Pair French Ormolu Mounted Chinoiserie Red Lacquer Commodes, François Boucher

Description

Pair of French Ormolu Mounted Chinoiserie Red Lacquer Commodes with marble tops, after François Boucher. Decorated with richly detailed Chinoiserie scenes after designs by François Boucher, this pair of French lacquered commodes reflect the 18th-century European fascination with imagined Eastern subjects. The red lacquer surfaces serve as the ground for polychrome narrative vignettes portraying idealized rural Chinese life. Across the front and side panels, figures in traditional dress are shown engaged in leisure and daily activity: playing stringed instruments, drawing water, conversing beneath trees, and seated beside pavilions with tiled roofs and columned structures. These painted compositions incorporate stylized architectural elements such as bridges, thatched huts, and open-air pavilions, arranged in landscape settings with a consistent horizon and visual rhythm. The figural treatment—outlined in dark brushwork and shaded with ochre, green, and brown—follows the decorative vocabulary of Boucher’s chinoiserie prints, which were widely disseminated in mid-18th century France and adapted across decorative arts. Each commode is constructed with a serpentine façade enclosing two drawers, raised on cabriole legs and finished with gilt bronze sabots. The body is made from hardwood, assembled using dovetail joinery and pegged back panels, with iron brackets on the interior for additional stabilization. A black and white variegated marble slab crowns each piece, shaped to match the undulating outline of the case below. The drawers are inset flush with the façade, fitted with wooden runners and an internal locking system. The red lacquer finish covers the entire visible surface, over which the figural scenes are hand-painted. Narrative scenes continue on the side panels, including depictions of dining, music, and drinking beneath architectural canopies, all bordered with thin gilt lines. The lacquer shows craquelure consistent with age and period technique. Gilt bronze mounts are applied to the cases for both reinforcement and embellishment. Each drawer features three circular pulls with foliate wreath backplates. The corners are mounted with vertically fluted neoclassical-style bronze elements, topped with acanthus swags and bands of beading. Gilt mounts also appear on the apron corners and at the upper joints, with curled foliate sabots protecting the feet. These mounts are all hand-cast and chased, consistent with French decorative bronze work of the Louis XV to early Louis XVI period. The form and structure of these commodes correspond to the transitional period between Louis XV and Louis XVI design, incorporating serpentine fronts with increasingly classical ornament. Painted Chinoiserie lacquer was a favored surface treatment among Parisian ébénistes and marchands-merciers during the mid-to-late 1700s, especially for furniture intended for elite clientele. The figural subjects and red ground resemble those seen on panels adapted from East Asian lacquer or recreated by French decorators based on engravings by Boucher and his contemporaries. Similar lacquer and ormolu-mounted commodes are held in the collections of the Musée Nissim de Camondo and the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlighting the appeal of these cross-cultural decorative objects in both their original and modern collecting contexts.

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