Attribué à NICOLAS PINEAU (Paris, 1684-1754) Lot n° 19

CONSOLE WITH WINGED TRITONS Paris, circa 1710-1720 Carved and gilded oak, black breccia marble from Troubat known as "portor des Pyrénées" Restorations from use and maintenance H. 78 cm, W. 142 cm, D. 65 cm Provenance Sale in Clermont-Ferrand, 6 June 1988 Sale in Gien, 25 November 1996 Private collection, Paris This console with a very clear decoration is crowned with a black breccia marble top from Troubat (Haute-Garonne). It is decorated with a central cartouche with a female mascaron and two feet in winged male terms. The grooved top rests on a tripartite reticulated belt, with convex sides and a face enriched with a floral decoration. The front is stamped with a mascaron on a motif of scrolls with foliage that blossom symmetrically on either side of the cartouche. The central female face, wearing a diadem in the antique style, has pretty almond-shaped eyes. The base of the console is composed of two curved and counter-curved legs, ending in hooves and linked by an S-shaped strut with a central nut decorated with a shell. The octagonal nut forms an octagonal tray intended to receive a piece of porcelain, as was customary in the 17th and 18th centuries. The originality of the sculpture helps to better understand the context in which our console was created, in an emerging Rocaille style. The upper part of the legs is in fact decorated with curious winged terms that support the belt of the console and which, in a reciprocal movement, seem to be topped by the egrets decorating the corners of the table. These hybrid figures, with their abundant hair and naked torsos, have dragon wings and scales on their bellies. The first models of tables with legs decorated with winged figures in terms date back to the middle of the 17th century. The drawings by Jean I Dubois (1625-1694), dated around 1650-1670 and kept at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts (inv. O.61), are evidence of this. The same is true of the models by Charles Lebrun (169-1690) (fig. 1). These models from the 1650s and 1670s derive from antique types with winged sphinxes. They are much busier than ours. Some Versailles tables designed in 1681 are attributed to Jean I Bérain (1640-1711) and are still in this vein (fig. 2). They were engraved and published by Pierre Lepautre in a collection that has enjoyed a long critical fortune among ornamentalists, certainly because of the modernity of their scroll base, which foreshadows the very type of our console. A few decades later, Nicolas Pineau (1684-1754) gave a new impetus to these tables with winged terms, in the spirit of the nascent Rocaille style. He began by taking up the term figure on a scrolled base, decorated with acanthus leaves, whose curve he accentuated in comparison with the models engraved by Lepautre (fig. 3). He continued his research in the direction of a better articulation of the base and the straight belt so that, in a second version published by Mariette in 1727, the head of the winged figure is superimposed on the corner of the console (fig. 4). Delicate hooves end, as in our model, the scrolled feet. Son of Jean-Baptiste Pineau, ordinary sculptor to the king, Nicolas trained in architecture and ornament with the greatest artists of his time, the architects Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Germain Boffrand, the sculptor Antoine Coysevoix and the goldsmith Thomas Germain. He was one of the king's envoys to St. Petersburg in 1716, to export the great Versailles style. The Czar's first sculptor, Nicolas Pineau enjoyed great fame in Europe. His designs, which circulated and were disseminated through engravings, were well known in the Parisian milieu before his return in 1727, as can be seen in the aforementioned collection of Nouveaux desseins de pieds de tables et de vases et consoles de sculptures en bois, inventés par le sieur Pineau, sculpteur (New designs for table legs and vases and wooden sculpture brackets), published that same year by Mariette. Nicolas Pineau's creations, which were based on the art of Jean I Bérain, lead us to believe that he was familiar with, or even used, the Livre des Tables engraved by Lepautre. In this collection, several models of tables present mascarons in cartouche comparable to ours. On one, it is a mask of Apollo (fig. 5); on another, a female mask with plaits tied on the chin. According to Calin Demetrescu, it could be a representation of Medusa. This motif was quite successful. It can be found on the large wall console of the Gandur Foundation for Art with, as on ours, very elongated almond-shaped eyes (fig. 6). At the beginning of the 18th century, the taste for these tables and consoles combining a cartouche with a mascaron with a volute base decorated with winged terms became more and more popular. However, few of them show such a mastery in the play of contrasts between curves and counter-curves, full and empty spaces, gilded wood and ma