THE BROTHERS ZWIENER:
Groundbreaking scholarship by Jörg Meiner in Berliner Belle Epoque: Der Ebenist Julius Zwiener und Kunstmöbel für den Hof Kaiser Wilhelms II (1888-1918) indicates that there were three Zwiener brothers from Herdon, Germany. The eldest brother Joseph had by the 1880s established a substantial workshop in the city of Breslau in Silesia, now in Western Poland, though little is known of his output. It was his younger brothers Emmanuel and Julius, working in Paris and Berlin respectively, who established themselves as premier haut luxe cabinetmakers of the late 19th century and founded the award-winning ‘Zwiener style’ lauded at the international exhibitions from 1889 onward. Emmanuel remained in Paris from the 1880s while Julius returned to Berlin in the mid-1890s to establish a workshop to rival the Paris ateliers, from which he produced important furnishings for Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Gilt-bronze mounts on furniture incised ‘Z’ or ‘ZN’, such as on the present lot, have been traditionally attributed to Emmanuel Zwiener, and mounts incised ‘ZJ’ to Julius. Prior to Meiner's research, a degree of confusion had been caused by attributions of the ‘ZJ’ mark to Maison Jansen who bought the old Zwiener workshop at 2, rue de la Roquette, and much of the stock, on Emmanuel’s retirement in 1895. In Paris Furniture: The Luxury Market of the 19th Century, Christopher Payne further establishes key stylistic differences between the Paris and Berlin workshops, noting that a ‘distinctive feature of the Paris production by Zwiener is the use of gilt-bronze overlaid on glass’, a technical feat which Julius does not appear to have attempted in Berlin (op. cit. p. 557). The present vitrine is elevated stylistically by the use of these overlaid mounts and highly expressive clasp and scrolling encadrements enclosing luxurious bois de bout marquetry and colorful vernis Martin.

THE PROVENANCE:
The present lot was acquired from the Estate of Susana Watson Lacayo (d. 1987), a sixth generation Californian and son of Manuel Dominguez, the former mayor of Los Angeles and an original signator of California's state constitution in 1850. Born in 1900, on the Watson Ranch in Southern California, Susana would eventually travel extensively through Europe with her husband Renato Lacayo where there taste for French decorative arts was fully formed. There they acquired the large number of furniture and decorations which adorned their Hancock Park mansion. The collection, sold at Christie's, New York, 26 January 1988, was an encyclopedic retrospective of the haut luxe firms of the Second Empire to the Belle Epoque, including a rare Steinway art-case piano by François Linke (illustrated C. Payne, François Linke: The Belle Epoque of French Furniture, Woodbridge, 2003, pp. 449), as well as array of furnishings now attributable to both Emmanuel and Julius Zwiener's workshops.