A Louis XVI Gilt-Bronze Mounted Tulipwood, Amaranth and Ebony Inlaid Bureau à Cylindre, Circa 1780

Aveline, Paris February 2000

The bureau à cylindre (rolltop desk) was an innovation in mid-18th century French furniture design that allowed documents in use to be securely stored without having to be put away. Its invention is traditionally attributed to the ébéniste du roi Jean-François Oeben, a skillful producer of mechanical furniture, and the first ever reference to a cylinder bureau in the Crown furniture records occurs in 1760, the same year King Louis XV commissioned Oeben to create a monumental rolltop desk that was only completed after Oeben's death in 1763 by his pupil Riesener and became known as the Bureau du Roi (Château de Versailles).

The form was well enough established by the late 1760s to be included in plates 262-63 of André Jacob Roubo's L'art du menuisier published in 1769, and was taken up by several Parisian cabinetmakers in the Transitional and Louis XVI periods, among them Roussel, Boudin, Garnier and especially François Gaspard Teuné (maître 1766). Teuné developed a specialty in this category of furniture and produced examples richly decorated with marquetry on tulipwood grounds, seen on a transitional cylinder bureau now in the Louvre and another in the Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris (both illustrated in Angie Barth, 'François-Gaspard Teuné spécialiste des "secrétaires à panses",' L'Estampille, L'Objet d'Art, October 2001, fig.6-8 p.60-61). Teuné also produced desks in plain veneers without inlay, such as a Louis XVI bureau à cylindre formerly with Galerie Didier Aaron, Paris with richly figured tulipwood veneers comparable to those used on the present lot (illustrated in Pierre Kjellberg, Le Mobilier français du 18e siècle, Paris 2002 p.870 fig. b).

Veneered on both the front and back sides, this desk was intended as a prestigious work of furniture to be viewed and admired away from the wall. The presence of two separate writing surfaces that pull out when the cylinder is open is extremely unusual and theoretically allows two people to work at the same t.mes .