Pair of Commodes

A pair of gilt-bronze-mounted commodes stamped B.V.R.B., the mark of the Parisian cabinetmaker Bernard II van Risenburgh, whose own name was unreadable behind that stamp for two centuries until a student's archival research solved it in 1957. The pair belonged to the Saxon royal House of Wettin, was sold out of the family in the early 1930s, was turned down by Duveen Brothers as too heavy and overdecorated, and was eventually bought by the Detroit automobile heiress Anna Thomson Dodge for the breakfast room of her Grosse Pointe mansion because the pieces happened to be the right size.

The stranger fact is that the Getty's own scholarship doubts the design is really his. The mounts do not resemble anything else documented from his workshop, and the museum's published catalogue entry says so without hedging: without the stamp, no specialist would call this Van Risenburgh's design on stylistic grounds alone. A pair of matching corner cupboards that once stood with these commodes in Dresden was destroyed in the 1945 bombing of the city, and the story that the whole suite was a royal gift from the Dauphin to his Saxon father-in-law has no surviving document behind it.

What is certain is the metal stamp, the guild mark beside it, and the paper trail that runs from an eighteenth-century Dresden palace inventory through a deposed prince, a Berlin dealing family, a Parisian decorating house, and a widow's Michigan mansion to a Los Angeles museum. What is not certain is whether the object the stamp names is the object the mounts show.

What the pair is

Each commode is a bowed rectangular case standing on four six-sided cabriole legs, veneered in bloodwood, kingwood and amaranth over an oak carcase, with a serpentine lower profile. At each front corner sits a heavy, pierced gilt-bronze mount of opposed foliate scrolls that end in flamework, and worked into the same casting are hunting trophies: horns, spears, powder flasks and quivers. The lower drawer of each commode carries a marquetry picture in the center of its front, a stag at bay under attack from two hounds, set on rocky ground.

The two commodes are close to identical in construction and design and appear to be original partners rather than a later marriage of separate pieces. Both are stamped B.V.R.B. on the tops of the front legs, next to the guild inspection mark JME.

A mark that took two hundred years to read

From 1743 the corporation of Parisian menuisiers-ebenistes required every piece of furniture offered for sale to be struck with its maker's stamp before a second stamp, JME, could be added by the guild's own quality inspectors, who examined workshops four times a year. The rule survives on both of these commodes. What it does not do, on its own, is say a name a reader can recognise.

B.V.R.B. is four consonants with no vowel, and for close to two centuries nobody could expand it. Pierre Verlet, the great French furniture historian at the Musee du Louvre, guessed at one point that it belonged to an otherwise undistinguished joiner named Bernard, with the remaining three letters carrying no further meaning. The stamp appeared on some of the finest case furniture of the Louis XV period, and the finest furniture of the period had no name attached to it.

The student who found the family

The mystery was solved in 1957, not by a museum director but by Jean-Pierre Baroli, a student of Verlet's at the Ecole du Louvre, who published his findings in Connaissance des Arts that March under the title Le mysterieux BVRB enfin identifie. Baroli's method was archival rather than connoisseurial: he went into the notarial records of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Paris district where the furniture trade concentrated outside guild jurisdiction, and traced a family of Dutch origin named Van Risenburgh, whose name was spelled by French clerks in at least three variants, Vanrisemburgh, Vanrisamburgh and Van Risen Burgh.

The stamp belonged not to one man but to three, grandfather, father and son, all sharing the same first name. Bernard I, born in Groningen and settled in Paris by 1696, established the workshop. Bernard II, active from around 1730 and master by 1735 when the guild's surviving membership records begin, is the maker now credited with the finest work under the stamp and the one to whom these commodes are attributed. Bernard III inherited the business in 1764 and ran it without particular success before his father's death, after which he is recorded working as a plaster modeller rather than a cabinetmaker; he never sought guild mastership in his own right.

The maker the stamp actually names

Bernard II van Risenburgh worked chiefly for and through the marchands-merciers, the dealer-decorators who controlled access to imported materials and to court clients and who commissioned specialist craftsmen to execute their designs: Thomas-Joachim Hebert, Lazare Duvaux and Simon-Philippe Poirier all placed work with him. Through that channel he supplied furniture to Queen Marie Leszczynska at Fontainebleau from 1737 and later to Madame de Pompadour, and he is credited as the first Parisian ebeniste to mount furniture with plaques of Sevres and Vincennes porcelain, almost certainly under Poirier's arrangement with the factory. His reputation rests on floral marquetry in end-cut veneers, usually kingwood or tulipwood, and on his work in Chinese and Japanese lacquer panels supplied to him ready-made by the dealers who employed him.

He retired for reasons of ill health in 1764, selling a workshop reduced by then to three benches to his son on 18 October of that year, and died not long after. None of that biography is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether this particular pair, with its heavy asymmetrical hunting mounts, belongs to it.

A commode that argues with its own stamp

The Getty's own published scholarship does not soften the problem. Its catalogue entry states that if it were not for the stamp on these commodes, and on the related commodes now in the Kunstgewerbemuseum of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, no specialist would attribute them to Van Risenburgh on the evidence of their design and quality. The mounts are described as of designs quite unlike any others used by him, and their fit to the case is called ill-considered, with an attachment strategy that obscures the case's upper profile rather than complementing it.

Nobody proposes the stamp is a later forgery. The dispute is narrower and, in a way, more interesting: whether the design is Van Risenburgh's own invention, executed to his usual standard but in an idiom he did not otherwise use, or a commission he built to someone else's specification, with mounts supplied or dictated by a client whose taste ran to a heavier, more overtly aristocratic style than his Parisian patrons preferred. Scholars have proposed the second explanation without being able to document it, and this record does not resolve it either.

The suite that scattered, and the pieces that did not survive

These two commodes are not thought to have been made alone. On grounds of shared design and shared early provenance, the Getty's catalogue links them to a larger suite that once included a pair of corner cupboards, a further pair of larger commodes, and a single commode, some of which survive in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Dresden today.

The corner cupboards do not survive. They were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. That fact belongs in any account of this pair, because it is the reason the group can never be reassembled and examined as a whole, and because it places an ordinary piece of Rococo case furniture inside one of the twentieth century's worst single acts of destruction, alongside the palaces and churches the same raids leveled.

A royal gift with no paper behind it

The suite carries a specific origin story: that the commodes and the corner cupboards were a gift from the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV and father of the future Louis XVI, to his father-in-law Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony. The Dauphin married Frederick Augustus's daughter, Maria Josepha of Saxony, in 1747, which is the kind of dynastic occasion such a gift would mark.

The Getty's catalogue records the tradition and then records, in the same breath, that there are no documents to prove it. This record repeats that pairing deliberately. A gift story attached to a piece of royal-adjacent furniture is exactly the kind of claim that improves with retelling and degrades with sourcing, and the honest position is that it is a reputation, not a fact.

What is documented: the Wettin ownership

Documentation begins later and more prosaically than the gift story: an addendum to an inventory of the Kurlander Palais in Dresden records the commodes there in 1798, in the possession of the Albertine line of the House of Wettin, the ruling family of Saxony. That is the first point at which the pair can be placed with confidence, and everything before it, including the manner and date of its arrival in Dresden, is unrecorded in the sources consulted for this record.

Ownership then follows the Wettin family down to Prince Ernst Heinrich von Wettin, a son of Frederick Augustus III, the last King of Saxony, who abdicated in 1918. By around 1924 and into the early 1930s the commodes were with Prince Ernst Heinrich at Schloss Moritzburg, in the porcelain quarter of the palace near Dresden, a family residence retained after the monarchy itself had ended.

Out of a princely house and into the trade

By 1925 the commodes were being shown on the international market: Duveen Brothers, then the most famous decorative-arts dealership in the world, examined them and turned them down. Their own correspondence from that year, quoted in the Getty's catalogue, calls the pair signed Burb too rich and heavy, made probably for the German market, and records a separate note that at an asking price of 10,000 pounds the writer did not care for them at all, finding them small and over-decorated. It would be nearly a decade before the pair found a buyer.

The dealer who eventually placed them was Alexander Ball, who traded in Paris and New York out of the Berlin dealing family of his father Hermann Ball, proprietor of the Berlin auction house Ball and Graupe. Ball acquired the commodes from the Wettin family in the early 1930s. This record notes, without asserting more than the sources support, that the sale falls within the years of the family's broader financial retrenchment after the fall of the Saxon monarchy and, separately, within the early years of the Nazi period in Germany; no source consulted for this record documents any specific compulsion, persecution or Aryanization connected to this particular transaction, and none is claimed here. The question of what pressures, if any, bore on this sale is recorded as open rather than answered.

A breakfast room in Grosse Pointe

Ball sent the commodes to America to the decorating house of Jansen, and it was there, apparently, that Anna Thomson Dodge saw and approved their purchase in 1934, mainly, the Getty's catalogue records, because they were the right size for the breakfast room of her house.

Dodge was the widow of the automobile pioneer Horace E. Dodge; after his death in 1920 and her remarriage to the actor Hugh Dillman in 1926, the couple built a new Rose Terrace on Lake St Clair in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, a Louis XVI-style chateau designed by the Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer and completed in 1934 at a reported cost of four million dollars. Dodge and Dillman spent two years in Europe assembling its contents with the advice of Joseph Duveen among others, which makes it a small, sharp irony that the firm bearing Duveen's name had already rejected this particular pair for being too heavy for its taste. The commodes that Duveen would not buy ended up furnishing the breakfast room of the house Duveen helped furnish everything else in.

From an estate sale to the Getty

Anna Thomson Dodge died in 1970. The contents of Rose Terrace's music room were willed directly to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the remainder of the collection, including this pair, was consigned to Christie's in London, which sold it on 24 June 1971 as lot 102. The buyer of record was the New York gallery French and Company, acting for the J. Paul Getty Museum, which completed the acquisition the same year under accession number 71.DA.96.1-.2.

No hammer price or premium figure for lot 102 specifically is published in the sources consulted for this record, and none is asserted here. Rose Terrace itself outlived its contents by only a few years: designated a Michigan State Historic Site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, it was demolished in the summer of 1976 for want of a preservation-minded buyer able to carry its maintenance costs.

What examination has found since

The Getty has examined the pair at least twice since acquisition, with restoration campaigns recorded in the 1930s, before the museum owned them, and again in 1972-73, shortly after. One commode of the pair is missing its gilt-bronze molding along the middle sides and rear corners, a loss not matched on its partner. X-radiography suggests the side panels were reveneered at some point, probably to repair splits in the original wood, and the marble tops now on the commodes are modern replacements dated to the 1990s, not the eighteenth-century originals.

X-ray fluorescence analysis of twelve of the gilt-bronze mounts found alloys consistent with ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian brass casting in most of them, but three mounts returned an elevated zinc content of 25 to 28 percent, well outside that range. The Getty's published technical account does not explain the anomaly, and this record does not guess at one. It is left here as a specific, checkable finding rather than folded into a general assurance that the mounts are original.