David Roentgen, maître in 1780.

With its elaborate mechanism designed to accommodate a whole spectrum of domestic activities, this sophisticated little table, veneered in figured mahogany, is typical of the late eighteenth-century production of the Roentgen workshops. Multifunctional tables such as this lot are similar to architect’s tables already existing in Roentgen’s oeuvre by the 1760. Unlike architect’s tables, an example of which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. L.2009.19), these dressing tables were only to be used seated and their mechanism was adapted from previously perfected models. A dressing table of this type and of virtually identical measurements but raised on legs mounted with mille-raies panels is in the ducal collections at Chatsworth, see Wolfram Koeppe, ed., Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens, New Haven and London, 2012, p. 171. Grand Dutchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia is known to have purchased a number of dressing tables of this type including one she had delivered in 1786 to Pavlovsk, where an example is still preserved in the dressing room of Grand Duke Paul. This model was among Roentgen’s more popular ones and various adaptations of it were executed by French cabinet makers, including Jean-Henri Riesener, who delivered several such tables to the French Court. Other examples of this model executed by Roentgen survive in various European collections, including Schloss Ludwigsburg, the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Mainz, and the Wittumspalais in Weimar, see ibid. p. 172.

Born in Neuwied and son of the cabinet-maker Abraham Roentgen (1711-1793), David Roentgen (1743-1807) was one of the greatest ébénistes of his age. He joined his father's workshop in 1757 and officially took control in 1772. Under his leadership it developed into a truly pan-European enterprise and he expanded his business in an unprecedented campaign no other 18th century furniture-maker could ever match. One of his first great international patrons was Charles, Duke of Lorraine (1712-1780), Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, brother of the Emperor Francis I who was married to Maria Theresa and uncle of Queen Marie-Antoinette. In 1774 Roentgen visited Paris to acquaint himself with the new neoclassical style, the latest development in Europe's capital of taste and fashion. By the late 1770s, his furniture showed his complete adoption of this new style. In 1779, having sold several pieces of furniture both to King Louis XVI and to Marie-Antoinette, his efforts were rewarded with the courtesy title of ébéniste-mécanicien du Roi et de la Reine, a title that helped open doors to all the other European courts. Soon after, Roentgen supplied furniture to many of the most discriminating aristocrats throughout Europe, including King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, as well as the Electors of Hessen and Saxony, the Dukes of Württemberg and the Margraves of Baden.