Louis XVI Style Cylinder Desk After A Model By Jean Henri Riesener

A Louis XVI style roll-top desk after a design by Jean Henri Riesener. The entire front is inlaid with a lozenge marquetry pattern. The cylinder is adorned in the center with a medallion depicting an allegory of music, surrounded by a garland of flowers chased around the medallion and finished with a Louis XVI knot. The interior contains five drawers, three compartments, and a writing surface covered in tan leather. The frieze opens to reveal three drawers, one of which is a secret drawer with a push-button release. The desk is richly ornamented with gilt bronze mounts featuring friezes of putti and foliate interlacing. The top is an openwork brass gallery with a veined white Carrara marble slab. It rests on tapered legs. Made in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine region in the early 20th century. The model for this piece is the desk of King Louis XVI, made by Riesener and now in the Louvre. About: Jean-Henri Riesener (in German: Johann Heinrich Riesener) (July 4, 1734 – January 6, 1806) was the French royal cabinetmaker, based in Paris, whose work perfectly illustrates the early Louis XVI Neoclassical style. Born in Gladbeck, Westphalia (Germany), Riesener settled in Paris where he began his apprenticeship shortly after 1754 with Jean-François Oeben, whose widow he later married. He was admitted as a master cabinetmaker in January 1768. The following year, he began supplying furniture to the Crown and, in July 1774, officially became cabinetmaker to the king, "the greatest Parisian cabinetmaker of the Louis XVI era." Riesener is the creator of some of the finest examples of Louis XVI style furniture, at a time when the French court embarked on furnishing projects of unprecedented luxury since the reign of Louis XIV: between 1774 and 1784, he received commissions averaging 100,000 livres per year. He was, along with David Roentgen, Marie Antoinette's favorite cabinetmaker. In addition to direct commissions from the Garde-Meuble (Royal Furniture Repository), he made furniture for the Count and Countess of Provence, the Count of Artois, the King's aunts, the Dukes of Penthièvre, La Rochefoucauld, Choiseul-Praslin, and Biron, as well as for wealthy tax farmers. He made extensive use of floral and figurative marquetry techniques, contrasting them with refined parquet and trellis backgrounds, and created gilt-bronze ornaments. His furniture was more finely finished than that of many of his Parisian contemporaries, and he took care to conceal the screw heads securing his ornaments with overhanging foliage details. It is likely that, as a royal craftsman, he was able to circumvent guild restrictions and produce his own gilt-bronze mounts: Antoine Vestier's princely portrait of Riesener depicts him at one of his richly ornamented tables, with designs for gilt-bronze mounts. Many of his pieces incorporated complex mechanisms for raising or lowering tabletops or tilting reading lecterns. Through his wife, he was related to other Parisian master craftsmen, notably the cabinetmakers Roger Vandercruse Lacroix and Martin Carlin. He completed the King's Desk, begun in 1760 under the direction of his predecessor Oeben; his name alone appears in the marquetry. In 1774, he delivered the commode intended for Louis XVI's bedroom at Versailles, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor. An even more sumptuous commode replaced it the following year (it is currently in the Condé Museum at Chantilly).