Charles-Guillaume WINCKELSEN (1812 - Charenton, 1871)

BOULLE MARQUETRY CONSOLE Paris, Napoleon III period, between 1860 and 1867 Ebony on oak frame; brass and pewter marquetry; gilt bronze H. 104 cm, W. 118 cm, D. 35 cm BIBLIOGRAPHY Christopher Payne, Paris, la quintessence du meuble au XIXe siècle, ed. Monelle Hayot, 2018, our piece of furniture reproduced p. 554 When he made this console, Charles-Guillaume Winckelsen was working as a "cabinetmaker of all kinds" in his workshop on rue Saint Louis, in the Marais. He stayed there from 1860 to 1867. This is his best period. In 1865 he exhibited a Boulle-style cabinet inspired by a model in the Louvre and designed for the Mobilier National, which loaned it for the occasion. Our console is in the same vein. It is inspired by the base of a pair of cabinets by André-Charles Boulle, now in the Louvre (fig. 1). In the 1860s, these cabinets furnished the Palais de Saint-Cloud. They had been transformed by Louis-Philippe into a pair of furniture with support height and a pair of consoles. Charles-Guillaume Winckelsen thus took as a model one of his consoles with four sheaths decorated with ram's heads to realize his own, adapted to the taste of the day with its top and its two crotch shelves underlined by geometrical friezes in pewter inlay on an ebony background. For the chasing of his bronzes, Charles-Guillaume Winckelsen employed Joseph Nicolas Langlois, the best chaser in Paris, capable of rendering the texture and thickness of the animal's hair. The model of these bronzes was bought by Linke in 1894 together with other objects from the workshop of Henri Dasson, Winckelsen's successor. Linke used them to make a copy of the Boulle cabinets that had just been returned to their original state after being deposited in the Mobilier national (fi g. 2). Our console is thus at a very high level of quality in the revival of the Boulle style.