THE FORM AND DECORATION
The combination of linenfold paneling and grotesque carving on this buffet-dressoir, an elevated cabinet intended for the display of precious objects, epitomizes the slow but monumental transition out of the Gothic style and into the Italianate Renaissance. Based on paintings and manuscript illuminations beginning in the fifteenth century, it appears that buffets of this form were placed in both public and private rooms, as stages for collections of either secular treasures including silver, ceramics and glass, or sacred objects such as table altars. Often, they are depicted with a simple white cloth draped across the top, and at times with a tall superstructure providing a canopy for the pieces on display. It has been noted that dressoirs placed in public rooms, such as those depicted in banquet scenes laden with multiple rows of silver, were not intended for pure ostentation, but instead as a display of hospitality to the guests in attendance.

Although the basic construction of the buffet-dressoir changed little between the late Middle Ages and Renaissance period, its decoration underwent a revolution around the turn of the sixteenth century, with the emerging taste for Classical motifs and grotesque ornament. Our example retains in its lower section the linenfold paneling introduced early in the previous century, but in its doors and stiles evokes the new taste, emerging in Italy at that century’s end, for grotesche: fanciful, symmetrical and generally vertical arrangements of sphinxes, shields, beasts, flowers and other motifs based on the Roman frescoes found the Nero's newly-discovered Domus Aurea on the Oppian Hill in Rome. Raphael, who visited the ancient site, adopted its motifs in his decorations of the Vatican logge in the late 1510s, and prints of grotesque or ‘Raphaelesque’ design circulated widely throughout Europe.

On the present buffet, the relief carving appearing on each door, stile and even the strips interspersing the linenfold panels, is of a style called 'candelabra grotesque,' as the vertical design elements comprise a fantastical, imaginary antique torchère. Similar work is known in French architectural woodcarving from the first decade of 1500s, and early examples of it can be seen in the oak panels from the workshop of Nicolas Castille now preserved in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (acc. nos. 41.190.494a-m and 16.32.303).

An important dressoir comparable to ours is in the Edmond Foulc Collection at the Philadelphia Art Museum (acc. no. 1930-1-180), its upper section carved with grotesques at the sides (its central doors may be replaced), and its lower section also with linenfold panels. The Philadelphia dressoir has recently undergone dendrological study, proving that the trees in its construction were felled circa 1512, which suggests that it was manufactured in the 1520s (see J. Hinton, Renaissance Treasures from the Edmond Foulc Collection, New Haven and London, 2020, pp. 46-47, fig. 227). An example in the Louvre Museum (inv. no.OA 6973), of identical dimensions and believed to be by the same hand as the Philadelphia example, is also carved with linenfolds at its sides and ‘décor de candélabres’ at the panels to its canted corners. In Agnès Bos’ recent catalogue raisonné of Medieval and Renaissance furniture at the Louvre, this piece is also dated by dendrochronology to the 1520s, with its cataloguing remarking that it illustrates the continued popularity of linenfold decoration even as classically inspired carving was beginning to predominate (A. Bos, Mobilier du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance: La Collection du Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2019, pp. 128-133, cat. no. 26). Bos also relates the Louvre and Philadelphia dressoirs to the ‘Joinville’ example in the Musée national de la Renaissance, Écouen (inv. no. E.Cl.20422), which is dated 1524; as well as another, today in the ‘Gothic Room’ at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (obj. no. F30n12).

THE PROVENANCE
This buffet is first recorded in the collection of the Chabrières-Arlès Family. One of the grandest familles lyonnaises of the nineteenth century, the Chabrières-Arlès first made their fortune in the city’s silk trade. They were subsequently involved in the development of the Suez Canal in the 1830s, and later in the expansion of the rail line from Paris to Marseille via Lyon. They assembled an important collection of sculpture, furniture and works of art in Paris and Lyon, some of which was shown at the Exposition Rétrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris during the Exposition Universelle of 1900. This lot is recorded in the 1900 Exposition not only by the label still affixed to its back, but also in a photograph published in its Catalogue officiel, where it appears alongside other art of the French Renaissance including furniture, sculpture and tapestry. In 1916, the legendary dealer Joseph Duveen made headlines when he purchased the Chabrières-Arlès collection for an enormous sum of nearly $1,500,000. The present lot is documented in his firm’s transaction records with the inventory number ‘C.A. 55’, as well as in the Bulletin of the Art Museum of St. Louis, who acquired it the following year.