Restoration of a cabinet opening with nine drawers arranged in five rows (six small drawers in the top row, one small central drawer, and two wide drawers in the lower section, each simulating two drawers) with turned ivory knobs. It is set into a base, itself opening with a wide drawer in the frieze, with four faceted legs connected by a flat, frame-like stretcher and ending in ball feet. This octagonal base 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
Apart from the separation of the four feet, this cabinet did not have any major structural defects. There were a few small areas where the veneer was missing, but the main problem was severe dehydration of the glues under the very thick scale (more than 2 mm in some places) and in the ebony veneer, which had numerous cracks and areas of separation.
The Restoration
On this cabinet, all the tortoiseshell panels were removed and glued in place with mammal glue. To access the drawer fronts, the wood moldings, which were held in place by small ebony pegs, had to be removed. After cleaning the entire piece, the old varnish was lightly removed and then restored before the whole piece was finished with a coat of colorless shellac.
