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Lot Essay
This impressive cabinet, almost entirely conceived in ebony and pearwood stained to imitate ebony, dates from the first phase of cabinet-making in France, when cabinet-makers, many of whom originated from the Low Countries and Germany (where there was already a tradition of working in ebony), were known as menuisiers en ébène, which was later shortened to ébénistes, a phrase which applied to cabinet-makers throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries.
This cabinet is unusual for its use of borders of amaranth in combination with the ebony panels, while its use of engraved rather than relief-carved ornament dates it to the earliest phase of the evolution of this novel form in Paris (see D. Alcouffe, La Naissance de l'ébénisterie: les cabinets d'ébène in Louis XIII Un Temps d'Exuberance, exh. cat., Paris, 2002, pp. 212-217).
This cabinet is unusual for its use of borders of amaranth in combination with the ebony panels, while its use of engraved rather than relief-carved ornament dates it to the earliest phase of the evolution of this novel form in Paris (see D. Alcouffe, La Naissance de l'ébénisterie: les cabinets d'ébène in Louis XIII Un Temps d'Exuberance, exh. cat., Paris, 2002, pp. 212-217).