ROENTGEN'S ARCHITECTS' TABLES

This superb architect's table is a perfect example of Roentgen's unrivalled craftsmanship, combining exacting quality of construction with the use of splendid veneers and finely chased gilt-bronze mounts.

Born in Neuwied and son of the cabinet-maker Abraham Roentgen (1711-1793), David Roentgen (1743-1807) was one of the greatest ébénistes of his age. He joined his father's workshop in 1757 and officially took control in 1772. Under his leadership it developed into a truly pan-European enterprise and he expanded his business in an unprecedented campaign no other 18th century furniture-maker could ever match. He developed extreme sophistication of woodwork, mechanism, and design and coupled this with a sound instinct for business. One of his first great international patrons was Charles, Duke of Lorraine (1712-1780), Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, brother of the Emperor Francis I who was married to Maria Theresia, and uncle of, among many other Princes and Princesses, Queen Marie-Antoinette. In 1774 Roentgen visited Paris to get acquainted with the new neoclassical style, the latest development in the European capital of taste and fashion and by the late 1770s his furniture shows him to have adopted this new style entirely. It may have been Charles of Lorraine who procured him the highly coveted entry to the French court during his second visit to Paris, in 1779, when he sold several pieces of furniture both to King Louis XVI and to Marie-Antoinette who rewarded his efforts with the courtesy title of ébéniste-mécanicien du Roi et de la Reine. This title opened doors to all the other European courts and Roentgen soon supplied furniture to many of the most discriminating aristocrats throughout Europe, including King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, to whom he delivered a closely related architect's table (recorded in F.W. Klose's watercolour of Friedrich-Wilhelm's study, where it is placed with its top raised beneath Raphael's Sistine Madonna, ill. H. Huth, op. cit., 1974, pl. 147), as well as the Electors of Hessen and Saxony, the Dukes of Württemberg and the Margraves of Baden. We have already mentioned Roentgen's large deliveries to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg which included nine such tables, two of which are now at the Palace Museum, Pavlovsk (ill. J.M. Greber, op.cit., 1980, vol. II, ills. 643-645 and D. Fabian, op. cit., 1996, cat. 91 and 95, pp. 59-60). An interesting 18th century documentation of the high regard with which Roentgen's tables were seen even in Paris can be found in the family portrait of Edouard Colbert de Maulévrier, plenipotentiary to the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne - de Maulévrier's elegant family portrait is centred by a table exactly like the one offered here. This type of table proved so popular that an engraving after Roentgen's original drawing was illustrated in a 1795 edition of the 'Journal des Luxus und der Moden', probably Germany's first fashion magazine, which was published in Weimar (see J.M. Greber, op. cit., vol. I, p. 261).

Examples of this model that have appeared at auction include one that was sold in May 1931 from the Stroganoff collections, now in the C.H. David Collection, Copenhagen; one from the Grand Dukes of Oldenburg, sold at Schloss Anholt, Christie's, 20-21 November 2001, lot 572 (DM 614,800), as well as one sold from the property of a Belgian Nobleman, Christie's, London, 5 July 2007, lot 257 (£132,000).