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Lot Essay
This impressive tray is an unusually large example of a special pictorial marquetry technique combining ivory, engraved brass and various woods designed by Ferdinand Duvinage (1813-1876), director of the Parisian luxury goods store Maison Alphonse Giroux. This new decorative technique called ‘une mosaïque combiné avec cloisonnement métallique’ was patented by his Duvinage’s widow in 1877 and was used in the manufacture of all manner objets d’art including trays, tazze, jardinières and table tops. The majority are in the Japonisme style, depicting exotic birds, bamboo and prunus borrowed from Far Eastern sources including Canton porcelain and Meiji metalwork.
These exquisite ornamental objects are first recorded to have been shown at the 1878 Exposition universelle in Paris. They are almost always marked and etched FD and Bté (short for ‘breveté’ or patent) and were likely created only between 1877, when the patent was granted, and 1882 when Madame Duvinage ceded her directorship of the firm (D. Kisluk-Grosheide, 'Maison Giroux and its 'Oriental’ Marquetry Technique’, The Journal of The Furniture History Society, vol. XXXV, 1999, pp. 154 & 162).
An apparently identical ‘Tray with a Rooster’, of the same size and scene, is in the collection of the Los Angles Country Museum of Art (M.81.175) and illustrated in D. Kisluk-Grosheide, op. cit. fig. 15, p. 163. Other examples of Duvinage’s distinctive marquetry mosaicwork can be found in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
These exquisite ornamental objects are first recorded to have been shown at the 1878 Exposition universelle in Paris. They are almost always marked and etched FD and Bté (short for ‘breveté’ or patent) and were likely created only between 1877, when the patent was granted, and 1882 when Madame Duvinage ceded her directorship of the firm (D. Kisluk-Grosheide, 'Maison Giroux and its 'Oriental’ Marquetry Technique’, The Journal of The Furniture History Society, vol. XXXV, 1999, pp. 154 & 162).
An apparently identical ‘Tray with a Rooster’, of the same size and scene, is in the collection of the Los Angles Country Museum of Art (M.81.175) and illustrated in D. Kisluk-Grosheide, op. cit. fig. 15, p. 163. Other examples of Duvinage’s distinctive marquetry mosaicwork can be found in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.