Mathieu Béfort dit Béfort Jeune French, b. 1813 " The Four Seasons", a pair of gilt bronze-mounted ebony and ebonised Boulle style tortoiseshell and brass inlay marquetry encoignures Paris, mid 19th century

each surmounted by a black marble top, opening to one shelf, some mounts have been removed to reveal the mark BJ from the bronze master models

Denise Ledoux-Lebard, Les Ebénistes du XIX Siècle, Editions de l'Amateur, Paris, 1984, pps. 48-50.

The figures allegorical of the four seasons are decorative attributes regularly used by Mathieu Béfort. It is interesting to note that the female figure holding a shaft of wheat, possibly Ceres, is identical to a mount that appears on an 18th century cabinet attributed to P-C Montigny (maître in 1766), formerly in the Arnold Seligmann Collection, and illustrated in F. Watson, Louis XVI Furniture, London, 1960, p. 153, no. 236.

Mathieu Béfort (1813-1880) was the son of Jean-Baptiste Béfort, who was of Belgian origin and renowned for having supplied furniture for the apartments of the Duc d'Orléans. He was established at numbers 1 and 6 rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles in Paris from 1844 to 1880. Mathieu was a gifted ébèniste-marqueteur specializing primarily in Boulle marquetry and in particular extremely high quality work inspired by the work of André-Charles-Boulle himself. The mark BF found on the present lot is most certainly an early way of signing is creations, since the most common marks discovered on most of his oeuvre are punched stamps reading BEFORT JEUNE on the carcass, and marks BEFORT JNE or BJ as in the present pair to the reverse of some bronze mounts.