French furniture emboies one of the mainstreams of design in the decorative arts of Europe, extending its design influence from Spain to Sweden and Russia, since the late seventeenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French furniture of the classic period 1660-1815, has been collected as passionately by non-French amateurs, with the English in the historical lead, and has set record prices consistently, since the Hamilton Palace sale of 1882. In the metropolitan culture of France, French furniture connotes Parisian furniture; furniture made in provincial centers such as Blois and Orléans in the Loire valley, and at Lyon or Liège (never part of France politically but within its cultural orbit), followed at some distance the design innovations that were initiated in the luxury trades of Paris, often with a time lag that could amount to decades; its history is told separately: French provincial furniture. In Paris, an unbroken tradition of apprenticeship, already fully-formed when the design center for luxury furnishings shifted from Antwerp to Paris in the 1630s, was slowly disrupted by the Industrial Revolution after the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps the last of the Parisian ébénistes working from a traditional atelier was Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933).