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Lot Essay
Jacques Dubois, maître in 1742.
The 'C' Couronné Poinçon was a tax mark used on any alloy containing copper between March 1745 and February 1749.
Although Dubois, whose career is thinly documented, did not receive his maîtrise until the age of forty-eight, he was almost certainly employed in the atelier of his half-brother, Noël Gérard from the late 1720s, the latter acting as witness to his marriage in Paris in 1730. Established in the rue de Charenton, Dubois enjoyed the privileges of an ouvrier libre and was thus unfettered by the strict guild regulations endured by his fellow ébénistes. Dubois worked in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine before achieving his maîtrise. Elected a juré of the guild in 1752, he was one of the most prolific cabinet-makers in the Louis XV period and is known to have collaborated with the marchands-merciers Jean-Jacques Machart, Bertin and Pierre I Migeon. Dubois particularly specialized in the production of grandly scaled bureaux plats, often with richly sculptural mounts as on this bureau, with related examples in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Louvre Museum, Paris (for these and other similar bureaux by Dubois, see A. Pradère, Les Ebénistes Français de Louis XIV à la Révolution, Paris, 1989, pp. 174-5, figs. 156-8).
The 'C' Couronné Poinçon was a tax mark used on any alloy containing copper between March 1745 and February 1749.
Although Dubois, whose career is thinly documented, did not receive his maîtrise until the age of forty-eight, he was almost certainly employed in the atelier of his half-brother, Noël Gérard from the late 1720s, the latter acting as witness to his marriage in Paris in 1730. Established in the rue de Charenton, Dubois enjoyed the privileges of an ouvrier libre and was thus unfettered by the strict guild regulations endured by his fellow ébénistes. Dubois worked in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine before achieving his maîtrise. Elected a juré of the guild in 1752, he was one of the most prolific cabinet-makers in the Louis XV period and is known to have collaborated with the marchands-merciers Jean-Jacques Machart, Bertin and Pierre I Migeon. Dubois particularly specialized in the production of grandly scaled bureaux plats, often with richly sculptural mounts as on this bureau, with related examples in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Louvre Museum, Paris (for these and other similar bureaux by Dubois, see A. Pradère, Les Ebénistes Français de Louis XIV à la Révolution, Paris, 1989, pp. 174-5, figs. 156-8).