Marquetry

Marquetry is a decorative woodworking technique in which thin veneers of different woods, and sometimes other materials such as shell, bone, ivory, or metal, are cut into shapes and pieced together like a mosaic to form a picture or pattern, which is then glued as a single veneer sheet onto the surface of a piece of furniture or other object. Distinguished from the related technique of inlay, in which pieces are set directly into a solid recessed ground, marquetry instead assembles the entire decorative veneer as a separate composed sheet before it is applied, and the technique flourished especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European cabinetmaking, reaching particular refinement in the work of French ebenistes such as Andre-Charles Boulle.