AFTER THE MODEL BY JEAN-BAPTISTE SENÉ, LAST QUARTER 19TH CENTURY

This richly carved salon suite is directly based on the celebrated suite of seat furniture supplied in 1787 to Marie-Antoinette's Cabinet Interieur at the Château de St. Cloud. The suite consisted of seventeen pieces including a canapé, bergères, fauteuils à la reine, chaises en cabriolet, tabourets and screens. Among the finest and most costly examples of Royal seat-furniture produced in the late 1780s, the suite took six months to produce, with several parties involved. Claude-Baptiste Sené is recorded as 'l'auteur des bois', or the chair-maker, with much of the work sub-contracted to his favourite carvers, as was standard practice in the period. Jean Hauré was responsible for the carving and was aided by Alexandre Regnier, Guerin and Nicolas-François Vallois; Chatard finally gilded the chairs and the tapissier Capin upholstered the suite in blue and white damask 'brodé en chenette blanche'. The suite was transported to Luxembourg at the end of the eighteenth century, but was later dispersed under the Second Empire with the majority of pieces now held at Compiegne, Fontainebleau and the Louvre (see P. Verlet, 'Le Mobilier Royal Francais', Paris, 1990 (2nd ed.), pp. 107-112, no. 38; P. Kjallberg, Le Mobilier français du XVIIIe siècle, 1998, p. 814). A set of four late 19th century fauteuils also modelled after the suite sold Monsieur and Madame Francois- A Lifetime of Collecting, Christie's, London, 9 June 2011, lot 149 (£25,000).