POSSIBLY BY JEAN PELLETIER, CIRCA 1700, FORMERLY A CABINET-STAND

Boughton House in Northamptonshire has been called the ‘English Versailles’ for the Continental Baroque influence on its design and furnishings. As a member of Charles II's Privy Council the 1670s, Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu (1638-1709) pursued the role of an 'Apollo of the Arts', endeavoring to bring gloire to the Restoration court by elevating English arts and manufactures to the same high standard that he had witnessed while serving as the King's Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Louis XIV. As 'Comptroller' of the Royal Tapestry Works at Mortlake from 1674, Montagu's role was to supervise the purveyors of furnishings to the Royal households and to set the 'national' or 'court' style. After returning from exile in Paris during the reign of James II, Montagu gained control of King William III's Great Wardrobe, a charge that catapulted his ambition to enlarge both Montagu House and Boughton in the most fashionable taste expounded by the French court, imbued with the 'antique' style of architects, ornemanistes and sculptors including Daniel Marot, Charles Le Brun, and Pierre Le Pautre.

The present table, probably originally a cabinet-stand, shares much of its design vocabulary with continental models, from the distinctive profile of its tapering columnar legs to the powerful curving of its X-shaped stretcher. French examples sharing similar elements include a Royal example sold Christie’s, London, 6 July 2023, lot 24 and an adapted console table sold from the Collection of Maria Angiolillo, Christie’s, London, 15 July 2010, lot 665, both of which have been related to the work of Le Pautre (1652-1716).

Most remarkable are the openwork legs, each apparently carved from a single block in a tour-de-force of carving that appears to defy structural logic. The tasseled lambrequin atop each is equally exceptional, evoking in carved giltwood the sumptuous upholstery that constituted the most valuable of furnishings in English homes of the seventeenth century. At Boughton House today, a cabinet-on-stand in the Audit Room is constructed with two near-identical legs at its front, although the upper structure and the ebonized remainder of the stand are unrelated, being apparently assembled in the Regency period from various elements including seventeenth-century Boulle marquetry panels. This may well have been the work of Thomas Parker, the fashionable 'Cabinet and Buhl Manufacturer' who is recorded as working at Boughton in 1813. It is first documented in 1820 in the Duchess’s Drawing Room, inventoried as 'a Boulle cabinet on a carved and gilt stand'. Furthermore, a table later photographed among the Buccleuch collections at Ditton Park is of a similar design, though with solid legs; it may have begun life at Boughton House and as relative of the present lot, as many of the furnishings at Ditton were brought from Boughton by the son of the 1st Duke.

A few similar tables outside of the Montagu family, both English and French, are documented. The closest is the example illustrated in A. Chastel, French Art, Vol. III: The Ancien Régime, 1620-1775, Paris and New York, 1994, p. 206. A French side table from the Georges Hoentschel Collection now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, also in gilt walnut, similarly features openwork legs centering stacked flowers (obj. no. 07.225.185). For an English example, see the Royal table commissioned by Montagu for the Late Queen’s Bedchamber at Kensington Palace, recently published in Ronald Phillips, trade catalogue, Great English Furniture, London, 2025, cover and pp. 264-268, cat. no. 132, for which bills to Robert Derignée and Jean Pelletier survive, signed by Montagu himself.

Christie's would like to thank Crispin Powell, archivist at Boughton House, for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.