A Find at The Wallace Collection

On my last trip to London, my brother took me to a museum I was unfamiliar with, a beautiful home right in the middle of town, the Wallace Collection. It is now a national museum, organized into 25 galleries with an incredible display of French 18^th Century paintings, furniture, porcelains, Old Masters paintings, and armor from around the world. It was established in 1897, by Richard










Seymour Conway, 4^th Marquess of Hertford, leaving it to his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace. After Sir Richard’s death in 1890, his wife bequeathed the entire collection to the nation. The only stipulation was that none of the objects ever leave their home, not even for loan exhibitions. So, if you want to see The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals, 1624, you will have to see it there!

While perusing the various, gorgeous rooms, my eye fell upon a desk by Jean-Henri Riesener (at left), German cabinet maker, (1734-1806), at left. It is a bureau a cylindre, circa 1785, that graces the center of the room. It is an early example of a writing table that has small stacked shelves in front of the user's main work surface, and a revolving cylinder part that comes down to hide and lock up the working papers when the desk is not in use. It is basically a roll-top desk, but a very new and innovative idea for the times. By the way, Riesener was one of the two favorite cabinet-makers of Marie Antoinette! He used floral and figures in his marquetry (the application of pieces of veneer to form decorative patterns), disguising screwheads and other structural elements with carved or cast foliage.

Jean-Henri Riesener became the French royal ebeniste,
the word stemming from “ebony”. He is responsible for some of the most exquisite examples of Louis XVI period furniture. Between 1774 and 1784 his average commissions while working for the French court was amounting to 100,000 livres per annum. Nice work!