A French gilt-bronze mounted mahogany commode à vantaux, after a model by Benneman and Stöckel, Paris in Louis XVI style, circa 1880

Estimate

20,000 - 30,000 EUR

bidding is closed

Description

96cm. high, 181cm. wide, 67cm. deep.

with white marble top, above a central frieze drawer, overall elaborately set with scrolling foliate cast gilt-bronze mounts, the two doors revealing an interior fitted with six further drawers

Literature

Pierre Kjellberg, Le mobilier Francais du XVIIIe siècle, The art of the ébèniste from Louis XIV to the Revolution, Paris 1989, pp. 405ff.
Similar examples have been sold at Sothebys New York, 22 November 2005, lot 303 and 27 April 2006, lot 247.

Catalogue Note

The present commode is closely based on the famous model by the eighteenth century ébéniste Guillaume Benneman, executed while he was running the Garde-Meuble Royal in Paris. Benneman adapted it from a model by Joseph Stöckel, received maître in 1775, and supplied to Queen Marie-Antoinette in 1786 for the Salon des jeux at Fontainebleau. Various early examples of this model found their place in the finest rooms of the French royal palaces, not only at Fontainebleau but among others at Versailles and Saint-Cloud.
In the middle of the 19th century under the influence of Empress Eugénie, the Louis XVI style became very fashionable. Eugénie sought to imitate the life-style of her idol Marie-Antoinette. In her bedroom at Saint-Cloud, she combined two pieces of furniture by Benneman, in appearance very similar to the present lot, with contemporary objects commissioned in Louis XVI style.