Imago Dei has always included furniture and cabinetry in its repertoire of creative arts and recently completed numerous furniture and cabinetry pieces in a wide range of decorative styles. Antique and distressed looks are among the most popular. We have worked on new pieces to make them look 200 years old and reworked antique and vintage pieces to give them new life. Imago Dei works with custom furniture designers, as well as new stock and one-of-a-kind antiques. Many layers are applied to achieve the final effect, and may include milk paints, low VOC acrylic paints, gold leaf, distressing techniques, stains, glazes and sealers. Great care is taken to remove any fabric, hardware, glass, etc. before the work begins.
Attention to detail is a key aspect of achieving a professional antique look. Distressing is done in such a manner to replicate normal wear over centuries of use, for example, around keyholes and on corners. 
Part of the great satisfaction of our job is bringing a client’s vision to life. Recently a client had fallen in love with a particular antique armoire that was done in the late 18th century European style of decorative painting. However, the piece did not fit his room in scale or function. The client located a similar antique that still had it’s original plain wood finish, but which fit the scale and function perfectly. So, Imago Dei worked with the client and designer to research historically accurate furniture finishes and decorative painted features. Our artists carefully replicated the color, gilding, painted subjects, styles and glazes.
To complete the replica on the door fronts, an oval trompe l’oeil frame was created that surrounds two custom landscapes. The landscapes on the original antique were painted in a Delft Blue, but the clients preferred a sepia tone image to better flow with the color palette of their room design. The artist created custom scenes done in the Hudson River School of painting, popularized in the mid-19th century and in perfect harmony with the European style.
Decorative painting is generally considered to be the work of artists who adorn objects rather than surfaces. Imago Dei is proud to have artists who are multi-facted in their talents who are able to recreate works of past masters, but also create their own custom art for our clients. Often overlooked, custom finished furniture can be the final touch that completes a room’s style and authenticity.
In the middle of 19th century in Britain, furnishings had begun to be uniformly designed, so that they fit the rest of the interiors from floor to the ceiling. The Italian, French and English decorative styles before that time, heavy and substantial Baroque, gave way to a relaxed and eclectic interior in which furniture was lighter and Neo-classical in nature. The effects were seen in Portugal, Germany, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia and United States.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement influenced by romanticism, and created by landscape painters. Their paintings depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains. This school of thought refers to a group of artists whose inspiration, production and style show consistency.While the paintings are realistic in manner, they are actually composites of different scenes or bits of nature as they were observed by the artists. The artists would travel to extreme destinations in order to observe nature in its purest form, therefore, they would be unable to paint in those conditions. So, they would sketch and makes notes in order to create the compositions later.
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