The sale includes a colourful menagerie of Chinese and Japanese animals and birds, as well as furniture, decorative arts and clocks by some of the most celebrated French craftsmen of the late 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, among them André-Charles Boulle, Jean-Henri Riesener and Etienne Levasseur.
Each piece has been carefully selected for its rarity, quality and provenance, encompassing French royalty, European nobility and celebrated art patrons and collectors such as Baron Gustave de Rothschild and Augustin Blondel de Gagny. ‘Many of these works of art are items that these dealers and their families have lived with for many years at home,’ adds the specialist.
The Chinese and Japanese animals and birds presented in the sale, executed in porcelain, bronze, cloisonné enamel and lacquer, include some of the rarest examples of their types. Such works have been collected by French and British royalty, as well as distinguished families, since the 17th century — such as Marie-Antoinette, who owned a model of a chicken in Japanese lacquer comparable to the charming ‘hen and chick’ box included in the sale.
