Louis XV circular marquetry and bronze dore table de salon

This round table has a top of white Sèvres porcelain painted with multicolored sprays of flowers within a blue border. It is surrounded by an openwork gallery of gilt bronze above a frieze mounted with three Sèvres porcelain plaques, one of which masks a drawer running the full depth of the top, resting on three straight supports mounted with gilt-bronze mounts in the form of pendant leaves and berries. The galleried undershelf is veneered with tulipwood radiating from a central rosette in a sunburst pattern, above three slightly splayed cabriole legs with gilt-bronze mounts in the form of acanthus leaves, the legs terminating in gilt-bronze scrolled feet. Although this type of table was variously called tablechiffonnière (work table for sewing), table en cabaret (bedside table), or table en auge (work table), the original inscription on the underside of the porcelain top clearly indicates that in the eighteenth century, it was also referred to as a meuble à corbeil (table with an open basket). At the Sèvres Manufactory, the circular plaques were known as grandes plaques rondes and the curved plaques, quarts de cercles; both shapes were produced specifically for mounting on furniture. Martin Carlin made a number of tables of this model fitted with porcelain plaques on the top, for the dealers Simon-Philippe Poirier and Dominique Daguerre. Among those in public collections are works in the Louvre, Paris,(1) the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris,(2) the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,(3) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.(4)

Catalogue entry from: William Rieder. The Robert Lehman Collection. Decorative Arts, Vol. XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 268.

NOTES:
1. Alcouffe, Daniel, Anne Dion-Tenenbaum, and Amaury Lefébure. Furniture Collections in the Louvre. 2 vols. Dijon, 1993, vol. 1, p. 228, no. 69. Another table of this model in the Louvre, Paris, is OA10468.
2. Gasc, Nadine and Gerard Mabille. Le Musée Nissim de Camondo. Musees et monuments de France. Paris, 1991, p. 39.
3. Sassoon, Adrian and Gillian Wilson. Decorative Arts: A Handbook of the Collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, 1986, p. 32, nos. 68, 69; Sassoon, Adrian. Vincennes and Sevres Porcelain: Catalogue of the Collections. J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, 1991, pp. 166 – 72, nos. 33, 34, with an extensive discussion of the Sèvres production of porcelain plaques designed for mounting on furniture.
4. Metropolitan Museum, 1976.155.104 (with a top of tulipwood radiating in a sunburst pattern; F. J. B. Watson and Carl Christian Dauterman. Furniture, Gold Boxes; Porcelain Boxes, Silver. Vol. 3 of The Wrightsman Collection. New York, 1970, pp. 52 – 54, no. 297). Another table of this model, with Sèvres plaques added at a later date on both upper and lower shelves, was also in the Wrightsman Collection (F. J. B. Watson. The Wrightsman Collection. Vol. 1, Furniture. New York, 1966, pp. 282 – 83, no. 142) but is now in the Metropolitan Museum.

Lord Hillingdon; [Joseph Duveen]; Audrey Kilvert Taylor, Paris; [Rosenberg & Stiebel, New York]. Acquired by Robert Lehman through Rosenberg & Stiebel in December 1959.