Dressoir

Dressoirs (cabinets with two doors and three drawers supported by a stand) were used to store a household’s most valuable tableware. Thoroughly restored in 1855 in Marseille, France, this finely carved dressoir offers a compendium of the decorative elements commonly used in French Renaissance art, including satyrs, harpies, female terms (or terminal figures), masks, and strapwork (decorative straplike bands). First emerging in the 1530s and 1540s at the court of Francis I at Fontainebleau, this style became increasingly playful in the hands of subsequent generations of craftsmen, as demonstrated by this piece.

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

Sennegon, Marseille. Chabrière-Arlès, Lyon and Paris, 1887. Duveen. Frick, 1916.

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.