拍品專文
The sphinx arm supports to this suite of Empire seat furniture relate to designs by Napoleon's 'architects' Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, whose drawing in the Recueil de décorations intérieures (1801) shows an armchair of similar form. Percier and Fontaine's style was adopted by the celebrated ébéniste François-Honoré-Georges Jacob (1770-1841) dit Jacob-Desmalter, who most famously used the sphinx arm support on a suite supplied to Empress Joséphine for her chambre à coucher in 1809 (D. Ledoux-Lebard, Le Grand Trianon, Paris, 1975, p. 186). Other motifs familiar to Jacob-Desmalter's oeuvre include the tapering legs headed by distinctive acanthus-carved capitals which, together with the proportions of the seat-frame and legs, relate to a suite commissioned by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, later Duc de Dalmatie (d. 1852) for his Parisian residence, the hôtel de Talleyrand-Perigord, on his appointment by Napoleon as a maréchal of France in 1804 (see Christie's, London, 5 July 2001, lot 132).