A Louis XVI Gilt-Bronze Mounted Sycamore Work Table Attributed to Adam Weisweiler, Circa 1785-1790

Louis XIV, Régence; Louis XV, Louis XVI, XIXe siècle, tapis, tapisseries, Maitre Marc-Arthur Kohn, Hôtel de la Monnaie, Paris, 24-25 October 1996

Bernard Steinitz, Paris

Pierre Kjellberg, Le Mobilier Français du XVIII Siècle, Paris 2002 p.915 fig. C

Elegance and Wonder: Masterpieces of European Art from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, May 2022-October 2023

Small rectangular tray tables, with one or more tiers and raised on four legs or two end standards, appeared in French furniture in the 1780s and were alternatively referred to as work tables, tricoteuses or vuides-poche. They may have been an invention of the marchands merciers and were produced by many of the leading ébénistes of the period, among them RVLC, Martin Carlin, Jean-Henri Riesener and Adam Weisweiler. A well-known three-tier parquetry work table by Weisweiler mounted with Wedgwood jasperware plaques and probably commissioned by Daguerre was used by the Empress Josephine in the Tuileries Palace during the Empire and is now in the Wallace Collection (F325). Another work table or vuide-poche in mahogany stamped Weisweiler, based on a similar table supplied by Riesener to Marie-Antoinette at the Château de Saint-Cloud and now in the Musée Nissim de Camondo, was sold Sotheby's New York, 28 April 2010, lot 135 ($170,500).

A trellis parquetry work table with pierced uprights and a gilt bronze stretcher similar to those on the present lot is illustrated in F. J. B. Watson, Louis XVI Furniture, London 1960, fig. 132, and another of comparable form in mahogany mounted with jasperware medallions was sold Christie's London, 29 June 1972, lot 72.