A Napoleon III ebonised and gilt-bronze centre table circa 1865, by Charles-Guillaume Diehl

Sotheby's, London, The Property of a European Collector, 19th century Furniture and Decorations, 15 May 1998, lot 495.

In the context of the strongly historicist taste that prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the designs of Charles-Guillaume Diehl (1811-1885) exhibit considerable inventiveness in their choice of materials and motifs. His richly ornamented furniture departs from the classic preference for eighteenth-century furniture in the ‘tous les Louis’ styles or the fervent Gothic Revival manner, instead drawing on Empire, Egyptomania, Renaissance and ancient sources. Indeed, this fluidity of his inspiration is reflected on the puzzled discrepancies between the descriptions given by contemporary reviewers, with the 1867 médallier now in the Musée d’Orsay described variously as a “Gaulish”, Merovingian in style, or even the curious amalgam of being a large, Gaulish piece in the Roman style (see the entry on the d’Orsay’s website at OA 10440). Diehl’s work is veneered in an array of woods, but he often worked in smart black ebony offset by glamorous gilt-bronze mounts as on the present table. For instance, the Musée d’Orsay also holds a large bureau bookcase (OAO 1917), and Christopher Paye reproduces several examples in his entry on the work of Diehl (see C. Payne, Paris Furniture, Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, 2018, pp.326-333). Circular centre tables are infrequent, but as Christopher Payne notes, it appears that much of his work was not signed, since he had a large workforce of around six hundred in 1870 yet only a handful of works with his signature have been identified (ibid., p.328). A narrower library table in gilt-bronze-mounted ebony sold at Sotheby’s London, 26th February 1999, lot 204. Diehl, who was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and became a naturalised French citizen in 1872, showed his work at several international exhibitions (where he won medals at Paris in 1855, 1867 and 1869 and at Vienna in 1873), and his work is in major collections including the Musée d’Orsay (OA 10440, OAO 1917), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1989.197) and the Rijksmuseum (BK-2011-6 and BK-2000-7; see R. Baarsen, Paris 1650-1900: Decorative Arts in the Rijksmuseum, New Haven, 2013, cat. 133 and 134, pp.544-549).