A Pair of Consulat Ebony-Inlaid Birchwood Armchairs Stamped Jacob Freres

$17,500.00

Status: Available

About

The curved pierced back with a palmette-inlaid shaped splat terminating in dolphin supports raised on an upholstered seat, on front carved joined hairy animal legs (pieds de biches) and hoof feet and back sabre legs; stamped: JACOB FRERES RUE MESLEE under the front rail. For a similar dolphin support, see Madeleine Jarry and Pierre Devinois, Le Siege Francais, pp. 267 and 271 illustration 264 for an armchair at the Musee Marmottan stamped G. Jacob and executed in 1792. Provenance: Millicent Rogers her son, Arturo Peralta Ramos II

Jacob Freres was the stamp used by brothers Georges II (1768-1803) and Francois-Honore Jacob (1770-1841) from 1796 to 1803. They were sons of Georges Jacob (1739-1814), arguably the best-known chair maker who worked for aristocracy and royalty during the reign of Louis XVI. The Jacob Freres firm's most famous client was Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. She would have most likely seen the work of their father during the revolution in a progressive aristocrat's house. She used them to decorate various Imperial residences, such as the Tuileries palace, and remained a loyal customer, using them almost exclusively, until her death. When Georges II (the elder brother) died in 1803, Georges came out of retirement to help the remaining son, Francois-Honor (who changed his named to Jacob Desmalter) from a new partnership called Jacob Desmalter Et Cie. (stamped Jacob D. R. Mesle, on two lines), which continued to be an influential supplier for the Imperial period and is credited with helping to define the Empire style as it is known today.

Millicent Rogers, born Mary Millicent Abigail Rogers, was a Standard Oil heiress, but she wasn't a poor little rich girl or a pushover, and she changed her fashion, decorating and living styles a number of times during her relatively brief life. At one time, the heiress art collection had included as many as a dozen paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, along with canvases from Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne. Because of a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, she had then-difficult-to-treat lifelong problems with her heart and died at only 51 in 1953. A 59 beauty with arching brows, alabaster skin and a biting wit, Rogers was a popular debutante whose first marriage at 21 to Austrian Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, with whom she had her first son, Peter, was opposed by her parents. Because of this, her father, Henry Huttleston Rogers II the son of H.H. Rogers, who founded Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller, and who also had interests in U.S. Steel and Anaconda Copper gave her only a tiny allowance. Rogers never made the mistake of angering her father again. Her second marriage was to Arturo Peralta-Ramos, the playboy scion of a wealthy Argentinian family, and she had two sons with him, Arturo II and Paul. Her third husband, Ronald Balcom, was an American stockbroker and she lived with him in the Arlberg mountains of Austria until Adolf Hitlers rise to power made that impossible. Later, her beaux included Clark Gable, Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl. She bred dachshunds, and when she returned to the U.S. in 1940, had large groups of them in tow.