East Meets West

June 4 2009, 1:19pm

An Extraordinary Matched Pair of Center tables Almost Certainly Commissioned for Schloss Charlottenburg. Carlton Hobbs LLC. These center tables, with their Chinese and Japanese porcelain and European lacquer work, represent an intriguing combination of objects from the oriental export trade and the European chinoiserie tradition, as seen in figure 1, which depicts a late 17th century bazaar in the Netherlands. “This fantasy of exotic luxury goods includes Japanese lacquer furniture, Chinese porcelain, ivory devotional sculptures, Indian chintzes and Turkish or Persian paintings.”1 Figure 2: Photo c.1930 depicting a room at Charlottenburg containing identical tables but lacking their tops. Figure 1: An imagined interior of a shop selling export wares, possibly The Netherlands, 1680-1700. See footnote. It is likely that the tables were made by a German lacquer worker. Craftsmen such as Gerard Dagly (1650-1728), who was the master Japanner to the court of Friedrich III in Berlin, produced furniture for the Porzellankabinette of the great houses of Germany. The most celebrated of these interiors was at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, Friedrich’s great monument to baroque taste. An archive photograph from around 1930 depicting one of the rooms at Charlottenburg illustrates almost identical tables but lacking their tops (figure 2).  Given the unusual nature of the design of these pieces it seems likely that the present pair formed part of a larger group made for Charlottenburg and subsequently dispersed. The Chinese Kraak dish which forms the top of one of the gueridons is decorated with panels filled with sunflowers and Chinese objects. The central medallion within the dish of one of the tables is decorated with a hanging basket, comparable to that on two pieces of Kraak porcelain in collections in Portugal, dating from between 1600-1615.2 The central stem of each table consists of a Japanese Arita vase dating from around 1700, while the porcelain mounts to the base are Chinese Kangxi porcelain saucers, dating from between 1662-1722. Footnote: 1. Snodin, Michael and Nigel Llewellyn, Eds. Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence. London: V&A Publishing, 2009. 34, Plate 1.26.