Room from a Hotel in the Cours d’Albret, Bordeaux
•Maker: Carving attributed to Barthélemy Cabirol (1732-1786) and his workshop
•Date: ca. 1785, with later additions
•Culture: French, Bordeaux
•Medium: Pine, Painted and Carved
•Dimensions:
oOverall: 13 ft. 2½ in. × 17 ft. 4½ in. × 18 ft. 1¾ in. (402.6 × 529.6 × 553.1 cm)
•Classification: Woodwork
•Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Herbert N. Straus, 1943
•Accession Number: 43.158.1
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 547.
Bordeaux, an important seaport on the Garonne River in southwest France, experienced unprecedented economic and demographic growth during the second half of the eighteenth century. At that time the medieval city was beautified and modernized with new houses and streets. The British traveler Arthur Young (1741-1820) remarked on this in the late 1780s: “Much as I had read and heard of the commerce, wealth, and magnificence of this city, they greatly surpassed my expectations. . . The new houses that are building in all quarters of the town, mark, too clearly to be misunderstood,the prosperity of the place.”[1]
The Museum’s delightful small and intimate room is believed to have come from the Hôtel de Saint-Marc on the cours d’Albret, one of the recently laid out avenues. This residence was built between 1782 and 1784 by an unknown architect for the king’s minister Joseph Dufour. It was named, however, after Jean-Paul-André des Rasins (also Razins), the marquis de Saint-Marc (1728-1818 ), who became its second owner in 1787, having purchased not only the building but also the mirrors, tapestries, and other interior decoration. Formerly an officer in the Régiment des Gardes Françaises, the marquis de Saint-Marc retired in 1762 and then devoted himself to writing scripts for opera and ballet, poetry, and educational pieces for children. The presence of a circular room to the left of the entrance facing the courtyard of his mansion makes it plausible that the Museum’s paneling was originally installed there. A dumbwaiter in the kitchen directly below suggests that the room may have been the setting for private dinner or supper parties. The walls are rhythmically divided by eight long and narrow panels flanking the double doors, wall niches, windows, and mirrors. Displaying arabesques consisting of trophies symbolic of various arts and farming and hunting, the carving on these panels—mostly in low relief—has been attributed to the local sculptor Barthélemy Cabirol and his workshop. Additional trophies are found above the lintel of the two sets of doors—one, with a compass, T-square, and basket overgrown with acanthus leaves alluding to the origin of the Corinthian capital, is emblematic of architecture. Cabirol is known to have been responsible for high-quality boiseries in a number of private residences in Bordeaux. An engraving in César Daly’s Décorations intérieures empruntées à des édifices français of 1880 depicts this room with its original mantel and parquet floor. The latter was laid out in a radiating pattern that emphasized the shape of the room. Both the mantelpiece and the floor have since been replaced by other eighteenth-century examples.
[Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, 2010]
Footnotes:
[1] Arthur Young. Travels, during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789; Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity, of the Kingdom of France. London, 1792, pp. 45, 47.
Provenance
Joseph Dufour (1782/84-1787; sold to des Rasins) ; Jean Paul André des Rasins, marquis de Saint Marc (1787-d. 1818) ; Catherine de Ségur (until d. 1847) ; Marie de Saint-Marc (Mme. de Larose) (until 1861; sold to Hospices de Bordeaux) ; Hospices Civils de Bordeaux ; M. Albert Habib (until 1931; sold to Straus) ; Mrs. Herbert N. Straus (1931-1943; to MMA).
Timeline of Art History
•Timelines
oFrance, 1600-1800 A.D.
MetPublications
•The Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
•Philippe de Montebello and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977-2008
•Period Rooms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
•The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 7, Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution
•Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century
Game Table
•Maker: David Roentgen (German, Herrnhaag 1743-1807 Wiesbaden, master 1780)
•Date: ca. 1780-1783
•Culture: German, Neuwied am Rhine
•Medium: Oak and walnut, veneered with mahogany, maple, holly (the last two partially stained); iron, steel, brass, gilt bronze; felt and partially tooled and gilded leather
•Dimensions:
oOverall: 30 13/16 in. (78.3 cm) (Height) × 38 11/16 in. (98.3 cm) (Width) × 19½ in. (49.5 cm) (Depth)
•Overall depth, when opened: 38 9/16 in. (97.9 cm)
•Classification: Woodwork-Furniture
•Credit Line: Pfeiffer Fund, 2007
•Accession Number: 2007.42.1a–e, .2a–o, aa–nn
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 547.
In the eighteenth century, when dicing and playing cards, chess, and backgammon had become widely popular, game tables furnished many upper- and middle-class houses, and they were frequently bought in pairs.[1] Yet space was often at a premium in the intimate rooms fashionable in those times, and patrons sought furnishing that could perform multiple tasks. This piece functions as a console table, which can be pushed back against a wall when not in use, and as a desk for writing and reading or a table for playing cards and chess. It also contains a concealed backgammon box that is released by a spring. The top’s surface and the sides are veneered with superbly grained mahogany, framed only on the recessed area below the top (the apron) with brass moldings. The corner blocks are inset with brass fluting and supported on square, tapered legs that can be removed, facilitating transport. In its construction and mechanics, the table is in the tradition of the examples decorated with chinoiserie inlay that Roentgen made for Duke Charles Alexander of Lorraine (see MAK—Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna, inv. no. H270), and of a game table with floral and figural marquetry in Munich (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, inv. no. 84/239).
Documenting the high esteem in which Neuwied furniture was held at the Russian court in Saint Petersburg are two watercolors that show a pair of game tables in the Armory Room at Gatchina Palace, near the capital.[2] One of them shows the tables covered, probably in leather, for protection when not in use.[3] Other examples are currently on display in Pavlovsk Palace, outside Saint Petersburg.
This table bears the stamp of the cabinetmaker Pierre Macret, indicating that at one time it furnished a Paris residence, and further that the French also appreciated its restrained design in the “English manner,” with mahogany and gilded mounts. Macret likely repaired the table shortly after its arrival in Paris. As there is no guild stamp on the piece, it seems that he simply wanted to leave his mark on it, or even, perhaps, to claim it a one of his own products.
An inventory made in 1810 of the assembly room at Weimar Palace, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was privy councilor to Duke Karl August von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, lists a “game table veneered with mahogany, and decorated with brass moldings. With a hidden ‘Tocadille [backgammon board],’ 3 feet 4 inches long, 1 foot 8 inches deep. By Röntchen.”[4]
[Wolfram Koeppe 2012]
Footnotes:
[1] Princely residences sometimes had a large gambling room, such as Marie Antoinette’s salon de jeux at the Château de Compiègne and at Versailles. They were furnished with game tables in a variety of shapes that had several different playing surfaces. See John Whitehead. The French Interior in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1993, pp. 212–13.
[2] For one of these watercolors by Edward Petrovich Hau, The Armory Room in Gatchina Palace, Russia, 1875, in which two Roentgen game tables can be seen beside the two front pillars, see Emmanuel Ducamp, ed. Imperial Palaces in the Vicinity of St. Petersburg: Watercolours, Paintings and Engravings from the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries. Gatchina. Paris, 1992, pp. 82–83, pl. 35.
[3] In the Hau watercolor, cited above, the three tops of the tables are clearly visible.
[4] Quoted in Andreas Büttner. “Roentgen in Dessau, Weimar und anderswo: David Roentgens Verkaufsbemühungen in den 1790er Jahren.” In Andreas Büttner and Ursula Weber-Woelk, eds. David Roentgen: Möbelkunst und Marketing im 18. Jahrhundert. Regensburg, 2009, p. 74.
Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings
•Inscription:
oStamped on Underside: MACRET
Provenance
Private Collection, Switzerland; [sale, Sotheby’s, Zürich, December 7, 1994, no. 257]; Private Collection, Germany (until 2006); [Vera Roeser; sold to MMA]
Timeline of Art History
•Essays
oNeoclassicism
•Timelines
oCentral Europe (including Germany), 1600-1800 A.D.
Posted by Autistic Reality on 2018-11-08 20:53:28
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