A Louis XVI White-Painted and Giltwood Athenienne with Pierced Gilt-Bronze Mounted Patinated Metal Cover, After a Design by Jean-Henri Eberts, Circa 1775
Auction Closed
February 3, 09:38 PM GMT
Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Height 37 1/4 in.; Diameter 16 7/8 in.
94.5 cm.; 42.5 cm.
Bernard Steinitz, Paris
Elegance and Wonder: Masterpieces of European Art from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, May 2022-October 2023
The athénienne was a completely new, multifunctional type of French Neoclassical furniture derived from the tripod-shaped perfume burner of classical antiquity. It could be used as a washstand, perfume burner, food warmer, and jardinière.
It was invented, probably in 1773, by Jean-Henri Eberts, editor of Le Monument du Costume (a series of etchings on the history of French costume in the eighteenth century), and was first advertised in L'avantcoureur in September 1773. Only a single engraving of the advertisement, now in the Library of the University of Warsaw, appears to have survived (Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide, Wolfram Koeppe, and William Rieder. European furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: highlights of the collection. New York and New Haven, 2006, fig. 97). Eberts stated in his advertisement that the athénienne could be examined and acquired at the shop of the gilder and color-merchant Jean-Félix Watin, the author of a popular handbook on gilding, L'art du peintre, doreur, vernisseur. In Eberts's engraving the athénienne is shown as a perfume burner.
Several examples of the athénienne have survived.
One of the earliest may have been supplied to Madame Du Barry (1743–1793) at Louveciennes in 1774.[3] But this example is closest in design to Eberts's engraving. Eberts owned a painting by Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), La Vertueuse Athénienne, which includes a tripod that was once thought to be the source of the design by Eberts, but because the correspondence is not close, that idea was subsequently played down by French furniture expert Sir Francis Watson: "Nevertheless, since Eberts owned the painting there may well have been some link between the two in his mind.
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