A Pair of Late Louis XV Gilt-Bronze Mounted Ebony and Japanese Lacquer Meubles d’Appui by Joseph Baumhauer, circa 1765

Augustin Blondel de Gagny (1695-1776), 15 Place Vendôme, Paris circa 1765;

His sale, Paris, 10 December 1776 - 22 January 1777, lot 946;

Acquired by Claude Darras (1717-1788), 15 Place Vendôme, and recorded in situ in 1788;

Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Couturier Nicolay, 14 December 1984, lot 108;

Galerie Aveline, Paris.

Jean-Dominique Augarde, '1749 Joseph Baumhauer: ébéniste privilégié du roi,' L'Estampille 204 (June 1987), p.26-27 fig.14, 15 & 17

Alexandre Pradère, French Furniture Makers: The Art of the Ébéniste from Louis XIV to the Revolution, Paris 1989, p.245 no.42-43 fig.251

Alexandre Pradère, 'L'hôtel de Blondel de Gagny (1697-1777), place Vendôme, décor intérieur, ameublement et objets d’art', Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français, Année 2017 (2024), p.48 fig.30

Thibaut Wolvesperges, Le meuble français en laque au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 2000, p.367 fig.201

This elegant pair of cabinets originally formed part of the same collection as the Chinese porcelain pot-pourri vase offered as lot 5 in this sale, that of Augustin Blondel de Gagny, one of the most important French connoisseurs active during the second half of the eighteenth century. Blondel assembled a collection of almost 500 master paintings of the Italian and Northern schools, over 400 items of Oriental and European porcelain, some with elaborate gilt bronze mounts, bronze statues, marble vases and important furniture by Boulle, Cressent and BVRB and other contemporary ébénistes, with a particular focus on pieces veneered with Chinese and Japanese lacquer. The collection was housed in Blondel’s residence at 15, Place Vendôme (now the Ritz Hotel) and was open to visitors by appointment, becoming effectively one of the most significant house museums in Ancien Régime Paris. The introduction to the catalogue of the auction held after Blondel’s death in affirmed its international renown: : ‘La réputation de ce Cabinet est si bien établie en Europe, par le concours d’Amateurs qui, dans tous les temps, ont eu la plus grand facilité pour le voir, que nous avons cru devoir nous dispenser d’en faire des éloges qui n’ajouteroient rien au mérite des objets capitaux, intéressants & agréables, dont il est composé.’ The presence of both this pair of lacquer cabinets and the pot-pourri vase in the same collection attests to the owner’s discerning passion for the best in French 18th-century furniture and objects manufactured with a richness of design using exotic and high quality materials.

THE TASTE FOR LACQUER FURNITURE IN 18TH-CENTURY FRANCE

Asian lacquer screens, chests, cabinets and small boxes and objects were exported to the West from the early 17^th century by the Dutch, English and later French East India trading companies and rapidly found favour with wealthy art lovers. Early on a distinction was made between Chinese and Japanese work, the latter regarded as better quality and artistically superior, and consequently sold for a higher price. Already in 1610 the Dutch explorer and head of the trading post in Bantam, Jacques L’Hermite (d.1624) remarked that Chinese lacquer was poorer in quality and he preferred to ship Japanese lacquer to Europe, an observation shared in 1697 by the English explorer William Dampier (1651-1715), who said Japanese lacquer was regarded as ‘the best in the world’, and this perception persisted throughout the 18^th century and was reiterated in Jean-Félix Watin’s 1772 L'Art du peintre, doreur, vernisseur which stated Japanese work was ‘bien supérieur’ and ‘ne cède en rien à celui de la Chine’. The cabinets and chests produced for export by the Chinese and Japanese workshops throughout the 17^th century were actually based on European models that had arrived in Asia with the first Portuguese traders in the late 1500s, and by the early 18^th century such types of furniture were no longer in fashion. The practice of recycling these stylistically redundant pieces by using the lacquer as a form of luxury veneer, in the same manner as exotic tropical woods, resulted from the combination of the design ingenuity of the marchands mercier and the technical skill of the Parisian cabinetmakers. Repurposing lacquer to fit the carcases of contemporary case furniture was a complicated task that required great manual dexterity to avoid damaging the decorated surface and its wooden support. As Roubo described in L’Art du Menuisier Ebéniste: ‘La laque qu’on emploie ordinairement en Ebénisterie, se prend dans des feuilles soit de cabinet soit de paravent venu de la Chine ou du Japon qui, pour la plupart, sont vernies & peintes des deux côtés, & qu’on refend au milieu de leur épaisseur pour les diminuer ensuite au rabot et les mettre en état d’être plaquées sur des fonds de Menuiserie ordinaire. Il faut prendre beaucoup de précautions […] de crainte de faire fendre ou éclater le vernis.’ Unsurprisingly, the expense of the material and labour rendered lacquer-veneered furniture among the most costly productions of Parisian ébénistes of the Louis XV and Louis XVI periods, and such furniture was actively sought after by the wealthiest clients as a symbol of both their refined taste and financial status.

‘UN DES PREMIERS & DES PLUS PARFAIT DE CETTE VILLE’ : THE CABINET OF BLONDEL DE GAGNY

Augustin Blondel de Gagny was the son of Joseph Blondel (1661-1726), a high-ranking official in the Bâtiments du roi, the service responsible for the management and upkeep of the royal buildings and parks, who acquired the château de Gagny in 1706. Augustin enjoyed the protection of his friend and fellow collector Jean-Baptiste de Machault, comte d'Arnouville (1701-1794), the powerful Comptroller General of Finances, through whom he obtained the lucrative post of treasurer of the royal debt fund (Caisse des Amortissements) in 1750, and in 1752 he became head of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, the body responsible for designing and overseeing the Royal Household’s festivities and entertainments, including the theatre and opera. Blondel was a keen music lover who possessed a harpsichord by Ruckers and a Stradivarius violin. Blondel only began collecting in the late 1730s following the death of his wife in 1730. By 1749 Blondel had attained enough notoriety to be included in a visitors’ artistic guide to Paris, the Mémorial de Paris et de ses environs, which described the collection as one of the ‘premier and most perfect in the capital’ and marvelled at the overall installation of the paintings, porcelain, bronzes and furniture: ‘Toutes ces beautés rangées dans un ordre sçavant, & nullement confus, produisent un effet si surprenant, que le Spectateur en est saisi’ (p.211).

At the time Blondel had been residing in the Place des Vosges since 1742, but in 1758 he took a lease on the hôtel de Gramont at 15 Place Vendôme, constructed by the architect Pierre Bullet between 1708 and 1720 for the duchesse Anne de Gramont and acquired in 1750 by the financier Pierre-Charles de Villette (1700-1765). Blondel would remain in the townhouse for the rest of his life, sharing the premises with his assistant Claude Darras (in 1897 it was purchased with adjacent properties by César Ritz and converted into the eponymous hotel). Following his move Blondel continued to acquire artworks, and his collection became known as one of the most important in private hands in the kingdom, receiving a prominent entry in Hébert’s 1766 Dictionnaire pittoresque et historique, prefaced with a glowing encomium (p.36): ‘Le cabinet de M. Blondel de Gagny, place Louis le Grand, communément dite de Vendôme, est un des premiers & des plus curieux de Paris tant pour le choix des peintures, sculptures & dessins, que pour d'autres ouvrages extrêmement beaux, comme cabinets, et autres pièces d'ébénisterie du fameux Boul [...], une très grande quantité de bronzes, porcelaines anciennes des plus parfaites, & presque toutes du genre qu'on appelle première sorte.’

Hébert devoted over forty pages to a detailed description of the collection, likely based on an inventory provided by Blondel himself, and thanks to this account and the remarkable recent study by Alexandre Pradère (2024), it is possible to virtually recreate the interiors. Blondel inhabited the first floor piano nobile of the hôtel, with a series of three appartements de représentation with windows on the square and three private apartments behind overlooking the courtyard, along with an enfilade of three rooms in a perpendicular garden wing. Each room appears to have been copiously filled with pictures hung in multiple rows covering all available wall space and a multitude of bronze and porcelain objects arranged both on the furniture, chimneypieces and wall brackets as well as on the floor against the wall and underneath tables and desks, revealing Blondel was an inveterate collector unable to avoid succumbing to the temptation of new acquisitions.

This pair of cabinets was located in the central room of the garden wing, which in principle would be considered more private than the three salons at the front the house directly overlooking the Place Vendôme; however, its interior was arguably just as luxuriously appointed, hung with four Beauvais tapestries illustrating La Fontaine fables after Oudry, lit by an eight-light Louis XIV gilt bronze chandelier, filled with porcelain and marble vases placed on pedestals, brackets, tables and on the floor, and furnished with a suite of giltwood chairs covered in Gobelins tapestry. Hébert (p.73) describes the cabinets as ‘deux armoires basses de beau & ancient lacq, avec enqaudremens & orenmens doré dans le goût antique, & avec dessus de marbre africain’ and supporting bronze groups by Robert Le Lorrain of Venus and Adonis and Vertumnus and Pomona. Interestingly, Hébert also records in the room a pedestal, large side cabinet and an armoire all in Boulle marquetry and like the cabinets also with breccia africano marble tops, providing a degree of stylistic unity between furniture manufactured at different times. Pradère has identified the side cabinet with a bibliothèque basse in the Eugène Kraemer collection sold in Paris, 2 June 1913, no.358, and the armoire as one now in the Jones Collection in the Victoria & Albert Musuem, London (1045:1-1882). The cabinets appeared as lot 946 in the posthumous auction of Blondel’s collection, described as each ‘composée d’un panneau avec bordures d’aventurine d’ancien laque noir, & animaux en or de relief, panneaux en retour de même laque, encadrés de moulures & ornés de masques, rosettes & bâtons rompus de bronzes doré, pilastres à cannelures de cuivre lisse, le dessus de marbre africain’. They were acquired for 1680 livres with the buyer listed as Fournel, but they were then re-sold to Blondel’s assistant and co-resident Darras, who had already managed to purchase the entire hôtel at no. 15 from the estate of its previous owner and would live there until his death in 1788, when an inventory recorded the armoires as still present in the property: ‘deux meubles en laque, l’un representant des cerfs, et l’autre des coqs, à panneaux et encadrements dorés et leur dessus de marbre.' Darras bought over a dozen lots in the auction, including porcelain, marble busts, a bookcase in Chinese Coromandel lacquer and a console attributed to Cressent (Pradère 2024, p.63 n.177 and p.64 n.216).

JOSEPH BAUMHAUER AS A PIONEER OF FRENCH NEOCLASSICISM

Almost nothing is known about the early life of Joseph Baumhauer, one of the most celebrated of the numerous German-born artisans who had successful careers in Paris during the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, managing to circumvent the city’s strict guild regulations, and in Baumhauer’s case never actually becoming a master cabinetmaker but still named marchand-ébéniste privilégié du roi (dealer and cabinetmaker to the King) in c.1749. He married the daughter and sister of a family of Parisian menuisiers (joiners), Reine Chicot, in 1747, and as his surname was unpronounceable to most French-speakers at the time he stamped his work with his Christian name JOSEPH. Joseph was able to access important clients through the leading marchand-merciers of the era, notably Lazare-Duvaux, Darnault, and Simon-Philippe Poirier, for whom he produced desks mounted with Sèvres porcelain plaques. Much of his surviving documented work was in a mature rococo style, such as bois be bout marquetry case pieces with rich gilt bronze mounts like the writing and reading cabinet supplied to the Austrian minister the Comte de Coblenz or the unusual concave bureau plat and cartonnier in the Wrightsman Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York [1979.172.2] (both illustrated in Pradère 1989, p.233-34, figs.235, 237), and Joseph produced similarly mounted important commodes in Japanese lacquer including a stamped example in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1013-1882) and another bearing the label of Darnault in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (55.DA.2).

Joseph was also a key participant in the early neoclassical revival in the decorative arts and produced the iconic bureau plat et cartonnier for the connoisseur Ange Laurent Lalive de Jully in c.1756-58 (Musée Condé, Chantilly), a seminal commission in the history of 18^th-century French design. Conceived by the architect Robert Le Lorrain, the desk and filing cabinet reintroduce a strictly rectilinear silhouette and traditional classical ornamental elements like laurel swags, Vitruvian scrolls, paw feet and, on the cartonnier, a Greek-key pattern frieze and triple-fluted pilasters headed by rosettes, similar to those seen on the present pair of cabinets. Throughout the 1760s Joseph would continue to evolve in this direction, a style referred to at the time as ‘à la grecque’, and practised for works such as one of his undisputed masterpieces, the Japanese lacquer commode supplied to the influential arts minister and brother of Madame de Pompadour, the Marquis de Marigny (private collection, illustrated in Daniel Alcouffe et al., 18e, aux sources du design : Chefs-d'oeuvre du mobilier 1650-1790, Versailles 2014, p.203, fig.1) and the Japanese lacquer commode and encoignures en suite supplied to the Duchesse de Mazarin, now in the British Royal Collection (RCIN 35826 and 29.1-2) . This sumptuous piece incarnates the exceptional quality of design and materials of the best late Louis XV furniture and further illustrates that Japanese lacquer with gilt bronze mounts was reserved for the most prestigious clients.