The japanned decoration on this cabinet is an example of the fashion for Chinoiserie, originating in the seventeenth century when European travelers brought back tales and engravings of the exotic sights they had seen in the 'Orient'. English and Dutch influences reached Germany in the late 1600s through the import of Chinese and Japanese lacquer and porcelain as well as their European copies, and finding their way to the mainly Protestant North German centers of Hamburg, Bremen and Brunswick. Two of the most talented North German lacquerers, Gerhard Dagly and Martin Schnell, were active in the courts of Saxony and Brandenburg/Prussia, where they created some of the most luxurious Western japanned furniture. While European lacquered pieces were most often executed in black or red, German lacquerers often used novel and unexpected colors, such as pink, blue, yellow, white and green.
This highly decorative commode is distinguished by its striking green ground and the whimsical quality of its lacquer decoration. A German bureau-bookcase with similar gilt and green japanning was sold Christie’s, New York, 24 September 1998, lot 178. The charming naivete of the human and animal figures on this commode relate this lot to a north German cabinet illustrated H. Kreisel, Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels, vol. II, Munich, 1970, fig. 15. Similar large-scale figures decorate a red and black japanned cabinet sold from the Lambert Art Collection, Christie’s, London, 14 October 2015, lot 184. While the gilt decoration at the top corners of our commode clearly imitates mask-form ormolu chutes, the gilt borders of the drawers and those framing the sides and the top are more similar to gilt embossing and can be found on other contemporaneous North German works, such as a cabinet of Hamburg manufacture, now in the Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo, see H. Huth, Lacquer of the West, Chicago, 1971, fig. 152, and a cabinet decorated in the manner of Dagly, sold from the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, Christie’s, New York, 23 October 2022, lot 526.