A Pair of Mahogany and Giltwood Torchères
The quality of execution of the giltwood acanthus-leaf motifs suggests a Lombard origin for these torchère stands, whose style—a neoclassicism assured though sober—could otherwise pass for Florentine: that is, for the simplified Empire style spread across Tuscany by the cabinetmaker Jean-Baptiste Youf (1762-1838). Youf had been summoned by Élisa Bonaparte, made Princess of Lucca and later Grand Duchess of Tuscany, to found at Lucca a manufactory able to rival the furniture that was then the glory of the Parisian cabinetmakers under the Empire.1
The ribbed lobes of the acanthus leaves, delicately superimposed, reproduce in giltwood the effect that alternating matt and burnished areas would have allowed in bronze. They point, for their part, to northern Italy as the origin of these torchère stands: either Piedmont, where a virtuoso school of intagliato had established itself in the 18th century, or Lombardy. The acanthus motif is, indeed, very close to that of a sgabello in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, made by a Lombard workshop at the end of the 18th century after a model by Giocondo Albertolli.
The base of one of the stands conceals a secret compartment.
Literature
See Denise Ledoux-Lebard, Les Ébénistes du XIXe siècle. 1795-1889, Paris, 1984, and above all Adriana Boidi Sassone et al., Furniture. From Rococo to Art Deco, Cologne, 2000. For the furniture made by Jean-Baptiste Youf for Élisa Bonaparte, see Enrico Colle, Il mobile dell’Ottocento in Italia. Arredi e decorazioni d’interni dal 1815 al 1900, Milan, 2007.
- Ledoux-Lebard, 1984, pp. 639-641 and Sassone, 2000, pp. 360-364. ↩︎