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Lot Essay
cf. F. Marcilhac, Jean Dunand His Life and Work, New York, 1991, p. 250, p. 250, no. 460 for a two-tiered round occasional table of varying dimensions with the same eggshell decoration.
We would like to thank Jean-Paul Dunand for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
The present table is a superb example of Jean Dunand's sophisticated skills as a designer and craftsman. The geometric motif on the top, meticulously inlaid in eggshell, references the machine aesthetic favored by the avant-garde in the 1930s. The starkness of the motif creates a finely calculated aesthetic tension compared with the delicateness of the eggshell with its association of fragility and the luxurious black lacquer, which was applied in a painstaking process in numerous thin layers.
Created around 1930, at the beginning of a decade of tumultuous changes in Europe, the table was purchased in Paris by a prominent New York family on one of their many trips abroad in the 1920s and '30s. The table was subsequently passed on to their daughter, a poet and political satirist and their son-in-law, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor, who had represented the US Government at the Nuremberg trials and later sat on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
For half a century, with the Dunand table a focal point in their Cambridge home, the couple entertained many prominent literary and artistic figures, leading members of the legal world and Harvard faculty from many disciplines. Among their guests over the years were Supreme Court Justices, author and chef Julia Child, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, and artists Jules Feiffer and Edward Gorey. Authors Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, Lillian Hellman and William Styron were also friends as well as social scientist Daniel Bell, political scientist Richard Neustadt, and behaviorist and inventor B. F. Skinner.
We would like to thank Jean-Paul Dunand for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.
The present table is a superb example of Jean Dunand's sophisticated skills as a designer and craftsman. The geometric motif on the top, meticulously inlaid in eggshell, references the machine aesthetic favored by the avant-garde in the 1930s. The starkness of the motif creates a finely calculated aesthetic tension compared with the delicateness of the eggshell with its association of fragility and the luxurious black lacquer, which was applied in a painstaking process in numerous thin layers.
Created around 1930, at the beginning of a decade of tumultuous changes in Europe, the table was purchased in Paris by a prominent New York family on one of their many trips abroad in the 1920s and '30s. The table was subsequently passed on to their daughter, a poet and political satirist and their son-in-law, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor, who had represented the US Government at the Nuremberg trials and later sat on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
For half a century, with the Dunand table a focal point in their Cambridge home, the couple entertained many prominent literary and artistic figures, leading members of the legal world and Harvard faculty from many disciplines. Among their guests over the years were Supreme Court Justices, author and chef Julia Child, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, and artists Jules Feiffer and Edward Gorey. Authors Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, Lillian Hellman and William Styron were also friends as well as social scientist Daniel Bell, political scientist Richard Neustadt, and behaviorist and inventor B. F. Skinner.