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Lot Essay
This spectacular cabinet is a tour de force by Louis-Alexandre Bellangé (1797-1861), one of the most innovative and accomplished ébénistes of the Restauration and Louis-Philippe periods. It combines many of the most sophisticated aspects of the oeuvre of the cabinet-makers of the ancien régime, with its sumptuous use of ebony and Japanese lacquer recalling the work of Weisweiler and Carlin under the direction of the marchand mercier Dominique Daguerre, while the distinctive female masks mounts of the sides are clearly inspired by the greatest cabinet-maker of Louis XIV's period, André-Charles Boulle, who frequently used that same model of mount on bureaux plats.
However Bellangé combines these elements in a new and novel way typical of the exploratory, historicist style of the 1820's and 1830's, with the wonderfully flamboyant neo-Renaissance grotesques of the uprights flanking the lacquer panels. Bellangé, who proudly used the signature on his locks of "EBENISTE DU ROI" from 1835, was commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1841-2 to supply neo-Renaissance furniture to the château in Pau which the king was furnishing in homage to Henri IV.
This dazzling cabinet, with the sheer richness of its materials recalls the work of other members of this celebrated family of ébénistes, such as Alexandre-Louis Bellangé, who supplied a number of sumptous pieces to George IV for furnishing Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace in the 1820's, often with extravagant use of gilt bronzes and porcelain plaques (see D. Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe Siècle, Paris, 1989, pp. 60-63, and H. Roberts, For the King's Pleasure, London, 2001, pp. 90-1).
However Bellangé combines these elements in a new and novel way typical of the exploratory, historicist style of the 1820's and 1830's, with the wonderfully flamboyant neo-Renaissance grotesques of the uprights flanking the lacquer panels. Bellangé, who proudly used the signature on his locks of "EBENISTE DU ROI" from 1835, was commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1841-2 to supply neo-Renaissance furniture to the château in Pau which the king was furnishing in homage to Henri IV.
This dazzling cabinet, with the sheer richness of its materials recalls the work of other members of this celebrated family of ébénistes, such as Alexandre-Louis Bellangé, who supplied a number of sumptous pieces to George IV for furnishing Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace in the 1820's, often with extravagant use of gilt bronzes and porcelain plaques (see D. Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe Siècle, Paris, 1989, pp. 60-63, and H. Roberts, For the King's Pleasure, London, 2001, pp. 90-1).