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Lot Essay
The sinuous lines of these elegant chairs, with distinctive confronting scrolls centring the top and seatrails, relates them closely to a set of five fauteuils, originally supplied to the court at Parma, either for the Casa Reale, Colorno, or the Palazzo Ducale, Parma (now in the Palazzo Quirinale, Rome), and a matching side chair, originally part of a larger set and also originally supplied to the court at Parma (now in the Palazzo Reale, Genoa), illustrated in A. González-Palacios, Il Patrimonio Artistico del Quirinale: Gli Arredi Francesi, Milan, 1995, cat. 23, pp. 174-8.
The court at Parma underwent a lavish refurbishment following the marriage of Madame Louis-Elisabeth (1727-1759), Madame Infante, eldest daughter of Louis XV, to Infant Don Philippe of Spain in 1739, who became rulers of the Duchy of Parma in 1748. Madame Infante made a series of trips to Paris and brought back an extraordinary quantity of furniture and bronzes d'ameublement, much of it purchased from Madame de Pompadour's favourite marchand mercier Lazare Duvaux.
The seat furniture ordered for the court at Parma was of a consistently high quality, including a set of fauteuils of extraordinarily rich carving, attributed to Nicolas Quinibert Foliot and now divided between the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a private collection.
As well as ordering seat furniture directly from menuisiers in Paris, French craftsmen were also installed in Parma, carrying out orders of designs from Paris, work which could also be sub-contracted to local chair-makers. For instance in 1750 an order from Claude Bonnet in Paris was sent to Parma to make a group of chairs 'sur un modele que nous vous enverrons, et qui est une simple moulure' (see González-Palacios op. cit., p. 175). It is possible that a similar order was made for both the fauteuils in the Quirinale, which appear to to be of French construction, but probably made in Parma, and the purely Italian chairs offered here.
However the CLS brand on the Segoura chairs does not seem to be consistent with any of the known brands for the palaces of Parma, making this provenance uncertain in the absence of any further documentation.
The court at Parma underwent a lavish refurbishment following the marriage of Madame Louis-Elisabeth (1727-1759), Madame Infante, eldest daughter of Louis XV, to Infant Don Philippe of Spain in 1739, who became rulers of the Duchy of Parma in 1748. Madame Infante made a series of trips to Paris and brought back an extraordinary quantity of furniture and bronzes d'ameublement, much of it purchased from Madame de Pompadour's favourite marchand mercier Lazare Duvaux.
The seat furniture ordered for the court at Parma was of a consistently high quality, including a set of fauteuils of extraordinarily rich carving, attributed to Nicolas Quinibert Foliot and now divided between the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a private collection.
As well as ordering seat furniture directly from menuisiers in Paris, French craftsmen were also installed in Parma, carrying out orders of designs from Paris, work which could also be sub-contracted to local chair-makers. For instance in 1750 an order from Claude Bonnet in Paris was sent to Parma to make a group of chairs 'sur un modele que nous vous enverrons, et qui est une simple moulure' (see González-Palacios op. cit., p. 175). It is possible that a similar order was made for both the fauteuils in the Quirinale, which appear to to be of French construction, but probably made in Parma, and the purely Italian chairs offered here.
However the CLS brand on the Segoura chairs does not seem to be consistent with any of the known brands for the palaces of Parma, making this provenance uncertain in the absence of any further documentation.