French Ormolu and Steel Guéridon with Marble Top, after Weisweiler

#18383: French Ormolu and Steel Guéridon with Marble Top, after Weisweiler
French, early 20th century
Height 77cm, diameter 32.5cm

This slender guéridon follows the guéridon à doubles colonnettes, a Louis XVI model attributed to Adam Weisweiler, in which the top is carried on three pairs of twinned supports. On the eighteenth-century tables these supports imitated bamboo, reflecting the taste for the exotic in late eighteenth-century Paris; here they are rendered as fluted polished steel columns wound with ormolu garlands.
The circular top is of figured marble, set within a moulded ormolu rim finished with engine-turned banding and resting on a mahogany frieze bordered by a cast acanthus band. Each of the six columns is headed by an ormolu lotus-leaf capital above a beaded collar, the shafts wound with spiralling garlands of roses, poppies and oak leaves secured at intervals by rosettes.
Below, a concave-sided triangular under-tier in mahogany is inlaid with rope-twist and beaded gilt mouldings framing a shaped central panel. The whole stands on three elongated ormolu sabots cast as cloven hooves with naturalistic hair, mounted beneath moulded gilt blocks.
Adam Weisweiler (1744–1820) was German-born and established in Paris by 1777, becoming a maître-ébéniste in 1778 and setting up his workshop in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. He worked chiefly for the marchands-merciers, above all Dominique Daguerre, through whom his furniture reached the French court, Marie-Antoinette, the court of Naples and the future George IV. His work is marked by an architectural discipline drawn from the antique, with fluted uprights, rectilinear cases and gilt-bronze friezes defining each element.
The model was sold through Daguerre and his partner Martin-Éloi Lignereux, and Weisweiler produced it in a number of variations, with tops of porcelain or Wedgwood, marble, lapis lazuli and lacquer. In 1791 Madame du Barry presented a table of this type to the duc de Brissac, and the delivery records a mahogany table standing on double bamboo legs of gilt bronze. A further example is recorded as supplied to the Comte Skavronsky. The present table was made in France in the early twentieth century, when the Louis XVI models of the Parisian ébénistes were widely reproduced. In place of the gilt-bronze bamboo of the 1791 table, its maker used polished steel, setting the grey of the columns against the gilt bronze and mahogany.
$11,250