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Lot Essay
Silver furniture played an important role in the decoration of Royal apartments of the Baroque, however, almost all of the silver from the most sumptuous of courts, that of Louis XIV at Versailles, was melted down in 1689 to help fill the empty treasury chests.
These chenets have been silvered using the mercury-based technique traditionally employed to gild bronze objects, whereby the mercury evaporates when exposed to the heat of the firing oven leaving the gold, or in this case the silver, bonded to the surface. The applied mercury mixture would have been very rich in silver and the total amount of silver used had to be considerably more than the amount of gold would have been to cover the same surface. Only few pieces of silver or silvered furniture and bronzes decorated in this technique survive, but gilt-bronze versions of this exquisite model of chenets can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (illustrated F.J.B. Watson, The Wrightsman Collection, New York, 1966, vol. II, p. 376); while another pair, with patinated bronze figures, was sold from the collections of Mrs. Thelma Chrysler Foy, Parke Bernet, New York, 23 May 1959, lot 669.
These chenets have been silvered using the mercury-based technique traditionally employed to gild bronze objects, whereby the mercury evaporates when exposed to the heat of the firing oven leaving the gold, or in this case the silver, bonded to the surface. The applied mercury mixture would have been very rich in silver and the total amount of silver used had to be considerably more than the amount of gold would have been to cover the same surface. Only few pieces of silver or silvered furniture and bronzes decorated in this technique survive, but gilt-bronze versions of this exquisite model of chenets can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (illustrated F.J.B. Watson, The Wrightsman Collection, New York, 1966, vol. II, p. 376); while another pair, with patinated bronze figures, was sold from the collections of Mrs. Thelma Chrysler Foy, Parke Bernet, New York, 23 May 1959, lot 669.