Decorator, Furniture, Les Collections, Celebres, D'Oeuvres D'Art, Secretaire Louis, XVI, From the Collection De M le Marquis d'Hertford, Plate 1, 1864

Date: 1864

Engraver: Delatre

Published by Goupil and Co, Editors, in Paris

Paper Size: 450 x 300mm

Print Size: 230 x 160mm

Condition: Good

Technique: Copperplate Engraving, later hand colouring

Price: $200

Description: 

A piece of furniture which the Marquis of Hertford thought was good enough to allow us to choose from among his treasures; to inaugurate the famous Collections, is a secretary of the most harmonious proportion. The front of the piece of furniture falls down and forms a mobile desk covered with green morocco; the interior is in amaranth wood with lemon tree fillets; there are three small drawers & seven compartments. Neither the artist who designed it nor the manufacturer who executed it signed it; however, we can probably attribute it to Riésener. It particularly strikes by the general tone, which is fine & sustained. The diamonds that stand out on the panels are brown & finely polished. The amounts which separate them are out of wood colored green, & like iridescent & pearly. The bronzes are very firm, and the angles as well as the moldings have profiles that are clean without being sharp. We will notice this pretty detail of these two branches of flowers that hang & which pass, without crumpling, under the circle of copper which reinforces the top of the piece of furniture. The top is in white marble. The cartridges, containing trophies in marquetry as finished as a painting, represent the attributes of the Arts, those of War, on the right those of Music, & on the left those of Sciences, Autumn & Spring, transparent allegories which say so well all that this piece of furniture of an easy & amiable, educated & polished century, must have contained tender & serious confidences!