A Pair of Louis XVI Gilt Bronze Plaques Depicting Allegories of Love, possibly Late 18th/Early 19th Century

Georges Hoentschel (1855-1915), Paris; his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris 31 March - 2 April 1919, lot 207 (a set of four);

Paul Dutasta, Paris (1873-1925); his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris 3-4 June 1926, lot 101 (a set of four);

A La Vielle Russie, New York.

Previously part of a set of four and possibly first conceived as mounts for a large piece of case furniture, this pair of plaques belonged to the designer and collector Georges Hoentschel, whose family upholstery business Maison Leys off the Place de la Madeleine in Paris developed into one of the most important interior decorating firms of the Belle Epoque, prefiguring later French houses such as Alavoine, Carlhian and Jansen. Hoentschel's clients included Alphonse de Rothschild, the Greffuhle, Ganay and Gramont families, Jacques Doucet, diamond magnates like Jules Porgès and Sir Julius Wernher, and overseas aristocrats such as King George I of Greece and Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia, and Hoentschel himself was a prominent Parisian social figure in the years preceding the First World War, participating in the 1900 Exposition Universelle for which he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, and friendly with prominent artists and writers, among then the Comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac, Marcel Proust, Émile Gallé, Sarah Bernhardt, Serge Diaghilev and Giovanni Boldini.

Hoentschel assembled over two thousand French Medieval and Renaissance artworks and 18th-Century carved wood panelling, tables and chairs, and ornamental gilt bronzes to form a 'study collection' that served as a basis for his firm's recreations of historical interiors and was exhibited as a house museum at his hôtel particulier in the Boulevard Flandrin near the Bois de Boulogne. In 1906 the entire collection of was sold to the American financier J.P. Morgan and donated to the Metropolitan Museum in New York with the express intent of forming a European Decorative Arts Department, transforming the institution overnight into one of the world's greatest public depositories of this material (see D. Kisluk-Grosheide, D. Krohn and U. Leben, eds., Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center, New York 2013).

Following this sale Hoentschel continued to collect French 18th century paintings and decorative arts, which were sold in a four-day estate auction in 1919. The plaques were acquired by another great Paris connoisseur of the period, the French diplomat Paul Dutasta (d.1925), the auction of whose collection of important paintings, furniture and works of art in 1926 was one of the major Paris sales of the interwar years, and numerous lots from this auction have since entered public museums.

In size and format the present lot is almost identical to a pair of gilt bronze plaques without frames depicting allegorical reliefs of Love and Lyric Poetry in the Wallace Collection, London (F295-296). These have been dated to c.1790-1820 and attributed to the gilder and bronze chaser Etienne Martincourt (active 1762-1800), who supplied many gilt bronze mounts to the royal cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener, or alternatively the bronzier Pierre-François Feuchère (1737-1823) who acquired some of Martincourt's models following his death. Identical trophies both with and without a bronze background appear on several of Riesener's surviving works, including a corner cupboard supplied to Marie-Antoinette at Versailles also now in the Wallace Collection (F275) and a suite of Japanese-lacquer veneered furniture including a commode, secretaire and encoignure recorded in the collection of Hortense de Beauharnais (Akram Ojjeh Collection, sold Christie's London 11 December 1999, lot 35).

Two fall-front secretaires supplied by Riesener to Marie-Antoinette at Versailles and the Petit Trianon and now in the Wallace Collection (F302, 303) are mounted with comparable oval gilt bronze figural relief plaques depicting the Sacrifice to Love; these are thought to have been added in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, replacing earlier marquetry reserves that may have incorporated royalist iconography. The decorative motif of a trophy or figural composition in a vertical oval reserve was inspired by contemporary neoclassical designs in ornamental wall decoration and textiles.