Impressive Louis XV Style Bureau Plat/Writing Desk, After Riesener & J.Oeben

AN IMPRESSIVE LOUIS XV STYLE BUREAU PLAT /DESCRIPTION - AFTER THE BUREAU DU ROI AT VERSAILLES BY J.-F. OEBEN AND J.-H. RIESENER

The rectangular top, with the outline of an arc-en-arbalète, is fitted with an embossed leather writing surface and is fitted with four short drawers on the moulded apron with opposing false drawers. It stands on cabriole legs fitted with oval biscuit panels on the sides representing the Three Graces and inlaid with marquetry panels depicting bouquets of ribbons, foliage and floral tendrils, shells, coral and draped pearls, all with berry and foliage tendrils of ribbons, the cabriole legs fitted with lion skin loops hanging down to form spiral patterned clogs.

Footnotes
The Bureau du Roi at Versailles is perhaps the most famous piece of furniture in the world and certainly one of the most luxurious furniture creations of the 18th century. Louis XV ordered this cylinder-topped desk from Jean-François Oeben (1721-1763), who had already completed the design and much of the production by the time of his early death in 1763. Jean-Henri Riesener (1734-1806), who married Oeben's widow and took over his business, completed the desk in 1769. The final price was 62,000 livres, one of the highest prices ever paid for a piece of furniture up to that time (for comparison, the average annual salary of a worker in the 18th century was almost 300 livres).

The office kept Riesener busy for the rest of his career, as evidenced by his numerous invoices for polishing and cleaning the bronzes and maintaining the extremely complicated mechanisms (the cylinder apparently opened and the writing slide moved forward, all with a simple turn of a key - modified in the 19th century, no one has since been able to reconstruct the original mechanism). At the height of the revolutionary excitement, Riesener even covered the royal double-L monogram with biscuit porcelain plaques so that the desk would not be defaced or sold by anti-royalist figures.

The first known copy of the Bureau du Roi was created around 1860 for Richard Seymour Conway, Fourth Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870). For this ambitious project, Hertford employed Carl Drechsler, a little-known cabinetmaker who worked for the famous sculptor and bronzemaker Charles Crozatier. Through his friendship with Emperor Napoleon III, he was inspired by the work of the French architect Charles Crozatier. Hertford gave Drechsler access to the desk itself, enabling him to make casts of the bronze fittings and produce a faithful and impressive copy, which can now be seen in the Wallace Collection in London.

Henry Dasson was the next to attempt this feat of furniture making, exhibiting his copy of the desk at the 1878 Paris World's Fair. Since Dasson took over Drechsler's business after his death in 1867, it is safe to assume that he inherited at least some of the models and bronze casts of the desk Drechsler had made for the Marquess of Hertford. Other examples are also known by Zwiener, Beurdeley, Jansen and Linke, and were made for such prestigious clients as Ludwig II of Bavaria and the Russian Tsar Nicholas II.

However, examples such as the present model - as a desk top without a cylinder top - are rare. There is indeed an 18th-century model: a Bureau plat was created in 1786 as a counterpart to the Bureau du Roi that Louis XVI had ordered for his cabinet at Versailles. This Bureau plat was made by Guillaume Jean-Benneman under the supervision of Jean Hauré and is now part of the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor. It differs from the Versailles cylinder bureau in a number of important details: the modelling of the bronzes, which is somewhat sharper and more detailed than in the work of Oeben and Riesener; the design of the marquetry panels and, in particular, the fact that Benneman's Bureau plat still bears the marquetry monogram with the double L, which Riesener later covered with the blue-ground bisque panels.

Literature:
Pierre Verlet, Le Mobilier royal français, Picard, 1992, II, p.

Camille Mestdagh, L'Ameublement d'art français 1850-1900, Les Editions de l'Amateur, 2010, p. 19; pp. 76-78.

Condition report:

Good. Wear consistent with age and use.