Restoration of a cabinet opening with nine drawers with turned ivory knobs, arranged in five rows: six small drawers in the upper rows, one small central drawer, and two wide drawers in the lower section, each simulating two drawers. The cabinet is set into a base which itself opens with a wide drawer in the frieze. This base rests on four faceted legs, connected by a flat, frame-like stretcher and punctuated with ball feet. This octagonal foot is characteristic of furniture Antwerp allows us to date this cabinet to around 1660, at the very end of the Louis XIII era or at the very beginning of the Louis XIV era.
The whole is veneered, on a frame of quarter-sawn oak (called "merrain", quarter-sawn), with red tortoiseshell (hawksbill turtle called caret or Eretmochelys imbricata) framed with moldings and fillets of ivory on a background of ebony veneer (from Ceylon).
State of affairs report
Aside from the separation of the four feet, this cabinet had no major structural defects. There were a few small areas where the veneer was missing. The main problem was severe dehydration of the glue beneath the very thick veneer (over 2 mm in places). The ebony veneer also exhibited numerous cracks and areas of separation.
The Restoration
On this cabinet, we removed all the tortoiseshell panels and then reattached them with mammal glue. To access the drawer fronts, we had to remove the ivory moldings, which were secured with small ebony pegs. After cleaning the entire piece, we thinned and then restored the old varnish. Finally, we evened out the finish with colorless shellac.
