Lot Essay
This exotic lit à la turque, with sinuous frame wrapped in watery palm fronds, is closely related to a remarkable suite of seat furniture supplied circa 1754 to the baron de Bernstorff for his palace in Copenhagen by Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot, after designs by the architect Pierre Contant d'Ivry, illustrated in B. Pallot, L'Art du Siège au XVIIIe Siècle en France, 1987, pp. 168-169. The Bernstorff commission also included console tables and is distinguished for its armchair by Foliot with similar palm-wrapped frame in the Louvre (illustrated in B. Pallot, Furniture Collections in the Louvre, 1993, vol. II, pp. 74-75, fig. 21). An early Louis XV console with frame composed entirely of palm fronds, also in the Louvre, may have provided the inspiration for such distinctive seat furniture designs (see Pallot, op. cit., pp. 56-57, fig 15).