A Louis XIV Period Desk Returns to Versailles

There are two of these desks from the same workshop owned by cabinetmaker Alexandre-Jean Oppenordt (1639-1715), who received a commission before June 1685 for "compartments" for "two desks in His Majesty’s small room". This meant panels designed to cover the furniture veneered with ebony and Brazilian rosewood created by the designer of the King's bedchamber, Jean I Berain. On July 25, the cabinetmaker received 240 livres for this work. The son of a butcher from Guelders in Holland, Alexandre-Jean Oppenordt, arrived in Paris between 1655 and 1660. He trained under the cabinetmaker César Campe, and had been working for a few months for the Bâtiments du Roi. One of the desks features première partie marquetry, with Louis XIV’s monogram and brass decoration in contrast against a scarlet-stained tortoiseshell background. This one is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The other, with contre-partie marquetry, had the same motifs but inverted, with the red tortoiseshell forming the design in the spaces left by the brass plaques. This one recently returned to its original home, the Château de Versailles. “Although highly prized in the Paris cabinetmaking sphere at the time," writes art historian Calin Demetrescu in Les Ébénistes de la Couronne sous le règne de Louis XIV (La Bibliothèque des arts), "red tortoiseshell was clearly considered unsuitable for royal furniture, and Oppenordt failed to obtain the success he had hoped for. Despite the extraordinary quality of his work, this was the last furniture commission he received from the Crown." These two eight-legged desks with gilt bronze decoration, featuring the king's monogram everywhere (right through to the keyholes of the side drawers, middle compartments and three dummy drawers in the apron), were known as "brisé" (“split”) because their hinged top opened in two parts, revealing an interior with a writing table and four drawers. They were intended for the Petit Cabinet Octogonal, which had been converted two years earlier into a "Little room where the king writes" behind the Hall of Mirrors. They are described as follows in the general inventory of 1729: "with tortoiseshell and copper marquetry, containing the King's monogram in the middle crowned and surmounted by a sun and in each corner a large fleur-de-lys, with nine drawers in front that can be locked, supported by eight quiver-shaped pillars featuring the same marquetry with gilt copper bases and capitals." Now old-fashioned, they were sold to Messrs. Joubert and Centenier on July 12, 1751, when Louis XV ordered the sale of the former furniture of the Crown.

 

At the Bedside of a Masterpiece
One of the two desks ended up in the Metropolitan Museum. The other can be traced to the collection of Ferdinand de Rothschild in London in the 19th century, then to that of Lady Ripon and finally her daughter Juliet Duff’s. Sold at Sotheby's in 1969, it entered the Servier family collection and was auctioned again in Paris on November 18, 2015. Classified as a French National Treasure, and thus forbidden to leave the country, it was preempted at €1,487,200 by the Musée National du Château de Versailles with sponsorship from Axa and the Versailles Friends Association, in partnership with the Fondation du Patrimoine (Heritage Foundation). Altered into a sloping desk probably before it was bought by Ferdinand de Rothschild, it has since been restored to its original form: a very rare decision explained by Laurent Salomé, the museum's director: "The piece had already been acquired at the time of my predecessor, Béatrix Saule, with the idea of restoring it to its former state, because it was difficult to integrate into the display area of the chateau in its current version. This decision was backed up by a study carried out in 2017 by the scientific committee. We realized that the transformationof the desk was unremarkable, poorly documented, and of poor quality. But despite the damage, the decoration was somewhat less restored than its counterpart’s in the Metropolitan Museum. When we saw that a great deal of the decoration could be recovered with very little loss, this further boosted our decision to restore it to its original form." The preliminary study refining the standpoints adopted for the restoration work lasted two years, during which curators from the scientific committee—including Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide, Chief Curator at the Metropolitan Museum—came to examine the desk several times at the Decorative Arts Department of the Musées de France laboratory, C2RMF. Forty pieces were examined, and X-rays revealed that the oaks used to make it had been felled after 1680, suggesting that the cabinetmakers worked with green wood, contrary to what had been believed. “On the top, we found traces of the screws forming the original pivots," says the head of art restoration Frédéric Leblanc. “Every restoration project produces a surprise. Here, it was discovering that all the brass marquetry had been refixed in the 20th century with an Araldite-based epoxy glue.” This glue had to be removed with an ultrasound scalpel (a long, painstaking job), and then everything was reattached with a reversible animal-based glue. This setback, however, enabled the restorers to study the tool marks on the reverse side of the marquetry elements, and to differentiate the original pieces from the others.
 

Scrupulous Restoration Work
The upper sections added to create the sloping flap of the desk were removed and the marquetry was replaced on the dummy drawers in the apron. To fill in the gaps (10% to 15% of the decoration), designs were traced, copied from the motifs in the Metropolitan Museum's desk. They were vectorized, using a technique developed by Frédéric Leblanc to enlarge the motifs without distorting them, then cut with special laser equipment. Tiny lines were engraved on some of the marquetry pieces, and the reverse side of the new brass parts was treated differently from the old ones, so that future restorers could have a clear picture of the work carried out. The extremely thick varnish was replaced, to revive the tones of the tortoiseshell. Finally, on the inside of the flap, under the red leather that had been added, a veneer was made using the fern frieze technique, which makes play on the patterns of the wood species. After more than five years at the C2RMF, Louis XIV's desk has now returned to the château, where it took up residence on November 20 in the Salon de l'Abondance, not far from the site of the former Cabinet where it was delivered in the summer of 1685. Laurent Salomé was relieved and delighted to welcome it back: "This desk spent a long time being restored, and we are very glad it has finally found its permanent home!"