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Lot Essay
This antiquarian 'Louis XIV' table, with marble-figures veneer inlaid with golden and silvery 'boulle' filigree, serves to display antique marquetry tablets that appear to have been adapted from cabinet doors dating from around 1700. Festive medallions, with vignettes of bacchantae-driven bacchic leopards in the Pompeian fashion, are enclosed in triumphal-arched frames of arabesque ribbon-scrolls and are after designs by Jean Brain (1637 - 1711), Paris (100 Planches principales de l'Oeuvre Complet de Jean Brain, n.d.). Cupids play with tame birds and attend flower-vases displayed on the vine-wreathed cornices; zephyr herms bearing cassolettes are flanked by Arcadian sphynx perched on antique tripods; while at the base Apollo's griffin guard 'Venus' shells.
What appears to be the pair to this table bears the name 'Vitalba' and an inscription stating that it was presented in 1838 (sold anonymously in these Rooms, 4 June 1992, lot 114). This boulle guridon is further related to a pair of torchres executed in Vienna in the first quarter 18th Century and which are now at Schloss Rohrau, Austria, and another that was possibly executed by Anton Lchtenstein in 1700, now in the Residenzmuseum, Munich (H. Kreisel, Die Kunst des deutschen Mbels, Munich, 1970, vol. II, fig. 392 and vol. I, fig. 612, respectively).
What appears to be the pair to this table bears the name 'Vitalba' and an inscription stating that it was presented in 1838 (sold anonymously in these Rooms, 4 June 1992, lot 114). This boulle guridon is further related to a pair of torchres executed in Vienna in the first quarter 18th Century and which are now at Schloss Rohrau, Austria, and another that was possibly executed by Anton Lchtenstein in 1700, now in the Residenzmuseum, Munich (H. Kreisel, Die Kunst des deutschen Mbels, Munich, 1970, vol. II, fig. 392 and vol. I, fig. 612, respectively).