LATE 18TH CENTURY

This elegant pair of fire-screens was conceived in the Dutch Louis XVI style of the 1780s. Fire-screens were often made in pairs, not for two opposite positions in one room, but to be placed side by side in the opening of one chimneypiece. Two pairs of Dutch fire-screens are still in their orginal setting. The first is a pair of satinwood screens inlaid with lacquer panels, which was executed by the celebrated Hague cabinet-maker Matthijs Horrix (1735-1809) for the Audiencie Zael of Huis ten Bosch near The Hague in 1791, for which he recived f 72.-. (R.J. Baarsen, 'In de commode van Parijs tot Den Haag' Matthijs Horrix (1735-1809), een meubelmaker in Den Haag in de tweede helft van de 18de eeuw' Oud Holland 107 (1993), p. 174, fig 5, and p. 231.) The second is a Dutch Louis XVI white and grey-painted pair in the drawing room of Willem Philip Kops (1755-1805) - removed from the Nieuwe Gracht in Haarlem and now in the Rijksmuseum - which was furnished in 1793-'95. (R.J.Baarsen, Nederlandse Meubelen, Zwolle, 1993, pp. 140-141)
See illustration