Paula repolishing a credenza base which we had to re-veneer as the walnut was cracking and peeling away (a common problem for veneer which has been around central heating).

French polish is made from shellac flakes, which is a secretion of the lac beetle found in Asia, and alcohol.  The secretion is harvested and then processed into flakes and also into buttons (where the name button polish comes from).  French polishing has been around in the UK for around 300 years.  Before french polishing was used as a finish, joyners and cabinet makers finished furniture with a mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and beeswax.  This mixture was applied with a cloth wrapped around a wooden block which was rubbed vigorously over the furniture for a period of around 30 days until a bright and durable finish was formed on the surface of the wood.  When french polish was introduced into the country, cabinet makers gave the product to the finishing rooms and essentially left the finishers to it without instruction; of course, finishers were unfamiliar with the polish and not used to having to employ a completely different method of application, meaning that initially there were an awful lot of mistakes.

Over a period of time the finishers developed their own way of applying french polish and the cabinet makers kept this a great secret from their competitors as to how the finish was applied and how each individual would work the finish; finishing became a very important part of the cabinet maker’s trade as a good finisher could make poor cabinet work and poor timber look good.  

The method involved in the french polishing technique entails building up thin coats of shellac dissolved in alcohol on to a surface, for example mahogany, rosewood or walnut, by the use of a rubber.  In actual fact this is a rubber in name only and is also known as a fad or wad; it is actually a piece of cotton about the size of a handkerchief and some cotton waste or wadding placed into the middle which is then wrapped up.  The object is to get the rubber as flat as you can.  The rubber is fed with french or garnet polish and alcohol and then applied thinly to the furniture using circular rubbing motions or figures of eight, slowly building up layers of polish over several days, lubricating the rubber if it starts to stick with linseed oil (specifically not boiled linseed oil).  Mineral oils are also good for polishing and some polishers use baby oil.  French polish has a beauty of its own and brings out the wonderful colours in quality timbers like mahogany, rosewood and walnut.  It also improves the appearance of cheap timbers which can make an inexpensive piece of furniture more desirable.  The process is very labour intensive and requires some skill, and in the Victorian age french polishers were considered craftsmen.  Around the 1920s, furniture manufacturing with the advent of mechanisation needed to have a durable finish that could be quickly and more cheaply applied and it was found that spraying nitrocellulose lacquer was a good alternative to french polishing.  It is true today as well that spray lacquered finishes are quicker and easier to apply and probably more durable, however the french polished surface is more forgiving in that it can be repaired more easily and is, to my mind, more beautiful in that it lends a depth and lustre which spray finishing cannot.  We would always put a french polished surface on an antique piece of furniture in preference to spraying (unless expressly asked by the customer).

One of the things that polishers need to master is the art of grain filling timber.  If this is not mastered, you can be polishing for weeks to get a flat level surface which will be difficult to achieve if the pores in the wood are not filled (especially in harder woods such as Cuban mahogany and South American rosewood).  There are modern grain fillers on the market which can be used; most of them have a proprietary colour added to them and it would not be appropriate to add colour to certain timbers, so we would normally employ a traditional method using pumice, which is available from good polishing shops.