Drop-Front Desk
Jean-Henri Riesener (1734-1806)
Date: 1780
Place Made: France
Materials & Techniques: Oak carcase; sycamore, holly, fruitwood, purple heart and other wood veneer; marble top; gilt bronze mounts
Dimensions: 144cm x 112cm x 45.5cm
Accession Number: The Wallace Collection, F300
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This piece of furniture is a tall desk designed to stand against a wall. It was made in France over 250 years ago by a cabinet maker called Jean-Henri Riesener who used many different types of wood to decorate it.
The body of the desk is made of oak. The front and sides are beautifully decorated with thin pieces of different woods, called veneers.These include common native woods such as sycamore, holly and fruitwood, and some more exotic woods including purpleheart and ebony. When the desk was made the veneers would have been much more colourful – some the bright natural colour of the wood, some stained with dyes. These colours have now mostly faded.
The front of the desk can be opened and pulled down to create a hard surface on which to write letters. Inside are drawers, including some secret ones, hence the French name for such a piece of furniture, ‘secretaire’.
The desk is also decorated with gilt bronze – bronze with a thin layer of gold on the surface.
Teachers' Information
This desk once belonged to Marie-Antoinette who moved to France from Austria to marry the future King Louis XVI when she was 14 years old. The court was busy and the king and queen would have had people around them all the time. They had very little privacy but a piece of furniture like this would have enabled Marie-Antoinette to keep some private papers in the drawers concealed in this desk.
Riesener and other furniture makers studied the characteristics of different types of wood so that they knew how each would behave when it was worked - whether the wood would split easily or whether it had some elasticity. They would also know how to use the wood veneers to create the colourings they wanted.
Activities
1. Your class could study the look of different types of wood. Using samples of wooden blocks used to lay flooring you could compare colour and grain. Mix and match the blocks of wood to see which look good together.
2. Letter-writing was very important in the past, especially for people living in different countries. Ask the children to choose a foreign country and to imagine they are moving there by themselves. Pupils could use non-fiction books and the internet to find out about the country and what it is like to live there. Pupils could then use this information to write a letter home to their parents. What is different in this country, what are the people like, do they miss home?