Nicolas Pineau

His chief work in Russia is the design and carving of the Grand Cabinet of Peter the Great in Peterhof, which the Tsar showed, newly complete, in August 1721.

The richly carved panels in varying relief with bold central cartouches and military trophies follow surviving drawings by Pineau.

On his return to Paris, Pineau found the Régence manner had been transformed in the decade of his absence by the carver-designer François-Antoine Vassé and the designer Gilles-Marie Oppenord (see Rococo).

Surprised to find the field of architecture currently well filled by highly competent Paris-trained practitioners, Jacques-François Blondel reported, he depended upon his own specialty of designs for carving, and enjoyed a vogue extraordinaire.

The later reaction against the Rococo ensured that most of these crucial works were destroyed through neglect: Pineau's work is amply documented, however, in his surviving drawings and in engravings, witnesses to his delicacy of relief, the extreme attenuation of his mouldings and the free interplay of tendril and interlace (Kimball, p. 163).