Restoration of a Regency period double-sided flat-fronted desk with a drawer unit, veneered entirely in kingwood. The sides feature a diamond-point frieze, and the drawer fronts are decorated with an inverted slab pattern. Each side opens with four drawers in the frieze, and one central drawer on the other side. The top is edged with a molding and gilt leather tooled in small pieces, resting on eight cabriole legs ending in goat hooves. Most notably, it features two emblematic bronzes from the oeuvre of André Charles Boulle: the mask of Democritus.
Indeed, gilded bronze masks are recurrent in Boulle's work; the masks of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus are mentioned in the post-mortem inventory carried out in 1732.
But this desk clearly does not belong to the production of the famous cabinetmaker. Since the masks created by Boulle were copied during his lifetime, we can only attribute the production of this desk to someone close to the master's workshop. Our bronzes are closer to those found on the Elector of Bavaria's desk by BVRB I than to those from Boulle's workshop.
You will find on the following link a magnificent 3D reproduction of Boulle's Democritus created by Explovision.
https://chateaudechantilly.fr/numerisation-3d-mobilier-boulle
Bibliography
- JP. Samoyault, André-Charles Boulle and his family, Geneva, 1979).
- Collective work under the direction of Mathieu Deldicque, André Charles Boulle, Monelle Hayot, 2024
State of affairs report
This piece of furniture showed severe dehydration of the glues on the veneered surfaces. There were numerous missing and torn sections of veneer. The structure itself was in good condition, except for the top, which was split three times beneath the leather. It should be noted that a 19th-century alteration transformed the two left-hand drawers into a single drawer containing a chest.
The Restoration
To begin, we removed the leather to access the slots in the tabletop and secure them. This revealed the screw fixings that had been added during a previous restoration. Since the original dowel fixing system was still present, we restored it and removed the screws. Next, we tackled the veneered surfaces. The drawer fronts were treated by vacuum-sealed glue infiltration. The sides were rehydrated by glue infiltration and then pressed using a hard/soft wedge system and a slight application of heat. For the fronts and legs, approximately 90% of the veneer was removed and re-glued with hot glue. Any gaps in the kingwood veneer were filled with new sawn veneer, which was scraped, sanded, oxidized, filled, and properly positioned on the back before being glued with a shaped wedge. After stripping with a solvent gel, a polished finish was applied. The leather was then re-glued, and before reassembling them, the bronzes were cleaned with gel.
