286 - ~ DAYBED

~ DAYBED Made of mahogany and mahogany veneer, with wood painted to imitate bronze and gilded wood. The slightly flared headboards are adorned with freestanding balusters, turned and carved with water leaves. Their panels feature a mascaron set within a circular medallion, at the center of a diamond flanked by rosettes in the spandrels. The side posts are adorned with winged griffins holding leafy scrolls extending into palmettes in their mouths. The straight apron is decorated with a diamond framed by palmettes. The piece rests on four splayed legs ending in lion’s claws. Frame-mounted set. Stamped by Bernard Molitor (awarded master status in 1787). Consulate or Empire period, circa 1799–1807. Height: 84.5 cm – Width: 163.5 cm – Depth: 64 cm. (Some restoration, small cracks, and wear to the gilding). Swietenia mahagoni (II/B). Pre-Convention specimen. Provenance: – Osenat Fontainebleau auction, May 6, 2021, lot no. 285. – Private collection. Description: With its elegant proportions, graceful silhouette, and rich ornamental vocabulary, this daybed exemplifies the taste for antiquity that characterized Bernard Molitor’s work at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The decoration—featuring winged griffins, palmettes, rosettes, and water leaves—is fully in keeping with the Neoclassical revival that, beginning in the mid-18th century, gained new momentum from the archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Publications by the Comte de Caylus in France, Piranesi in Italy, James Stuart in England, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Germany helped spread the models and aesthetic principles of Greco-Roman antiquity. The finesse of the craftsmanship and certain ornamental details of this daybed may also indicate a collaboration with the cabinetmaker Demay, who is listed as early as 1796 among the cabinetmaker’s suppliers. A curule armchair stamped with Demay’s mark, now in the collection of the Carnavalet Museum in Paris (inv. MB 289), features a design of winged griffins very similar to the one adorning the headboards of our example. While this stylistic similarity does not allow us to confirm a direct collaboration on the creation of this piece, it underscores the circulation of designs and motifs within Parisian workshops of this period. Born in Luxembourg, Bernard Molitor (1755–1833) settled in Paris in the mid-1770s and received his master’s certificate in 1787. His career, which spanned until 1819, spanned the political upheavals and shifts in taste from the end of Louis XVI’s reign to the Restoration. Prized for the quality of his craftsmanship, the simplicity of his compositions, and the harmony of his proportions, his clientele included several prominent figures, notably the Count of Chartres, the Polignac family, the Marquis de La Fayette, Baron de Staël-Holstein, the Swedish ambassador, and Count de Fernán Núñez, the Spanish ambassador. He also received royal commissions, including the creation of a mahogany parquet floor for Marie-Antoinette’s study at the Château de Fontainebleau. Molitor’s work has been the subject of an in-depth study by Ulrich Leben, who lists, among other pieces, eleven daybeds of this type. Of these examples, only two—including the one presented here—are believed to bear the cabinetmaker’s mark, a feature that lends this piece additional documentary significance. The popularity of this model in the interiors of the Consulate and the Empire is finally reflected in an interesting iconographic detail in an anonymous portrait of Letizia Bonaparte [Inv. No. 880], mother of Napoleon I, housed at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, which depicts her seated on a daybed very similar to ours.