SECOND HALF 19TH CENTURY, THE PORCELAIN PROBABLY 18TH CENTURY

The fashion for displaying Sèvres porcelain plaques around the frieze of a bureau plat was probably started by the influential marchand-mercier Simon-Philippe Poirier who commissioned plaques directly from the Sevres manufactory. The small group of surviving pieces of late Louis XV bureaux with such Sèvres decoration include a bureau plat by Joseph in the James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, one in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch at Boughton, Northamptonshire, and a third, now thought to be a 19th Century copy, is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. It is particularly interesting to note that the Gulbenkian bureau is stamped E.H.B. for Edward Holmes Baldock, an English marchand-mercier who is known to have dealt in both exceptional 'antique' furniture and in modifying furniture for contemporary tastes, and who is a possible author of this bureau plat.