The Gunstock Maker’s Gift: Johann Schwanhardt and the Origins of Flame Molding (~1600)

Before there were machines, there was a man. And before there were picture frames shimmering with rippled light, there were gun barrels.

The origin story of waveform molding — the technique behind every “Dutch ripple” frame you’ve ever seen — doesn’t begin in Holland at all. It begins in a small Franconian town in southern Germany, around the year 1600, in the hands of a craftsman who made his living shaping wood and metal for firearms.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Johann Schwanhardt was a Kunstschreiner — an art joiner — working in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a walled medieval town on the Romantic Road in what is now Bavaria. He was also a gunstock maker, a trade that put him in daily contact with one of the most sophisticated manufacturing techniques of his era: rifling.

Rifling — the cutting of spiral grooves inside a gun barrel to impart spin to a projectile — had been practiced since the late 15th century. The technique relied on a pattern-and-follower system: a spiral guide rod was pulled or pushed through the barrel, and a follower attached to the cutting head traced the guide, transferring the spiral pattern to the interior wall of the barrel in controlled, incremental cuts.

Schwanhardt recognized something that, in retrospect, seems obvious but at the time was a conceptual leap: the same pattern-and-follower principle that put spiral grooves inside a gun barrel could put undulating waves onto the surface of a piece of wood. Instead of a spiral guide rod, you used a sinuous template. Instead of a cutting head inside a barrel, you used a blade above a wooden stock piece. The fundamental logic — a shaped pattern controlling the movement of a cutter — was identical.

Conservation scholar Jonathan Thornton, who has studied the lineage of these devices extensively, notes that the connection between gunsmithing and decorative woodwork is probably not coincidental. Schwanhardt occupied both worlds, and the technology bridged them.

The Language of Flame and Wave

What Schwanhardt created — or at least, what tradition credits him with inventing — were the techniques that the German language divides into two distinct categories, each describing a different type of surface undulation:

Flammleisten — literally “flame moldings.” These produce a side-to-side waveform, where the ripple pattern moves horizontally across the face of the molding, like the flickering of a candle flame. The German verb flammen captures this lateral, shimmering movement. These were produced by devices where the stock piece (or the plane, in early versions like the Kaseman wriggling plane) was forced to move laterally as it passed through or under the cutter.

Wellenleisten — literally “wave moldings.” These produce a vertical undulation, where the surface ripples up and down like ocean waves. The German Wellen (waves) describes this vertical rise and fall. These required a different mechanical approach — typically an eccentric wheel or cam that lifted and lowered the stock relative to the blade.

The distinction matters because it’s not just terminological — it reflects fundamentally different mechanical actions. A Flammleisten machine moves the work sideways. A Wellenleisten machine moves the work vertically. Combining both motions in a single pass produces the complex “basketweave” patterns found on many Dutch and Flemish frames.

English largely collapses this distinction into the single word “ripple,” which obscures the mechanical and aesthetic differences. The French split it differently: moulures ondées (waved moldings) is the general term, without the flame/wave distinction. Only the German terminology maps precisely to what the machines actually do.

From Rothenburg to Nuremberg

Schwanhardt’s technique might have remained a local specialty had it not been for a family connection. His son-in-law, Jacob Hepner, brought the technology from Rothenburg to Nuremberg — a far larger city and one of the great centers of European craft production in the 17th century.

Nuremberg in 1600 was a powerhouse. It was a center of precision metalwork, clock-making, printing, and instrument-making. It sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking northern and southern Europe. And critically, it was home to a dense network of Kunstschreiner and Ebenisten (ebony workers) who produced luxury furniture and decorative objects for courts and wealthy merchants across the continent.

In this environment, Hepner’s wave-molding technique found fertile ground. The combination of Nuremberg’s existing expertise in precision mechanisms, its access to high-quality materials, and its commercial reach meant that Flammleisten and Wellenleisten production could scale rapidly. Within a generation, waveform moldings were being produced across southern Germany and exported far beyond.

The Hapsburg Connection

The spread of flame and wave moldings across Europe follows a map that would puzzle anyone thinking of them as a “Dutch” invention. The regions where these frames appear most abundantly in the early to mid-17th century are: southern Germany (especially Nuremberg, Augsburg, and the Bavarian workshops), Flanders (especially Antwerp), the Northern Netherlands (especially Amsterdam), and Spain.

What these regions share is not a common language or religion. What they share is the Hapsburg sphere of influence and the trade networks it sustained. The Spanish Hapsburgs ruled the Southern Netherlands (Flanders) directly. The Holy Roman Empire, under Hapsburg leadership, encompassed the German workshops. The Dutch Republic, though politically independent and at war with Spain for much of the period, was deeply enmeshed in the same commercial networks through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which had shareholders from across the Hapsburg world.

The VOC is especially important because it controlled the supply of the material that made ripple frames so distinctive: ebony. Diospyros ebenum and related species were harvested from VOC holdings in Sri Lanka, India, and Southeast Asia and shipped in bulk to European ports starting in the early 17th century. Ebony was dense, dark, lustrous, and exotic — perfect for luxury goods. But it was also extremely expensive, extremely hard, and available only in relatively narrow billets. These properties dictated how it could be used in frame-making.

Why Ripple?

Ebony’s physical properties help explain why wave-molding technology and ebony were so perfectly matched — a marriage that defined an era of European frame-making.

Ebony was always used as a veneer on picture frames, never as a solid structural material. It was too expensive and too dimensionally tricky for that. The substrate was typically a softer secondary wood — pine, poplar, or oak — over which thin strips of ebony were applied.

But veneer creates a problem for decoration. You can’t carve deeply into a veneer — there isn’t enough material. The composition ornament (compo) that would later allow the elaborate relief decoration of gilded frames wasn’t invented until the early 18th century in France. So if you wanted to decorate an ebony frame in 1630, your options were limited: inlay (tortoiseshell, ivory, bone, boxwood), applied metal mounts, or surface texture.

Waveform moldings were the ideal solution. The ripple technique worked with the thinness of the material rather than against it. The cuts were shallow — typically no more than a quarter inch deep — but the undulating surface they created transformed the way light played across the frame. Under candlelight (the only artificial illumination available), a ripple frame didn’t just sit there passively. It shimmered. The peaks caught light while the troughs fell into shadow, creating a continuously shifting pattern of highlights and darks that changed as the viewer moved or the candle flickered.

This was decoration achieved not through material addition (carving, gilding, applied ornament) but through material manipulation — reshaping the surface to interact dynamically with light. It was a profoundly elegant solution, and it produced frames whose visual energy was completely disproportionate to their physical depth.

The “Dutch” Misnomer

So why do we call them “Dutch ripple” frames?

The short answer is association. Ebonized ripple frames became so strongly identified with the Protestant aesthetic of the Dutch Republic — the austere, dark frames surrounding the paintings of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, de Hooch, and their contemporaries — that the style became synonymous with Holland in the minds of later collectors and dealers.

There’s a cultural logic to this association. The Reformed Protestant culture of the Dutch Republic favored visual restraint. Where Catholic churches and palaces blazed with gilded Baroque frames, the homes and civic buildings of Amsterdam and Delft preferred frames that were dark, understated, and materially refined rather than ornamentally extravagant. The ebony ripple frame fit this aesthetic perfectly: luxurious (ebony was expensive), technically sophisticated, but visually quiet. It let the painting command attention.

But the association is misleading as attribution. As frame scholar Lowy 1907 has noted, ripple frames were more often made in Flanders, Germany, Spain, or Italy than in Holland itself. The Rijksmuseum’s landmark 1984 exhibition Prijst de lijst (“Praise the Frame”) — later published in English as Framing in the Golden Age — found surprisingly few ripple frames among the nearly one hundred original Dutch frames it catalogued. The dominant Dutch frame types were plain ebony or fruitwood cabinetmaker’s frames, Auricular carved frames, and trophy frames. Ripple moldings, when they appeared, were typically limited to a single narrow strip.

The most elaborately rippled frames — those with multiple bands of different wave patterns, combined with tortoiseshell veneers, ivory inlay, or gilt accents — were predominantly Flemish (especially Antwerp), southern German, or Spanish in origin.

Schwanhardt, working in Franconian Germany around 1600, is the origin point. The “Dutch” label is a testament to the power of cultural association over historical accuracy.

 

Sources:

• Jonathan Thornton, “The History and Technology of Waveform Moldings: Reproducing and Using Moxon’s ‘Waving Engine,’” WAG Postprints, 2002.
• “Flammleiste,” Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte (RDK), Vol. IX, columns 752–806, by Josef Maria Greber and Ingrid Haug. Available at rdklabor.de.
• “Flammleiste,” German Wikipedia (de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammleiste).
• P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, Framing in the Golden Age: Picture and Frame in 17th-Century Holland (Waanders, 1995).
• V&A Collection entry for Flemish tortoiseshell and ebony frame, 1640–1700 (collections.vam.ac.uk, item O369441).
• Caversham Picture Framer, “Dutch Ripple” (cavershampictureframer.co.uk).
• Lowy 1907, educational pages on Dutch ripple frames (lowy1907.com).
• Lynn Roberts, “Frames in Paintings: Part 2 – The 17th Century,” The Frame Blog, 2024.