CIRCA 1775

This eye-catching secretaire, with its distinctive inlay of architectural capricci influenced by the work of the celebrated Roman engraver and designer Giovanni Battista Piranesi, belongs to a group of secretaires and commodes executed in the 1770s with similar marquetry subjects. According to Geoffrey de Bellaigue, the pictorial and architectural marquetry panels on these pieces appear to have been made by one or a group of specialty marqueteurs who supplied furniture to Parisian marchands-merciers and ébénistes, including Jacques van Oostenrik, dit Dautriche, Pierre Denizot, Léonard Boudin, Pierre Roussel, Pierre Macret, Martin Ohneberg, Nicolas Petit, Charles Topino, Christophe Wolff and André Louis Gilbert. (See G. de Bellaigue, 'Engravings and the French Eighteenth Century Marqueteur', Burlington Magazine, May 1965, pp. 240 - 250 and July 1965, pp. 356 - 363, and 'Ruins in Marquetry', Apollo, January, 1968, pp.12-16).