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Lot Essay
Louis Noël Malle, maître in 1765.
This intricately inlaid table à ecrire, depicting a landscape view with a castle by a river with boats, is a superb example of the ‘pictoral’ furniture produced from the 1770s until the end of the Ancien Régime. As discussed by scholar Geoffrey de Bellaigue, furniture with these remarkable ‘paintings in wood’ represented a coordinated coming together of a range of artists and craftsmen. Typically, the panels themselves would be based on engraved sources by celebrated artists, which specialist marqueteurs such as Wolff and Gilbert would then transfer onto wood for the marchand-merciers and ébénistes. Larger ateliers, however, are known to have employed their own marqueteurs, and so would have carried out the process entirely in-house (G. de Bellaigue, 'Ruins in Marquetry', Apollo, January, 1968, pp.12-16 and G. de Bellaigue, 'Engravings and the French Eighteenth-Century Marqueteur', Burlington Magazine, May 1965, pp. 240-250 and July 1965, pp. 356-363). This seems to have been the case for the workshop of Louis Noël Malle, who presided over a thriving operation on the Grande Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, combining furniture ateliers with a shop front from which he sold his productions. The Almanach général des marchands of 1772-74 lists Noël - as he was known among his contemporary cabinetmakers - among the principal marqueteurs then working in Paris. A closely related writing table by Malle to the one here offered, similarly veneered on the top and all four sides with panels of naive pictoral marquetry depicting idyllic Italianate scenes with boatmen punting across a river, is in the Frick Collection (ill. and discussed in J. Focarino, ed., The Frick Collection, An Illustrated Catalogue, V Furniture, Italian & French, Princeton, 1992, pp. 359-370).
This intricately inlaid table à ecrire, depicting a landscape view with a castle by a river with boats, is a superb example of the ‘pictoral’ furniture produced from the 1770s until the end of the Ancien Régime. As discussed by scholar Geoffrey de Bellaigue, furniture with these remarkable ‘paintings in wood’ represented a coordinated coming together of a range of artists and craftsmen. Typically, the panels themselves would be based on engraved sources by celebrated artists, which specialist marqueteurs such as Wolff and Gilbert would then transfer onto wood for the marchand-merciers and ébénistes. Larger ateliers, however, are known to have employed their own marqueteurs, and so would have carried out the process entirely in-house (G. de Bellaigue, 'Ruins in Marquetry', Apollo, January, 1968, pp.12-16 and G. de Bellaigue, 'Engravings and the French Eighteenth-Century Marqueteur', Burlington Magazine, May 1965, pp. 240-250 and July 1965, pp. 356-363). This seems to have been the case for the workshop of Louis Noël Malle, who presided over a thriving operation on the Grande Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, combining furniture ateliers with a shop front from which he sold his productions. The Almanach général des marchands of 1772-74 lists Noël - as he was known among his contemporary cabinetmakers - among the principal marqueteurs then working in Paris. A closely related writing table by Malle to the one here offered, similarly veneered on the top and all four sides with panels of naive pictoral marquetry depicting idyllic Italianate scenes with boatmen punting across a river, is in the Frick Collection (ill. and discussed in J. Focarino, ed., The Frick Collection, An Illustrated Catalogue, V Furniture, Italian & French, Princeton, 1992, pp. 359-370).