CIRCA 1810

The elegant French Empire table or console, executed entirely in bleu turquin marble and with Grecian unadorned and plinth-supported pillars, would almost certainly have been supplied en suite with a chimneypiece. One such blue turquin chimneypiece, but with rectilinear capitals to its tapered columns, was introduced to the Emperor Napoleon's bedroom apartment at Malmaison, following the château's aggrandisement from 1799 by Josephine de Beauharnais with the assistance of the Rome-trained architects Charles Percier (d.1838) and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine (d. 1853) (B. Chevallioer, Malmaison Château et domaine, Paris, 1989, fig. 270).