AFTER THE MODEL BY JEAN-FRANCOIS LELEU, LATE 19TH CENTURY

A pupil and later collaborator with Jean-François Oeben, Jean-François Leleu became maître on the latter's death in 1763. His work can be divided into two concurrent but distinct styles: the first, owing more to the legacy of Oeben, being of large, solid forms, more noble in style; the second, although retaining the clean, definite lines of the first, being an exercise in elegance and understatement. It is this second style for which Leleu is chiefly remembered and which the present commode (now at Versailles), with its lightly bombé form and restrained frieze mounts, is a principal example.