Getty Museum

Table

Date

about 1680–1685

Medium

Oak veneered with marquetry tortoise shell, pewter, brass, ebony, horn, ivory, boxwood, cherry, natural and stained sycamore, pear, thuya, satinwood, cedar, beech and amaranth; gilt-bronze mounts

Culture

French

Department

Decorative Arts

Institution

Getty Museum

Marquetry of extraordinary quality in wood and in tortoiseshell, brass, horn, and pewter decorates the top of this table. A band of brass surrounds a large central oval of tortoiseshell, and naturalistic flowers in wood marquetry frame the table's outer surface. Peonies, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and ranunculus can all be identified. The flowers are composed of small pieces of wood veneer that were assembled and then scorched with hot sand to create subtle gradations of shadow. Originally, the table would have been more vividly colored; light exposure has bleached the wood marquetry and faded the blue paint underneath the framing areas of horn to gray. Very few pieces of furniture are veneered with two types of marquetry. A single person seems to have made all of them, including this table, as they include many comparable motifs. For example, four small birds on the top of the table are very similar to four birds found on the drawer fronts of the large *Cabinet on a Stand* in the Museum's collection. André-Charles Boulle, a royal cabinetmaker working at the Louvre, may have designed and executed these pieces.

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