Based on a design attributed to Pierre GOLE (1620–1684) and - Lot 448

Based on a design attributed to Pierre GOLE (1620–1684) and likely designed and crafted around 1660–1665 for the Duke of Orléans’s “white cabinet” at the Palais Royal in Paris. A cabinet with floral marquetry, entirely veneered with bone and richly decorated on a frame of oak and walnut with bouquets of flowers in green-stained bone marquetry, boxwood and fruitwood, ebony, and horn imitating tortoiseshell, with moldings in blackened walnut. The front features numerous drawers, including one around the base and some with simulated openings, as well as a door revealing a compartment with three drawers. It rests on a base with six faceted column-like legs joined by a crossbar and supported by spheres. Louis XIV style. Height: 133 cm. Width: 82 cm. Depth: 38 cm. Comparable piece: The model for our cabinet is housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum; ours is a very faithful copy, in the same dimensions, of this masterpiece of French cabinetmaking. However, our cabinet is made with a bone and stained bone background, whereas the original is entirely veneered with ivory. The idea of using ivory as a veneer had developed in Augsburg in the 1620s, but Pierre Gole, the king’s cabinetmaker in Paris, was the only one to employ it in France as a backing for vibrantly colored wood marquetry. Gole most likely crafted this cabinet for the home of the Duke of Orléans, brother of King Louis XIV of France. In 1661, the duke married Henriette Anne, the fifth daughter of King Charles I of England. The couple took up residence at the Palais-Royal in Paris. Upon the duchess’s death in 1670, an inventory of her possessions was drawn up under Gole’s supervision. It mentions a cabinet of identical shape and dimensions—the “White Cabinet”—in their apartments.