A DESIGN OF TIMELESS ELEGANCE
The PIASA sale of Jewellery, Old Master Paintings & Drawings, Furniture & Objets d’Art on 16 June 2016 (with Pierre-François Dayot officiating as expert for the latter two specialities) will feature a remarkable, ormolu-mounted, ebonized pearwood Régence bureau plat attributed to Noël Gérard.
When the multi-legged Bureau Mazarin fell out of fashion after 1700, cabinet-makers sought to design a new style of desk. In 1710 André Charles Boulle (1642-1732) definitively abandoned existing models and conceived an extended form of writingtable known as a bureau plat, whose main challenge lay in the relationship between the size of the desk-top and the reduced number of legs. Other cabinet-makers would follow Boulle’s lead in making four-legged, large-topped desks throughout the 18th century.
The bureau plat to be offered at PIASA belongs to a group of several desks of similar design, shape, decoration and technique, including the one stamped NG in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (cf A. Pradère: Les Ebénistes Français de Louis XIV à la Révolution, p.112); one now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, thought to have been owned by the Duchesse du Maine; and three in Bavaria – in the Bayerisches Museum in Munich, the Neue Residenz in Bamberg, and the Residenz in Ansbach (formerly owned by the Margraves of Brandenburg).
