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Lot Essay
Pierre Roussel maître, in 1745.
This rare form of secrétaire coffre à bijoux belongs to a small and select group predominantly executed on commission for the marchands-merciers. Of these, a closest example is an unstamped, but almost certainly Roussel, coffre illustrated by R. Wark, French Decorative Art in the Huntington Collection, 1979, figs. 70 and 72. Another similar piece also attributed to Roussel sold Christie’s, London, 12 December, 2002, lot 170. Further related secrétaire, stamped by the marchand-ébéniste Léonard Boudin, in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, see 'French Taste in the Eighteenth Century', Exhibition Catalogue, Detroit Institute of Art, 27 April-3 June, 1956, p. 25, no. 41. The most elaborate example, profusely inlaid with incrustations of mother-of-pearl and formerly in the collection of the Earls of Jersey at Middleton Park, was sold from the Jaime Ortiz-Patino Collection Sotheby's, New York, 20 May, 1992, lot 71 ($352,000). The naive landscape marquetry panels both of this and the Huntington cabinet are typical of Roussel's work, and recur on a number of signed pieces by him, for instance on a writing table and a cylinder bureau illustrated J. Nicolay, L'Art et la Manière des Maîtres Ebénistes Français au XVIIIe Siècle, Paris, 1956, pp. 406-7, figs. A and F. Such panels would probably have been contracted out to a specialist marqueteur.
This rare form of secrétaire coffre à bijoux belongs to a small and select group predominantly executed on commission for the marchands-merciers. Of these, a closest example is an unstamped, but almost certainly Roussel, coffre illustrated by R. Wark, French Decorative Art in the Huntington Collection, 1979, figs. 70 and 72. Another similar piece also attributed to Roussel sold Christie’s, London, 12 December, 2002, lot 170. Further related secrétaire, stamped by the marchand-ébéniste Léonard Boudin, in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, see 'French Taste in the Eighteenth Century', Exhibition Catalogue, Detroit Institute of Art, 27 April-3 June, 1956, p. 25, no. 41. The most elaborate example, profusely inlaid with incrustations of mother-of-pearl and formerly in the collection of the Earls of Jersey at Middleton Park, was sold from the Jaime Ortiz-Patino Collection Sotheby's, New York, 20 May, 1992, lot 71 ($352,000). The naive landscape marquetry panels both of this and the Huntington cabinet are typical of Roussel's work, and recur on a number of signed pieces by him, for instance on a writing table and a cylinder bureau illustrated J. Nicolay, L'Art et la Manière des Maîtres Ebénistes Français au XVIIIe Siècle, Paris, 1956, pp. 406-7, figs. A and F. Such panels would probably have been contracted out to a specialist marqueteur.
