A Pair of Mahogany Console Tables, by Jacob-Desmalter
A console table of the same model, in mahogany too, with one drawer and pieds à jarrets, was shown at the Chefs-d’œuvre des grands ébénistes exhibition, Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, in 1951,1 to illustrate the best works of the third generation of the Jacob dynasty — that of Georges-Alphonse Jacob-Desmalter, who bore the title “menuisier et fabricant de bronzes du roi et des princes” from Charles X to Louis-Philippe.2 Each of the present tables — consoles-dessertes, in technical terms, bears the stamp used by Georges-Alphonse from 1830 onward (fig. 1), and the pair can be dated, like the 1951 console, to about 1835.
Georges-Alphonse’s father, François-Honoré Jacob-Desmalter (1770-1841), second son of Georges Jacob (1739-1814), inherited the workshop in 1796 with his brother Georges II (see fig. 2) as Jacob Frères, then ran it alone from 1803 as Jacob-Desmalter et Cie — principal supplier to the Napoleonic court until the firm’s dissolution in 18133 — before retiring in 1825 in favour of his son and pupil. Georges-Alphonse, who also studied under Charles Percier, whose distinctive anticomaniac style can perhaps be recognised here, sustained that primacy through the Restoration and July Monarchy, until the trade’s drift toward industrial manufacture eroded the personal craftsmanship the Jacob name stood for; he sold the house to Jeanselme in 1847.4
Literature
See Denise Ledoux-Lebard, Les Ébenistes Parisiens du XIXe siècle. 1795-1870, Paris, 1965 and Denise Ledoux-Lebard, Les Ébenistes du XIXe siècle. 1795-1889, Paris, 1984.