MID-19TH CENTURY

Designed in the Louis Quatorze Roman fashion and evoking the Arcadian Golden Age, the cupboard's centre door has a golden tablet embellished in bronze bas-relief against a rich filigree of Roman acanthus. The mask of the Arcadian deity emerges from an acanthus and shell-scalloped cartouche that is displayed above a satyr-headed and lambrequin-draped bracket; while a bacchic ram-headed, pearl-wreathed and lion-footed altar bears a shell-scalloped cartouche with the festive head of the harvest wine-deity. The pattern was invented around 1700 by the court ébéniste André-Charles Boulle (d.1732) and featured on a triumphal-arched cabinet, formerly in the possession of Jacques-Nicholas Colbert (d.1707), Archbishop of Rouen, and exhibited in 1862 at the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria & Albert Museum), and again in 1917.
Amongst 18th century furniture featuring the Pan mask is a secretaire delivered for Marie Antoinette's Versailles apartments in 1780 by J.H. Riesener (see P. Hughes, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Furniture, vol. II, London, 1996, no. 196)