A Fine Mid-Victorian Pietre Dure Mounted Credenza

Description

A Fine Mid-Victorian Gilt-Bronze and Pietre Dure Mounted Ebonised Credenza or Side Cabinet.

This impressive ebonised side cabinet is richly mounted in sculptural gilt-bronze and Florentine pietre dure (hardstone). The polished top with brass-inlaid edge above a gilt-bronze guilloche-cast frieze. The doors with brass-stringing and central ribbon-tied medallions framing flower-filled classical urns in raised pietre dure intarsia. Flanked by corner panels of trailing flowering vine. The soft-red coloured velvet lined interior fitted with a fixed shelf. The doors flanked by pilasters with female term busts. The concave sides with glazed doors enclosing two fixed shelves lined in soft-red velvet. The cabinet is raised on a solid plinth with block feet.

England, Circa 1860.

In the mid-19th century, London was the largest city in the world and home to a thriving furniture trade. London’s wealth and position at the centre of a trading empire meant that furniture makers reflected the latest European fashions and imported from overseas luxury materials such as Japanese lacquers, Chinese porcelains, timbers from the West Indies, French porcelain and Alpine marbles.

This explains the creation of the present cabinet which was made in London in the Victorian period but is designed in the French style and using Italian carved hardstone panels. In the 1860s, London makers such as Town & Emanuel of New Bond Street and Jackson & Graham of Oxford Street, designed French inspired furniture. The demand was such that Paris makers opened showrooms and even relocated their workshops to the British capital, for example Monbro of Paris who set up shop in London in 1861.

Although London was richer, Paris was still considered the epicentre of good taste and particularly fashionable was the luxuriant style of the Emperor of France, Napoleon III.  This cabinet, although made in Britain, is designed in the fashionable French style of Second Empire Paris. Making marquetry pictures in hardstone is an Italian technique perfected in Florence at the Opificio delle pietre dure, literally meaning “Workshop of semi-precious stones”, established by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the 16th century. Beginning with the production of floors and tabletops, shortly thereafter Italian craftsman started to apply panels of hardstone to decorate furniture. In turn the Italian fashion was adopted by furniture makers at the court of the French king, Louis XIV. In the 18th and 19th century, the practice was perfected culminating in a great revival during the Napoleon III period when Parisian makers such as Hippolyte-Edme Pretot and George-Alphonse Monbro showed opulent hardstone mounted furniture at the Great Exhibitions of the mid-19th century.