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Lot Essay
Nicolas-Alexandre Lapie, maître in 1764.
These cabinets almost certainly formed part of the celebrated collection of French furniture and objets d'art acquired by Margaret, Baroness Keith and Nairne (1788-1867) and her husband Auguste-Charles-Joseph, comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie (1785-1870), natural son of Talleyrand (1754-1838), and nephew of the comte d'Angiviller, who himself was the Marquis de Marigny's nephew and successor as Directeur-Général des batiments du Roi. The Flahauts married in 1817 and spent fifty years together, during which time they maintained houses of considerable grandeur in Paris, London, Vienna and Scotland. Amongst the highest echelons of cultivated society, the Flahauts purchased the former Hôtel de Massa in the mid-1820s, and this later drew immense praise when it was finally furnished in 1831. It is thought that most of their important purchases were made at that time. The greater part of the collection became concentrated at Meikleour in Perthshire at the very end of the nineteenth century. Their elder daughter Emily Jame Mercer Elphinstone de Flahaut (1819-1895) married the 4th Marquess of Lansdowne and it was through this marriage that much of the collection of French furniture came into the Landsdowne family.
These cabinets almost certainly formed part of the celebrated collection of French furniture and objets d'art acquired by Margaret, Baroness Keith and Nairne (1788-1867) and her husband Auguste-Charles-Joseph, comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie (1785-1870), natural son of Talleyrand (1754-1838), and nephew of the comte d'Angiviller, who himself was the Marquis de Marigny's nephew and successor as Directeur-Général des batiments du Roi. The Flahauts married in 1817 and spent fifty years together, during which time they maintained houses of considerable grandeur in Paris, London, Vienna and Scotland. Amongst the highest echelons of cultivated society, the Flahauts purchased the former Hôtel de Massa in the mid-1820s, and this later drew immense praise when it was finally furnished in 1831. It is thought that most of their important purchases were made at that time. The greater part of the collection became concentrated at Meikleour in Perthshire at the very end of the nineteenth century. Their elder daughter Emily Jame Mercer Elphinstone de Flahaut (1819-1895) married the 4th Marquess of Lansdowne and it was through this marriage that much of the collection of French furniture came into the Landsdowne family.