Commode à Vantaux (One of a Pair of Commodes with Two Doors)

This cabinet and its pair, 1918.5.43, may well be the last pieces of furniture made by the celebrated Parisian cabinetmaker Bernard van Risenburgh II just before he retired in 1764 and sold his workshop to his son, Bernard van Risenburgh III, who finished them. The cabinets feature eight panels of black-and-gold Japanese lacquers of exceptionally high quality taken from a seventeenth-century Japanese cabinet, chest, or screen. Beginning in the 1730s, the older van Risenburgh worked almost exclusively with the influential marchands-merciers (merchants of luxury goods), who provided the cabinetmaker with the rare and costly Oriental lacquers and sometimes with the design for the furniture on which to mount them.

Source: Vignon, Charlotte. The Frick Collection Decorative Arts Handbook. New York: The Frick Collection/Scala, 2015.

Sale, A. Paillet & H. Delaroche, Paris, April 18 et seq., 1803, Lot 342, bought by Desmarets for 980 livres. Adelbert Wellington Brownlow, third Earl Brownlow, Ashridge Park, Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire. Duveen. Frick, 1918.

Source: Furniture in The Frick Collection: Italian and French Renaissance, French 18th and 19th Centuries (Pt. I). Volume V. New York: The Frick Collection, 1992.