BY DAVID ROENTGEN, CIRCA 1785

With its beautifully figured mahogany timber, fine ormolu mounts, and overall pure form inspired by contemporaneous English tripod tables, this elegant guéridon is a product typical to the workshop of David Roentgen in the late eighteenth century. A particularly interesting feature of this work that distinguished it from contemporaneous similar French models is the inventive wooden gallery that Roentgen used in lieu of a gilt bronze gallery. Roentgen is known to have produced similar models in various sizes, some of which were used to serve tea or small meals in intimate domestic settings. Its similarity with late Louis XVI guéridons, the French provenance of most surviving comparable examples, and the presence of a maker’s stamp suggest that Roentgen’s workshop produced these tables for the French, and possibly Russian, markets, see W. Koeppe, ed., Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens, New Haven and London, 2012, p. 200. The curious stepped silhouette of the legs of this table is unlike anything found on comparable pieces by Roentgen but it echoes the outline of the much-used and favored staircase-like drawers found in the interiors of many of Roentgen’s rolltop desks, such as the famous Apollo desk in the Hermitage Museum, the one at Chatsworth, another one in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and one in the collection of the Klassik Stiftung, Weimar, see ibid., pp.154, 167, 206, and 214, respectively. This motif is also widely use by Roentgen on the exterior of his pieces, including many of his well-known caskets and and desks at Pavlovsk and Gatchina, see J. M. Greber, Abraham und David Roentgen: Möbel für Europa, Starnberg, 1980, vol. 2, pp. 306 and 326, respectively. A similar table with identical wooden gallery comparable stem, and stamped by Roentgen is illustrated Koeppe, op. cit., p. 201. This table and two similar examples found in a North American private collection also share almost identical figuring to the mahogany top; another characteristic reinforcing the attribution of this lot to the Roentgen workshop.