quarti moved to a new factory designed by Luigi Conconi situated in Via Carlo Poma. Here, he gradually started a production that aimed at a progressive widening of customers in an entrepreneurial perspective of that time. Alongside his luxurious and valuable pieces of furniture, he offered also a cheaper line of items. From 1906 he introduced checkered inlays and half-spheres made of dark and light wood or glass with clear reference to Vienna in his geometrical decorations. Many important furnishings designed for some Milanese houses and for the Camparino bar in Galleria Vittorio Veneto II dated back to the first decade of the century. In 1923 Quarti replaced the old Empire Style furnishings in the Camparino bar with his own furniture. A deep and significant makeover that allowed the collaboration with Angiolo d'Andrea and Alessandro Mazzuccotelli. Eugenio Quarti passed away six years later leaving his company to the son Mario (1901-1974), who inherited his father's company and reorganized it. During 1930s, the "Quarti – Furniture" counted around 200 employees.

Without a doubt, Eugenio Quarti was one of the most famous cabinet-makers of the 20th century and he worked with the most prestigious architects of his age.

Among them Giuseppe Sommaruga, Luigi Broggi, Alfredo Campanini.

He worked also as decorator, designing complete furnishings for public and private buildings. He designed the furniture for Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, Villa Carosio in Baveno, Grand Hotel and Casino in San Pellegrino Terme, Hungaria Palace in Venice Lido. He took also other less important commitments such as the furniture for Villa Mariani in Bordighera, the residence of the painter Pompeo Mariani. To his activity as cabinet-maker before and decorator after, he added an educational activity and he became executive director of the art studio applied to the wood industry, at the Humanitarian Society.

The suggested furniture shows, in our opinion, the traditional and more important features of Quarti's cabinet-making production after 1904 and completely consistent with the entrepreneurial will inherent in the production of complete furniture affordable by a larger range of customers.

Nevertheless he keeps the stylistic elements of his most famous and rewarded productions. For example the so called coup de fouet, with maple threads, similar to the one present on the music cabinet (exibited in Turin in 1902) and visible on the "The Italian Liberty furniture" Irene de Guttry / Maria Paola Maino page 185 fig. 13; or to the flower inlaid made of light wood, similar for manufacture and style to the one present on the living room furniture visible on "The twentieth century furniture" Degrada, Gualdoni Ed De Agostini page 75 (exhibited first in Paris in 1900 and then in Turin in 1902). Generally there are obvious similarities with the specific stylistics. They can be noticed in the artistic flower inlaid, the light inlays that follow the natural lines of the main species, simple but refined lines like the sinuous underlining of curves given by the insertion of thin brass threads (typical also of the personal signature with which the cabinet-maker used to sign his most important productions) and coined with the term "incastonatura" (setting, mounting). The uncommon embellishments and the light blue lacquer stand out in the refined furniture.