A Louis XIV Gilt Bronze-Mounted Brass, Mother-Of-Pearl, and Stained Horn Inlaid Tortoiseshell Première Partie Marquetry Casket, Circa 1700

Palais Galliera, Paris, 11 April 1962, lot 61, plate XLVI

This exquisite casket forms part of a group of fewer than two dozen recorded works likely emanating from the same workshop, all with identical gilt bronze mounts and decorated in the same technique and materials of tortoiseshell, brass, pewter, mother of pearl and stained horn inlaid in première or contre partie. The caskets are in both larger and smaller sizes and all the share the same rectangular form with canted concave corners and concave lids and are decorated with comparable iconography of disporting and sleeping putti, Venus and Cupid, flowering and fruit trees, and various flying birds and waterfowl. Several of the larger versions including the offered lot have the same decoration on the concave lids of a rosette-filled trellis centering billing doves and classical profile bust medallions. Referred to in 18th-century inventories as carrés de toilette, these boxes were intended for use on a lady's dressing table to hold brushes, pincushions, ribbons and feathers. Their shape derives from late 17th-century carved boxes in cherrywood or bois de Bagard, these in turn based on the covered boxes that traditionally formed part of large silver or silver gilt toilet services. Two such carrés are visible on the table de toilette of Madame Marsollier in Jean-Marc Nattier's 1749 portrait of her and her daughter now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (45.172).

Caskets from this series have long been prized by connoisseurs and entered some of the most distinguished collections of the past 150 years. Examples of the larger format are recorded in the following auctions and institutions:

- Getty Museum, Los Angeles, contre-partie, formerly Hamilton Palace and Arturo Lopez-Willshaw collections

- Wilanów Palace, Warsaw, two in première partie from the toilet service of Queen Maria Kazimiera of Poland

- Victoria & Albert Museum London, Jones Collection, contre-partie

- Sotheby's London, 22 November 1963, lot 1, première partie, from the collection of Mrs Nelly Ionides

- Christie's New York, 22 November 1983, lot 24, contre-partie

- Christie's London, Wildenstein Collection, 14 December 2005, lot 14, contre-partie

- Sotheby's New York, Lily and Edmond J. Safra Collection, 19 October 2011, lot 709, contre-partie, and lot 710, première partie, formerly Keck Collection, La Lanterne, Bel Air, California

And for the smaller size:

- Ader Picard Tajan, Paris, 28 November 1978, lot 149, première partie, formerly Hamilton Palace

- Wilanów Palace, Warsaw, two in première partie from the toilet service of Queen Maria Kazimiera of Poland

- Sotheby's New York, Lily and Edmond J. Safra Collection, 19 October 2011, lot 708, première partie, and lot 711, contre partie

- Sotheby's Paris, Dillée Collection, 18 March 2015, lot 4, contre partie, formerly Hamilton Palace

Although the design repertory on each of the caskets varies somewhat, the primary source of inspiration appears to be a cycle of paintings depicting the History of Venus by the Bolognese artist Francesco Albani (1578-1660) that was acquired by Louis XIV in 1684-5 and is now in the Louvre. The very distinctive practice of combining brass and tortoiseshell marquetry with stained horn and mother-of-pearl, which diverges somewhat from the technique typically seen in the Boulle workshop, is found on several surviving contemporary pieces of case furniture generally considered to be of German manufacture, including a bureau from Knole sold Christie's London 17 June 1987, lot 73, and another bureau from the Patino Collection sold Sotheby's New York 20 May 1992, lot 57. Also, a similarly decorated casket sold Sotheby's Monaco 23 February 1986, lot 784, is signed Fried. Luchtenstein Dusseldorf 1706. This raises the possibility that the series to which the offered lot belongs may have been produced in Germany, or alternatively in a Paris workshop run by a German émigré.