A GERMAN NEOCLASSICAL GILT-BRONZE AND PIETRE DURE MOUNTED MAHOGANY SECRETAIRE, DAVID ROENTGEN WORKSHOP, NEUWIED CIRCA 1785-90, THE PANELS FLORENCE 17TH CENTURY

This elegant secretaire has many hallmarks of the work of David Roentgen (1743-1807), the most celebrated German cabinet maker and certainly one of the most skilled ébénistes of the late 18th century. Indeed, common characteristics associated with his work are visible in the present piece: the uncompromising quality of construction, a neoclassical spirit inspired by the French Louis XVI style, an architectonic structure adorned with miniature gilded vases positioned usually on galleries at the top, mille-raies gilt friezes, and his signature bronzes, both the almond-shaped mounts centred with a flower and roundel mounts.

The style fits in the period when he was supplying numerous pieces to Catherine The Great’s court, and many of the above-mentioned elements are seen in works in Russian collections. The ribboned husk mounts used are – in this particular model with a ribbon to each husk - rare in his oeuvre and can be seen in a bureau from Pavlosk (Greber, nr687). The bronze mounted fluted columnar legs can be seen on, among other pieces, on the spectacular bureau made for Catherine (The State Hermitage Museum, EPR-5.090) and the bureau a cylindre from the French Royal collections, now at the J.Paul Getty Museum (72.DA.47).

Nevertheless, the present lot stands out in Roentgen’s workshop outstanding and copious production for the unusual use of inset pietre dure plaques. These, made in Florence in the second half of the 17th century, employ rare and high-quality stones, which point out to the production of the best workers from the Granducal workshops.

Roentgen’s knowledge of the Paris trends and acquaintances of the best craftsmen and marchand-merciers – his relationship with the bronzier Rémond is well documented – might suggest that he knew of Weisweiller’s use of inset pietre dure plaques in his pieces. The Parisian ébèniste was born not far from Neuwied and of whom is said to have been an apprentice in Roentgen’s workshop.

David Roentgen trained in his father Abraham's workshop in Germany. Abraham was himself a fine cabinet-maker whose peripatetic training had taken him from Cologne to the Netherlands, London and Herrnhaag before settling in Neuwied at the invitation of the visionary Count Johann Friedrich Alexander zu Wied-Neuwied. An ambitious man, David was determined to expand the family business and set off for Paris, the epicentre of European cabinet-making. Roentgen took premises with the marchand-mercier Brebant in rue Saint-Martin, to whom he entrusted the sale of his furniture. Dogged by the politics of the guilds, it was not until he established his own enterprise in 1781 that the Roentgen workshop thrived. The wizardry of his mechanical furniture was greatly admired, and so was the virtuosity of its marquetry, which delighted patrons with beautifully executed pictorial scenes en camaïeu. Roentgen quickly established an international clientele including Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the Comte d'Artois, Catherine of Russia and Frederick the Great, benefiting greatly from the excess of the final years of the Ancien Régime.