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Lot Essay
This splendid center table illustrates the fashionable taste for à l'antique furniture designs in the early years of the Napoleonic Empire. The table is based on a design by architect Charles Percier (d.1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine
(d.1853) from their Recueil de décorations intérieures in 1801 (reproduced here).
The table is nearly identical, except for the top, to one (illustrated here) supplied by Jacob-Desmalter in 1805 for the Elysée Palace, Joachim Murat's Parisian resdence until 1808. The table, which has an inlaid marble top, remained in the the Elysée after the Murat's departure for Naples and the palace's sale to Napoleon in 1808. In 1874 it was sent to the Grand Trianon at Versailles where it is conserved today. The gueridon offered here shares the distinctive feature of the ormolu ring issuing from the wings of the supporting lions, while the specimen marble top rests on a similar iron rim.
Further versions of this model were supplied to Malmaison (now in the Salon Doré, also with an inlaid marble top) and to the Palace of Saint-Cloud (of a slightly differing model and with a thuya wood top, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and illustrated in L. De Gröer, Les Arts Décoratifs de 1790 à 1850, 1985, Fribourg, p. 58, fig. 86.)
(d.1853) from their Recueil de décorations intérieures in 1801 (reproduced here).
The table is nearly identical, except for the top, to one (illustrated here) supplied by Jacob-Desmalter in 1805 for the Elysée Palace, Joachim Murat's Parisian resdence until 1808. The table, which has an inlaid marble top, remained in the the Elysée after the Murat's departure for Naples and the palace's sale to Napoleon in 1808. In 1874 it was sent to the Grand Trianon at Versailles where it is conserved today. The gueridon offered here shares the distinctive feature of the ormolu ring issuing from the wings of the supporting lions, while the specimen marble top rests on a similar iron rim.
Further versions of this model were supplied to Malmaison (now in the Salon Doré, also with an inlaid marble top) and to the Palace of Saint-Cloud (of a slightly differing model and with a thuya wood top, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and illustrated in L. De Gröer, Les Arts Décoratifs de 1790 à 1850, 1985, Fribourg, p. 58, fig. 86.)