# "Ombelliferes" (Cow Parsley) Cabinet > Emile Galle - ca. 1900 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/emile-galle/galle-ombelliferes-cabinet-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-19 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Emile Galle - **Date:** ca. 1900 - **Medium:** Case and carved elements in stained beech; back in plywood veneered with zebrano; door veneered with curly, tiger, and quilted maple, birds-eye maple, European chestnut, satinwood, and walnut, forming a marquetry picture of umbelliferous (cow-parsley-family) plants - **Dimensions:** 101.6 x 125.3 x 29.5 cm (40 x 49 5/16 x 11 5/8 in); 16.8 kg (37 lb) - **Object type:** Furniture - **Period:** French Art Nouveau, Ecole de Nancy - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A shallow marquetry cabinet made in Emile Galle's Nancy furniture workshop around 1900, its door built entirely from contrasting wood veneers, curly, tiger, and quilted maple, birds-eye maple, European chestnut, satinwood, and walnut, into a picture of cow parsley and its umbellifer relatives. The Metropolitan Museum, which has owned it since an anonymous gift in 1982, states that only one other example of this model is known, at the Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy, making it a small, two-example rarity inside a furniture practice that otherwise produced most of its designs in numbers.The same French title has been used for at least one other, materially unrelated Galle cabinet on the art market, and this record spends real effort keeping the two apart, along with two further umbellifer-themed pieces, at Reims and at the Musee d'Orsay, that share the plant-family programme without being this object. The cabinet's own history before 1982 is undocumented, its donor unnamed, and its exact dating basis unstated beyond the Museum's stylistic estimate; what can be said with confidence is that the estimate places its manufacture inside Galle's own lifetime, before the posthumous, star-marked production of his firm's later years.Its timber list also corrects an easy assumption: rather than an exclusively native French material programme in keeping with Galle's documented Lorraine regionalism, the cabinet mixes local European species with an African back veneer and, almost certainly, tropical or North American figured woods in the door, a material fact this record reports plainly rather than forcing into a symbolic reading no named source has actually made about this specific object. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **ca. 1900** Made in the Emile Galle furniture workshop, Nancy `[documented]` (manufacture) Dated ca. 1900 by the Metropolitan Museum on stylistic grounds; no signed or dated workshop record was located. The date falls within Galle's lifetime (he died September 1904) and before the firm's post-1904 continuation under his widow, Victor Prouve, and later Paul Perdrizet. - **ca. 1900-1982** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, dealer, exhibition, or sale is documented for this cabinet across roughly eight decades between its manufacture and its arrival at the Metropolitan Museum. Nothing in the sources consulted names an intermediate holder. - **1982-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift) Credit line 'Anonymous Gift, 1982'. The transfer to the Museum and its date are documented by the Museum's own credit line and accession number (1982.246); the donor's identity is not disclosed in any source consulted for this record and is treated here as unknown, not omitted. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - No auction sale of this specific object (Met 1982.246) is recorded in any source consulted. It entered the Museum by anonymous gift in 1982, not by purchase, and no market transaction for it at any date was found. General auction and dealer-market comparanda for Galle furniture as a category are discussed in the narrative (see 'Furniture against glass in the market') but no result there concerns this cabinet or its Nancy sibling. ## Open questions - Who was the anonymous 1982 donor, and has that identity ever been disclosed in a Museum publication not reviewed for this record? - What is the specific documentary basis for the Museum's 'ca. 1900' date? No signed, dated, or workshop record was located; the date is described as stylistic. - Does the Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy's sibling cabinet carry an inscription, a marquetry signature, or any published history of its own, and can its existence be confirmed directly from the Nancy museum rather than through the Met's catalogue statement alone? - Was this specific cabinet exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, as several closely related umbellifer-themed Galle furniture pieces were? No exhibition history is recorded for it. - Does this cabinet carry an inscription or marquetry signature that the Museum's published catalogue data simply does not record, given that closely comparable pieces of the same decorative programme are inscribed and signed? - What happened to this cabinet between its manufacture around 1900 and its arrival at the Museum in 1982? No owner, dealer, or exhibition history for that span was found in any source consulted. - Is there a documented posthumous-marking convention for Galle furniture comparable to the star mark used on glass from 1904 to 1914, and if so, does its absence on this piece's catalogue record confirm a pre-1904 date or simply reflect incomplete cataloguing? ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Ombelliferes (cow parsley) Cabinet', object 482526, accession 1982.246, collection database and public collection API. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Emile Galle', consolidating biography, furniture workshop founding, Ecole de Nancy presidency, political engagement, and posthumous firm history. Flagged for replacement with a scholarly monograph (e.g. Bloch-Dermant or Garner) for any future deepening. - [3] Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy, biography of Emile Galle, 'Protagonists of the Ecole de Nancy' series. - [4] Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy, 'Ma racine est au fond des bois' (focus on a work), for the text and dating of Galle's workshop-door devise. NOTE: this page is the museum's own fictionalized composition in Galle's voice, not a documentary artifact record - used here only for the devise text and its traditional dating, not as evidence of a surviving physical door. - [5] Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy, 'Furniture: renewing the living environment', collections page, checked directly for any listing of an Ombelliferes cabinet; none found in the material sampled. - [6] Musees de la Ville de Reims, catalogue entry for 'Etagere aux ombelliferes' by Emile Galle, inventory 941.3.523. - [7] Musee d'Orsay, catalogue entry for 'Les Ombellules' by Emile Galle, inventory OAO 1467. - [8] Robert Zehil Gallery, Monaco, dealer listing for Emile Galle, '"Les Ombelliferes", Cabinet, circa 1900', consulted for comparison and version-safety purposes only; a dealer listing, not an independent scholarly source, and not the object this record describes. - [9] American University, 'Emile Galle's Furniture: Adorned After Nature', 'Nature as Symbol: Galle's Motifs', for the meubles parlants tradition, botanical precision, and Galle's own statements on Symbolism in furniture design. - [10] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Furniture by Emile Galle, and file records for the 'Ombelliferes (cow parsley) Cabinet MET DP237552/ES6897/ES6898.jpg' images, consulted for image identification and CC0 licence verification via the Commons API extmetadata field. - [11] Suzanne Singletary (or attributed author), 'La Lorraine Artiste: Nature, Industry, and the Nation in the Work of Emile Galle', eScholarship, University of California, for the argument connecting Galle's Lorraine identity and the 1871 annexation to named, inscribed works. Accessed only through indexed search results; the source PDF exceeded this record's fetch size limit and was not read in full. Flagged for direct review in any future deepening. - [12] Metropolitan Museum of Art, public Collection API record for object 482526, for materials, dimensions, classification, and public-domain image status. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.