A Regency Gilt Bronze-Mounted and Engraved-Inlaid Rosewood Writing Table, in the Manner of Louis Le Gaigneur, Circa 1820

This desk exemplifies the fashion among the English aristocracy in the first quarter of 19th century for French Ancien Régime taste based on the work of the French royal ébéniste Andre-Charles Boulle and the designs of Jean Bérain. Leading exponents of this style were the Prince Regent, William Beckford and the 3rd Marquess of Hertford.

There were several cabinetmakers working in London at this period who specialised in this type of work, including Thomas Parker of Air Street, Piccadilly; Town and Emmanuel of 103 Bond St; and Louis le Gaigneur, probably an expatriate French artisan first recorded in Queen Street (now Harrowby Street) off Edgware Road in circa 1815, and also recorded in nearby Homer Street in 1808, who produced brass-inlaid furniture in the newly revived 'Buhl' style. A pair of library tables in the form of bureaux Mazarin were supplied by Le Gaigneur to the Prince Regent at Brighton Pavilion in 1815 (RCIN 35289; now in Windsor Castle); and a similar desk is in the Wallace Collection (F479).

An almost identical writing table with contre partie inlay on the frieze is illustrated in Christopher Claxton Stevens and Stewart Whittington, Eighteenth Century Furniture, The Norman Adams Collection, Woodbridge 1983, pp. 170-171, and a further example is seen in a 1934 photograph of the Tapestry Room at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire (C. Hussey, English Country Homes, Early Georgian, 1715-1760, London 1955, p. 71, pl. 95).