BY MICHELE GRANDVILLE, SORRENTO, DATED 1869

Throughout the nineteenth century, there existed many workshops in the Sorrento and Mantua regions specialising in fine wood and straw marquetry. Besides what amounted to a large-scale industry supplying both tourists and an active export market with souvenir trinket boxes and other affordable objects, these ateliers operated a smaller, yet equally important sideline, producing individual pieces of furniture, many of them of exhibition quality. In Sorrento, a town firmly on the tourist map given its dramatic coastal location and substantiated claim as the birth place of Tasso, three makers dominated production during the nineteenth century: Antonio Damora, Luigi Gargiulo and, perhaps the most important, Michele Grandville, the maker of the present piece (see L. de Caunes, S. Goldszal, C. Baumgartner, La Marqueterie de Paille, Paris, 1993, pp. 33-37). Regularly participating at the major international exhibitions of the third quarter of the century, collectively the ateliers of these three ebenisti employed no less than one hundred craftsmen, and together their work was characterised by the use of local woods - such as olive, orange, pear and box - often complemented on the interior by straw marquetry.

As far as functionality is concerned, Michele Grandville (d. 1893) was without doubt the most adventurous of all the Sorrentino makers, and this double-faced 'secretaire', for want of a more inclusive term to describe its multiplicitous uses, is a perfect and rare example of the highly complex nature of his art. Inlaid with various fruit and hand-coloured woods, using the techniques of ink-outlined and cross-hatched pictoral, floral and highly-intricate geometric mosaic marquetry, this piece serves as writing, games and toiletry table, as well as stationery and document holder, music-stand and sewing nécessaire. A recurring decorative theme in Grandville's work, the scenes of daily Neapolitan life depicted are drawn directly from the popular contemporary engravings of Gaetano Dura. In addition, in contrast to the mid-nineteenth century Italian ebenista's tendency to list his name, exhibition participation and prizes on a discretely attached label (see in this sale the fine ivory and marquetry table-cabinet by Federico Lancetti [lot 469], and the splendid walnut and pietre dure centre-table by Angiolo Barbetti [lot 474]), here, Grandville has chosen to advertise his identity and Gold Medal award at the 1862 London Universal Exhibition as an integral part of the decoration (see detail).

Two other examples of multifunctional double-faced 'secretaires' by Grandville are known to exist: the first, dating from 1867 and with regular side-opening doors, rather than double-hinged top as here, forms part of the Alessandro and Alma Fiorentino collection of Sorrento marquetry, housed in the Museobottega della tarsia lignea of the same town (illustrated and described in Il Museobottega della tarsia lignea a Sorrento: Collezione Alessandro e Alma Fiorentino, Naples, 1999, p. 110-111; in G. Gargiulo, Où fleurit l'oranger, in Franco Maria Ricci, French Edition, vol. VII, March/April 1987; and in L'Arte della tarsia a Sorrento dal XIX secolo al nostri giorni, exhib. cat., Paris Institut Culturel Italien, 7 May - 7 June 1987, ed. A. Fiorentino, Naples, 1987, p. 38); the second example, of unknown specifications, but using both wood and straw marquetry and dating from circa 1870 (de Caunes, Goldszal, Baumgartner, op. cit. pp. 37 and 117) was sold by Messrs Mercier & Cie, Lille, in 1992. The present example, part of the Ettlinger Family collection for over one hundred years and, at the time of its purchase at auction in New York in 1896, reputed to have been made for the Empress Eugènie, wife of Napoleon III, is hitherto unrecorded and represents an important addition to any future study of Grandville's oeuvre or catalogue raisonné of his principal works.