BY GEORGES JACOB, LATE 18TH CENTURY

Georges Jacob, maître in 1765.
Delicately carved with leaf-tips and pearls to the back and seat-rails and with distinctive baluster arm-supports, these elegant chairs are characteristic for Georges Jacob’s seat-furniture executed in the late-1780s. These were the years when he worked extensively for the Crown, supplying large quantities of chairs to almost all Royal residences but notably to St. Cloud and Compiègne. A pair of closely related fauteuils by Jacob, bearing a paper label inscribed ‘Pour la Reine a Compiègne, Chambre de Toilette’, were sold Christie’s New York, 26 October 1994, lot 84 ($92,700). These had probably been supplied circa 1787-88, when the Garde-meuble de la Reine, under the direction of Bonnefoy du Plan, began to supply furniture and decorations in her newly appointed rooms, a redecoration scheme which had begun in 1784. It is tempting to assume that the present fauteuils and chaises, with traces of a possibly Royal inventory label but now removed, were part of these deliveries.
An extensive suite of related seat-furniture, supplied by Jacob for the salon des Jeux at château de St. Cloud in 1787-88, included six voyeuses carved with identical pearl and stiff-leaf seat-rails as those of the current fauteuils and chaises. The St. Cloud suite consisted of various fauteuil and chaise types, many of which with differing carved ornament to the rails, which was entirely normal practise within the largest Royal suites of seat-furniture. One sees, for instance, that the seat-rails of the fauteuils have square corner blocks, those of the chaises and voyeuses are rounded. The same is apparent on the present fauteuils and chaises, almost certainly also originally part of a large suite destined for a château (P. Verlet, Le Mobilier Royal Francais, vol III, no. 38, pp. 239-243).