A pair of Louis XV carved giltwood console tables, mid-18th century

From the Estate of Mrs. Robert Lehman;

Acquired after sale Sotheby's New York, Important French Furniture, Ceramics and Carpets including Property from the Estate of Mrs. Robert Lehman, 18 November 2010, lot 54 ($81,250).

The elevated central platform at the intersection of a table’s stretcher was often used by capable eighteen-century carvers as a showcase for their brilliance, with many consoles like the present lot featuring animalier carving of considerable verve and complexity. Numerous designers of the period created imaginative console tables that used animals in this manner, visible either in surviving drawings such as those of Nicolas Pineau¹ or published sources, such as the fantastical tables in the Livre de plusieurs Desseins de pieds de Tables en Console of François Roumier (1750).²

Among the creatures found in such sculptural consoles, dolphins and dragons of mythological form appear frequently, and hunting scenes are also common. The latter is unsurprising given that tables of this level of richness will have been intended for aristocrats who had the leisure and estates to hunt frequently, and a superb example can be seen on a pair of tables that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $192,000.³ Birds, as on the present lot, are far rarer – a pair on a table that sold at Christie’s in 2007 were likely a romantic pair of billing turtle doves,⁴ though the long necks on the birds on the present table suggest that they are more likely to be swans. Depictions of animals in decorative art are often used to suggest narratives from the eternally popular fables by Aesop, which may be the case for the table depicting a bird and a dog pictured in a 2000 publication by Giacomo Wannenes.⁵

¹ B. Gady, T. Edwards and F. Gilles (ed.), Nicolas Pineau 1684-1754: Un sculpteur rocaille entre Paris et Saint-Pétersbourg, Paris, 2025, cat.394.

² F. Roumier, Livre de plusieurs Desseins de pieds de Tables en Console, Paris, 1750, pl.4. Available at: <https://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/idviewer/49738/9>

³ Sotheby’s New York, 16 October 2024, lot 129.

⁴ Christie’s New York, 20 April 2007, lot 380.

⁵ G. Wannenes, Eighteenth Century French Furniture, [n.p.], 2000, p.83.