Bob Boyd is the lucky owner of these beautifully crafted marquetry pictures that were made in Germany by Buchschmid & Gretaux in approximately the late 1950's to early 1960's.

Bob has asked us if we can provide him with any information about Buchschmid & Gretaux, but, even though we have extensive archives and reference sources, we have to hold our collective hand up and say that Bob has beaten us with this enquiry!

If any of you out there have any knowledge of these talented German Marquetry artists would you mind getting in touch and give us some idea of what happened to this fine company.

The veneer selections used in these examples look to be nicely chosen and do complement their subjects rather well. The distant mountain range depicted in the Neuschwanstein Castle picture is very sublety convincing and fades into the background in a very naturalistic fashion.

The only references we have available on Buchschmid and Gretaux is that they refered to their work as "Wood Inlay Art of Heidelberg". Although we would term the method used for making the pictures as marquetry rather than wood inlay work. However, inlay work is an apt description of the window method we all seem to use these days!

From a close look at the supplied photos of these marquetry pictures we rather suspect that they have been "saw cut" rather than knife or blade cut.

We are assuming that these marquetry works were produced in reasonable quantities of say at least ten examples of each picture.

Such a level would be practical for saw cut pictures because, if they are cut with a fret or piercing saw using a standard veneer pack of ten sheets of veneer, it would be feasible to assume that ten identical marquetry pictures could be produced from such methods.

If Buchschmid and Gretaux were using some form of templates for their cutting, then it is conceivable that they may well have produced their pictures in series of hundreds, but this is just pure conjecture until any of you can put us wiser on this subject.

Unfortunately even that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, doesn't seem to have any information on Buchschmid and Gretaux!

We offer our grateful thanks to any of you who can help us to track down some information on these fascinating marquetry artists.

If you are able to help you can, (if you are using Outlook Express or Windows Mail), click the "Marquetry Enquiry Reply" box to the right of these pictures and fill in the pre-addressed Email form that will appear on screen.

Or, if you are using a different Email client just type the following address in to your 'send to' address bar (there are no gaps in the address, it's all one word. We have just split it up a little so that it does not spread too far across the page nudging the pictures to the right and thereby making you have to scroll to read everything!):

mqstymail@
redbridgemarquetry
group.org

You could of course just copy and paste the above address, but if you do, make sure that you remove any spaces between the words and letters so that it makes one complete 'word'.

Thanks for your help.

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