The Long Silence and the Modern Revival

The Long Silence and the Modern Revival

Somewhere in the 19th century, the ripple molding machines stopped. Not all at once — no decree was issued, no last machine was ceremonially decommissioned. They simply became obsolete. Industrial wood-processing machinery could produce moldings faster, cheaper, and at a scale that hand-cranked waving engines couldn’t approach. The specialized knowledge of pattern-making, cutter-grinding, and machine operation that had been passed through generations of craftsmen since Schwanhardt’s time gradually lost its economic value. Machines were abandoned, scrapped, or forgotten in the back corners of workshops. The patterns wore out and weren’t replaced. The craft entered what we might call a long silence — not quite extinction, but something close.

This post is about that silence and the people who, over the past few decades, have broken it.

What Was Lost

It’s important to be specific about what disappeared during the 19th and early 20th centuries, because the loss was not primarily one of objects. Plenty of ripple-framed paintings survived in museums and private collections. What was lost was the capability — the practical knowledge of how to produce waveform moldings.

The machines themselves were few to begin with. Unlike a molding plane (thousands survive) or a lathe (ubiquitous), a waving engine was a specialized tool that only made economic sense in workshops producing ripple moldings regularly. When demand for new ripple frames disappeared — as gilded frames, then simple wooden frames, then metal section frames became the norm — the machines had no alternative use. They were junked.

The patterns were even more vulnerable. The wooden template rods that controlled the wave profile wore out quickly — 1642 Designs notes that period work often shows evidence of moldings made with worn-out patterns, where craftsmen were trying to eke out the last bit of usefulness. Without new demand to justify replacing them, worn patterns were discarded. The metal patterns that replaced them on later machines were scrapped for their material value.

The craft knowledge — how to grind a cutter to the correct profile, how to set the proper depth of cut for a given wood species, how to read the grain and adjust the feed rate, how to design patterns that produced aesthetically pleasing waveforms — existed almost entirely in the hands and heads of practitioners. When the last practitioners died or moved to other work, that knowledge died with them.

What survived was the written and visual record: Moxon’s description, Diderot’s plates, Roubo’s treatise, the RDK entry, and the frames themselves. Enough to understand what had been done, but not enough — on its own — to simply pick up where the 18th century left off.

The Scholars Who Documented What Remained

Before the makers could revive the craft, the scholars had to document what survived. This work proceeded on several fronts, in several languages, over several decades.

The Rijksmuseum, 1984. The landmark exhibition Prijst de lijst (“Praise the Frame”), organized by P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, was the first systematic attempt to study Dutch Golden Age frames as objects worthy of scholarly attention in their own right — not merely as accessories to paintings. The catalogue, later published in English as Framing in the Golden Age, documented nearly a hundred original frames with detailed profiles, construction analyses, and historical context. It established the vocabulary and the framework that all subsequent Dutch frame scholarship would build on.

The exhibition was reviewed in Oud-Holland, the venerable journal of Dutch and Flemish art (founded 1883), by C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, who noted its significance as an entirely new area of art-historical inquiry.

The RDK, ongoing. The Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, published by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, devoted columns 752 through 806 of its ninth volume to the “Flammleiste” entry, written by Josef Maria Greber and Ingrid Haug. This is the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject in any language — a monument of German art-historical thoroughness that covers the history, tools, regional variations, and applications of flame and wave moldings from their origins to the modern period. It is freely available online at rdklabor.de, though it requires German to read.

Jacob Simon, National Portrait Gallery. Simon’s online resource “The Art of the Picture Frame” at the NPG has been regularly updated (most recently in January 2026) and includes a directory of British picture framemakers from 1600 to 1950 with meticulous entries, articles on artists and framing choices, and an annotated bibliography of frame publications from 1995 to 2018. It is an essential starting point for anyone entering frame scholarship from the English-speaking world.

Lynn Roberts, The Frame Blog. Roberts’s blog, running since the early 2010s, has become the most accessible and wide-ranging English-language resource on frame history. Her coverage of Dutch Golden Age frames, the KWAB (Auricular) exhibition of 2018, museum reframing projects, and the Piccolomini Spannocchi collection has brought frame scholarship out of academic journals and into public view. Her “Frames and the Internet” article documented the disappearance of the Rijksmuseum’s online frame database — a cautionary tale about the fragility of digital scholarship.

CODART, 2010. The CODART DERTIEN conference included a session called “Framing the Frame,” where Eric Domela Nieuwenhuis surveyed Dutch frame scholarship twenty-five years after Prijst de lijst. His finding was sobering: research on 16th, 18th, 19th, and 20th-century Dutch frames was virtually nonexistent. The 17th century remained an island of knowledge in an ocean of neglect.

Uwe Lehmann, Germany. Lehmann published important articles on the reconstruction of historical wave-molding machines — “Das geflammte Hobeln” in Bauhandwerk (2007) and “Rekonstruktion historischer Vorrichtungen” in Restaurator im Handwerk (2006). He presented a rebuilt machine at the Denkmalmesse in Leipzig in 2006, one of the first modern demonstrations of a functioning historical device.

The Makers Who Brought It Back

The scholarly documentation created a foundation, but the actual revival required people willing to build machines and cut wood. Several makers, working independently on different continents, took up the challenge.

Jonathan Thornton, United States. Thornton, a conservation professor, built a close reproduction of Moxon’s Waving Engine during a 1994 semester sabbatical. His paper “The History and Technology of Waveform Moldings” (WAG Postprints, 2002) is the foundational modern text on the subject — the document that connects the scattered historical sources into a coherent narrative and provides firsthand testimony about what the machines can actually do. Thornton’s reproduction proved that a skilled operator using a Moxon-type device could produce a remarkable range of waveforms, and that the hand-pulled technique produced surface qualities that differ measurably from machine-produced work. His later essay for Lost Art Press’s With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture connected the waving engine to Roubo’s broader woodworking practice.

Kurt Nordwall, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Nordwall, a framemaker at the MIA, built a reproduction waving engine and documented the process in a 2015 YouTube video, “Making Waves.” The video brought the technology to a broad public audience for the first time, showing the mesmerizing process of a ripple molding being cut in real time. It remains the most accessible visual introduction to waving engine operation.

Kingswood Frames, United Kingdom. This contemporary British workshop spent three years designing and building a Flammleisten machine based on historical sources. They use Swiss pear timber, passed through the machine multiple times, then finished with a special mix of black ebonized polish. Their machine can produce both the classic ripple pattern and the wave pattern, with four different cutters creating different textures on a single frame. Their website includes video of the machine in operation — essential viewing for anyone interested in the mechanics of the process.

1642 Designs, United States. Perhaps the most ambitious modern revival. The workshop began with a traditional follower-based waving engine, experienced the limitations of wooden patterns (which wear out, creating inconsistent relief), and ultimately designed and built an all-metal, CNC-controlled version of the classical waving engine.

Their “About” page tells the story: the CNC machine cuts like the originals, with a steel scraping cutter held vertically in the cutterhead while motors move the cutterhead over a stationary bed. The CNC control allows the designer to create ripple patterns with vectors, varying the size, spacing, depth, and skip pattern at will. Each profile, no more than 1.5 inches wide, is run on the waving engine and assembled on a pine or poplar subframe — exactly as in the 17th century. The subframes use mortise-and-tenon or spline joinery, and all show surfaces are hand-planed to match period texture.

The 1642 Designs approach is significant because it explicitly bridges the historical and the modern: traditional scraper-cutting technique, powered by CNC, assembled and finished by hand. It’s neither pure reproduction nor pure industrial production. It’s something new that respects the old.

J. Schiffer, Unikatrahmen, Austria. Working at unikatrahmen.at (also accessible via flammleisten.at), Schiffer produces ripple frames using traditional hand methods in the Austrian tradition — a direct continuation of the Central European craft lineage that stretches back through the Nuremberg workshops to Schwanhardt himself.

What the Revival Revealed

The modern revival of wave-molding technology has produced several insights that purely scholarly study could not:

The patterns wear out fast. Multiple makers have confirmed what the historical record suggests: wooden template rods degrade quickly, especially when cutting hard tropical woods like ebony. This explains why surviving 17th-century ripple frames often show shallow, inconsistent relief — the makers were using worn patterns. The switch to metal patterns (and eventually to CNC) was driven by this practical reality.

Hand-cut ripple has a different surface character than machine-cut. Thornton was the first to document this systematically, but other makers confirm it. The subtle variations in speed and pressure inherent in hand-pulled cutting produce a surface that is almost regular but not quite — and that near-regularity interacts with light in a way that perfectly uniform machine-cut ripple does not. It’s the same distinction that separates hand-planed surfaces from sanded surfaces: measurable, visible, and aesthetically significant.

The technique is more versatile than the surviving frames suggest. Thornton’s experiments with his Moxon reproduction demonstrated that the historical machines could produce a far wider range of patterns than the relatively limited vocabulary found on surviving 17th-century frames. The makers constrained themselves — by convention, by client expectation, by the limitations of their specific patterns — not by the limitations of the technology.

Scraper-cutting, not plane-cutting, is the dominant technique. Despite the association with the word “plane” in English accounts, the actual cutting action in most historical waving engines is scraping, not planing. The blade is ground to a profile and held nearly vertical, scraping thin shavings from the wood surface rather than shearing with the lower cutting angle of a true plane. This distinction matters for surface quality and for the types of wood that can be successfully rippled.

 

Sources:

• Jonathan Thornton, “The History and Technology of Waveform Moldings,” WAG Postprints, 2002. Free PDF at wag-aic.org.
• P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, Framing in the Golden Age (Waanders, 1995).
• “Flammleiste,” Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte (RDK), Vol. IX (rdklabor.de).
• Jacob Simon, “The Art of the Picture Frame” (npg.org.uk).
• Lynn Roberts, The Frame Blog (theframeblog.com).
• Eric Domela Nieuwenhuis, CODART DERTIEN presentation, 2010 (codart.nl).
• Uwe Lehmann, “Das geflammte Hobeln,” Bauhandwerk Jg. 29 (2007); “Rekonstruktion historischer Vorrichtungen,” Restaurator im Handwerk (2006).
• Kurt Nordwall, “Making Waves” (Minneapolis Institute of Art, YouTube, 2015).
• Kingswood Frames (kingswoodframes.com/ripple-and-wave).
• 1642 Designs (1642designs.com/about).
• J. Schiffer, Unikatrahmen (unikatrahmen.at / flammleisten.at).
• C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, review in Oud-Holland Vol. 99 (1985).