REGENCY PERIOD FLAT DESK Attributed to Charles Cressent (1685-1768) In satinwood and amaranth veneer, with chased and partly gilded bronze ornamentation, gilded leather upholstery encircled by a bronze moulding, the waist opening out into three large drawers and two secret drawers flanking the central recessed drawer, the sides decorated with Bacchus masks and acanthus scrolls, the curved uprights surmounted by Chinese heads and finished with claws; restorations, accidents and missing veneer. H. 76 cm (30 in.) l. 202 cm (79 ½ in.) P. 95 cm (37 ½ in.) Provenance : Baron Alfred de Rothschild (1842-1918) at Halton House, Buckinghamshire ; His nephew, Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1882-1942); His son, Baron Edmund de Rothschild (1916-2009); His Sale, Christie's London, 3 July 1975, lot 65 (Fig. 1); Sale in Paris, Hôtel Meurice, 1 December 1976, lot 177; Former Akram Ojjeh (1918-1991) collection; Sale, Christie's Monaco, 11-12 December 1999, lot 53 (FF. 4,192,500) ; Former Djahanguir Riahi collection (1914-2014). Bibliography : B.E. Escott, The story of Halton House, Country Home of Alfred de Rothschild, 2008, p.70 (illustrated). A. Pradère, Charles Cressent, sculpteur, ébéniste du Régent, Éditions Faton, Dijon, 2003, p.265, fig. 44 (illustrated). A Regence gilt-bronze mounted, satinwood and amaranth bureau plat, attributed to Charles Cressent Within Cressent's oeuvre, flat desks remain the best-known pieces of furniture, and although they account for a relatively small proportion of his corpus, they leave the clearest image of Charles Cressent's art among his contemporaries. A Cressent desk similar to our own is illustrated in the famous portrait of the Turkish Ambassador Saïd Mehmet Pacha painted in 1742 by Jacques-André-Joseph-Camelot Aved (cf. fig. 2). Our desk belongs to the very early part of Cressent's career, at the beginning of the 1720's. The influence of the work of André-Charles Boulle is clear in the choice of bronze ornaments, the powerful curve of the legs and the overall shape of the desk. The heads of women in the corners wearing Chinese hats can be found on flat desks in tortoiseshell and brass marquetry produced by Boulle's workshop in the same years, as can the fauna masks or leafy falls decorating the lower part of the desk. However, as can be seen from our piece, Cressent departed from Boulle's work by lightening the belt line and lengthening the side drawers to the detriment of the central drawer. Our desk belongs to a group of six pieces identified by Alexandre Pradère in his monograph on Cressent's work under the section "Bureaux Plats à Têtes de Chinoises" (see A. Pradère, Charles Cressent, Éditions Faton, Dijon, 2003, p.265): - A first copy from the former collection of Charles Dupleix de Bacquencourt, Duc de Camaran, at the Château de Courson (which had its own cartonnier until the early 20th century). - A second copy acquired by J. Paul Getty in 1949 and now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. - A third formerly in the Josse collection, sale in Paris on 29 May 1894, lot 152, then the Doucet collection, then the Ernest Cronier collection, sale in Paris on 4 December 1905 and finally the François Coty collection, sale on 1 December 1936, lot 84 (disappeared during the War). - A fourth desk formerly owned by the Duke of Sutherland at Trentham (sold 6 July 1925, lot 485). - A final copy from the Béhague collection, where it remains to this day. Like all the pieces mentioned, except for the one in the former Sutherland collection, our piece has a peculiarity found on other large Cressent desks: the masks of bearded men surrounding the central drawer conceal two secret drawers of the same depth as the others. This feature, which seems to have been Cressent's own invention, enabled a secretary to change ink, sealing wax or paper without having access to the other three large drawers, which could thus remain locked. A prestigious provenance: Rothschild-Ojjeh The rarity of this model is heightened by its prestigious provenance: it is featured in an 1892 photograph illustrating the drawing room of Halton House (see fig. 3), the residence in the English county of Buckinghamshire belonging to Baron Alfred de Rothschild (1842-1918). Alfred inherited Halton from his father, Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879); however, it was Alfred who gave the property its current appearance as a château in the purest French Renaissance style after carrying out extensive renovations, which were completed in 1884 with the official opening of the residence in the presence of the Prince of Wales, a close friend of the Baron. On the Baron's death in 1918, Halton and its contents were inherited by his nephew, Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1882-1942). An analysis of the photograph suggests a formal identification with our copy. In fact, our desk is the only one of the series of six mentioned below where the bronze frames of the two large drawers on the front have a more rounded contour than the others; this is clearly visible in the photo of the Halton desk. It is interesting to note that in the same photograph another large flat desk by Cressent of the same design as ours can be seen in the background; we can therefore assume that Baron de Rothschild had a pair of desks of the same design. Unfortunately, the quality of the image does not allow us to identify it with any certainty. In any case, our example remained in the Rothschild family even after Halton's sale to the British Ministry of Defence, as we find the desk in a London sale in the 1970s as the property of Baron Edmund de Rothschild (1916-2009), the son of Baron Lionel Nathan. The desk later became part of the collection of the Saudi businessman and art collector Akram Ojjeh (1918-1991); the desk then lived in the salons of his sumptuous Parisian town house on the Place des États-Unis (see Fig. 4).