CIRCA 1790

This jewel-like table, with its delicately garlanded frieze with the rare feature of grisaille-decorated medallions, reflects the distinctive neo-classical furniture and bronzes d’ameublement being produced in St. Petersburg in the 1780s and 1790s. The grisaille medallions echoes the use of verre eglomisé ornament on pieces supplied by the German-born cabinet-maker Heinrich Gambs to the Imperial court (for instance a centre table and longcase clock at Pavlovsk, both inset with verre eglomise plaques, illustrated in A. Chenevière, Russian Furniture The Golden Age 1780—1840, New York, 1988, figs. 80 and 82). The distinctively upturned stretcher also features on other related tables produced in St. Petersburg at this time, for instance an oval table formerly in the collection of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, illustrated Chenevière op. cit., p. 97, fig. 78 and a cut steel table produced in the Tula workshops with similarly garlanded frieze, now in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (illustrated in La France et la Russie au Siècles des Lumières, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1986, p. 310).