Furniture with support height with two leafs, by Louis-Alexandre Bellangé circa 1835-40

Furniture with support height at two leafs in brass inlaid ebony, Japanese lacquer panels and gilded bronze frames.

BY LOUIS-ALEXANDRE BELLANGÉ, CIRCA 1835-40.

With a marble top, above a frieze of leaves, it opens with two doors of cabinets inlaid with Japanese lacquer panels in nashiji frames.
The uprights are decorated with chimeras, dolphins, and the side panels of female masks; the interior doors lined with amaranth contain the lock inscribed "EBELANGE EBENISTE OF THE KING".

This spectacular cabinet is a tour de force of Louis-Alexandre Bellangé (1797-1861), one of the most innovative and accomplished cabinetmakers of the Restoration period and Louis-Philippe. It combines many of the most sophisticated aspects of the work of the cabinetmakers of the old regime, with its sumptuous use of Japanese ebony and lacquer recalling the work of Weisweiler and Carlin under the direction of the mercer Dominique Daguerre, while the distinctive female masks on the sides are clearly inspired by the greatest cabinetmaker of the Louis XIV era, André-Charles Boulle, who used the same model.

However, Bellangé combined these elements in a new and innovative way typical of the exploratory and historicist style of the 1820s and 1830s, with the wonderfully flamboyant neo-Renaissances of the uprights flanking the lacquered panels.
Bellangé, who proudly used the signature on his locks of "EBENISTE DU ROI" of 1835, was commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1841-2 to supply neo-Renaissance furniture to the castle of Pau that the king provided in tribute to Henry IV.

This dazzling piece of furniture, with the richness of its materials, recalls the work in England of the Bellangé workshop, which provided a number of sumptuous pieces to George IV for the layout of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace in the 1820s, often with extravagant use of gilded bronzes and porcelain plates (see D. Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe Siècle, Paris, 1989, pp. 60-63, and H. Roberts, For the King's Delight, London, 2001, pp. 90-1). This includes a sumptuous side table performed in the neo-Boulle manner, currently kept in the royal collection (inv. no. RCIN 2415).