A PAIR OF LATE LOUIS XVI MAHOGANY CHAISES

These chairs, with their distinctive out curved back and elegantly tapered legs ‘en fuseau’, were almost certainly part of a set of seat furniture made by Georges Jacob in 1790 for the ‘pavillon chinois’ of Princesse Kinsky (1729-1794), rue Saint-Dominique, Paris. The model derives from a design by the architect Charles Percier (d. 1838; co-author with Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (d. 1853) of Recueil de décorations intérieures, 1801), who supplied patterns of seat furniture to Georges Jacob in the ‘Etruscan’ manner at the end of the Ancien Régime. Several closely related examples, probably en suite with the present pair, are recorded: a pair of fauteuils with identical legs and back was in the Ledoux-Lebard Collection, sold Artcurial, Paris, 20 June 2006, lot 131, and retains a label inscribed ‘par Georges Jacob pour le pavillon Chinois de la Princesse Kinsky’; a pair of chairs with identical front legs, with a pierced back and bearing a similar label was sold from the collection of René Fribourg, Sotheby’s, New York, 28 June 1963, lot 183.

Granddaughter of the celebrated Hungarian palatine count Palffy, Marie-Léopoldine-Monique Palffy married François-Joseph, prince Kinsky who died in 1752. In 1761, Princesse Kinsky moved to Paris and in 1774 into the hôtel de Gourges on the rue Saint-Dominique, which she lavishly furnished in the latest fashion with the help of Dominique Daguerre. She hired the architects François-Simon Houlié, Gilles-Paul Cauvet, and Charles-Joachim Bernard, successively, to redesign the interiors and exterior of the hôtel particulier that now bears her name. Her collection was confiscated by the new French Republic in 1794 after her death; the inventory numbers ‘2197’ and ‘2198’ visible on the present pair may have been stamped when they subsequently integrated the dépôts de la Nation.