CIRCA 1820-1830

The graceful lion-form supports of the present table are based on a design by Charles Percier and Pierre-François Léonard Fontaine, the famed architects and draughtsmen of the Empire period who were, in turn, inspired by furniture of Antiquity (J-P Samoyault, Fontainebleau Musée National du Château, Catalogue des collections de mobilier 3, Meubles entrés sous le Premier Empire, Paris, 2004, p. 93). Lion-form supports can be found on important commissions from the era including a pair of giltwood console tables ordered from Jacob-Desmalter for Napoleon I’s sale du Trône at the Château de Fontainebleau and delivered in 1808 (illustrated Samoyault, op. cit., pp. 91-93, no. 24). As the present table would suggest, these antique-influenced supports remained en vogue in the decades following the Empire. Here, they are combined with superbly chased frieze mounts of bacchic putti and a finely inlaid Italian marble top, a mélange emblematic of the splendid 'historicist’ interiors of Restauration France.