Object Description
This is a beautiful antique French Louis XV Revival walnut, kingwood and marquetry commode, circa 1860 in date.
It has a stunning shaped Italian Breccia marble top above two drawers finely inlaid with scrolling foliate and floral marquetry and featuring unusual ormolu corner mounts featuring acanthus scrolls and cartouche cresting.
A lot of intricate workmanship by a master craftsman has gone into the creation of this wonderful commode.
Condition:
In really excellent condition having been beautifully cleaned, French polished and waxed in our workshops, please see photos for confirmation.
Dimensions in cm:
Height 97 x Width 136 x Depth 53
Dimensions in inches:
Height 3 foot, 2 inches x Width 4 foot, 5 inches x Depth 1 foot, 9 inches
Marquetry
is decorative artistry where pieces of material (such as wood, mother of pearl, pewter, brass silver or shell) of different colours are inserted into surface wood veneer to form intricate patterns such as scrolls or flowers.
The technique of veneered marquetry had its inspiration in 16th century Florence. Marquetry elaborated upon Florentine techniques of inlaying solid marble slabs with designs formed of fitted marbles, jaspers and semi-precious stones. This work, called opere di commessi, has medieval parallels in Central Italian “Cosmati”-work of inlaid marble floors, altars and columns. The technique is known in English as pietra dura, for the “hardstones” used: onyx, jasper, cornelian, lapis lazuli and colored marbles. In Florence, the Chapel of the Medici at San Lorenzo is completely covered in a colored marble facing using this demanding jig-sawn technique.
Techniques of wood marquetry were developed in Antwerp and other Flemish centers of luxury cabinet-making during the early 16th century. The craft was imported full-blown to France after the mid-seventeenth century, to create furniture of unprecedented luxury being made at the royal manufactory of the Gobelins, charged with providing furnishings to decorate Versailles and the other royal residences of Louis XIV. Early masters of French marquetry were the Fleming Pierre Golle and his son-in-law, André-Charles Boulle, who founded a dynasty of royal and Parisian cabinet-makers (ébénistes) and gave his name to a technique of marquetry employing shell and brass with pewter in arabesque or intricately foliate designs.
Breccia Marble
Is a rock composed of broken fragments of minerals or rock cemented together by a fine-grained matrix that can be similar to or different from the composition of the fragments.
Breccia rock can be any colour and is very colourful. The colour is determined by the colour of the matrix or cement along with the colour of the angular rock fragments.
The word has its origins in the Italian language, in which it means either “loose gravel” or “stone made by cemented gravel”.
For thousands of years, the striking visual appearance of Breccias has made them a popular sculptural and architectural material. Breccia was used for column bases in the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete in about 1800 BC. Breccia was used on a limited scale by the ancient Egyptians, one of the best-known examples is the statue of the goddess Tawaret in the British Museum.
It was regarded by the Romans as an especially precious stone and was often used in high-profile public buildings. Many types of marble are brecciated, such as Breccia Oniciata or Breche Nouvelle.
Breccia is most often used as an ornamental or facing material in walls and columns. A particularly striking example can be seen in the Pantheon in Rome, which features two gigantic columns of pavonazzetto, a breccia coming from Phrygia, in modern Turkey. Pavonazzetto obtains its name from its extremely colourful appearance, which is reminiscent of a peacock’s feathers,pavone is “peacock” in Italian.
Our reference: A1693