Cabinet

A large walnut-and-oak cabinet, painted and iron-mounted, built in Burgundy in 1580 and dismissed for roughly thirty years as a nineteenth-century fake. J. Paul Getty bought it in 1971 for 1,700 dollars, against his own curators' advice, because its suspiciously pristine, wax-coated surface looked exactly like the many Renaissance Revival pastiches sold to American collectors a century earlier; fifty years before that it had reportedly carried an asking price of 46,640 dollars. A 2001 French exhibition on the Burgundian architect and designer Hugues Sambin sent a Getty curator to Ecouen, and the reexamination that followed, tree-ring dating the structural oak to 1574-75, radiocarbon dating the walnut and its silk-and-linen lining to 1400-1600, and matching sixteenth-century tool marks across both woods, overturned the fake verdict entirely.

The provenance behind that verdict is unusually rich for a piece of furniture: a possible 1596 mention in a Besancon nobleman's estate inventory, the celebrated Debruge-Dumenil and Prince Soltykoff collections of the Paris art world's golden age of medieval and Renaissance connoisseurship, the 7th Duke of Marlborough's Blenheim Palace, Baron Achille Seilliere's private museum at the Chateau de Mello, and half a century in the hands of Duveen Brothers before the entire remaining Duveen inventory passed to the Norton Simon Foundation in one of the largest dealer-stock sales in American art-market history. This record checks every link in that chain against sources independent of the Getty's own catalogue, and corrects two dates the Getty's own database appears to have gotten wrong along the way: a Soltykoff family conflation, and an acquisition window for Baron Seilliere that his own death date rules out.

Who actually carved it remains unknown. The Getty's own last word is honest about that, and this record follows it: Hugues Sambin is a plausible name, supported by real archival and stylistic circumstance, not a proven one.

A two-tiered cabinet built to be looked at from across a room and read up close

The object is a large, freestanding, two-tiered cabinet, 307.7 centimetres tall, 153.4 wide and 57.2 deep: taller than a person, wider than a doorway, built of walnut and oak with painted panels and iron mounts, and lined inside with linen and silk. It is not a piece of storage furniture in the ordinary sense. It is an architectural object in miniature, built with the same vocabulary of doors, orders, terms and pediments that a Burgundian mason would have used on a real facade, and it was made to stand in a room and be read the way a facade is read: from across the room as a single composition, and up close as a sequence of individually carved and painted incidents.

The upper section is closed by three doors. The centre door carries a carved figure of Apollo, based on a print made after a design by Raphael, set inside an elaborate surround of human figures, masks, curling foliage, flowers and scrollwork. The two flanking doors have arched panels inset with painted scenes rendered in yellow monochrome, a grisaille-like technique that lets painted narrative sit inside a carved architectural frame without competing with it for attention. The lower section repeats the scheme at a smaller scale: a further monochrome painting on its central door, and boldly carved griffins projecting from each end of the case, the kind of hybrid guardian beast that Northern Mannerist ornament borrowed wholesale from print sources circulating out of Italy and Fontainebleau. The very top of the cabinet, according to the Getty Museum's own published description of the object, originally carried a painted panel showing Saint Jerome. That panel is no longer part of the cabinet as it survives today, and none of the sources consulted for this record explain when or why it was removed.

Apollo above, Jerome above that: what the two figures were doing on the same object

The Getty Museum's own catalogue text is explicit that the carved Apollo on the upper central door is 'based on a print after Raphael,' and it is equally explicit that the vanished top panel showed Saint Jerome. No source consulted for this record identifies the specific print used for the Apollo figure by engraver or by the Raphael composition it reproduces, and this record does not guess at one; readers should treat the print's author as an open question, not as Marcantonio Raimondi or any other named printmaker, until a source states it.

What can be said without guessing is what the pairing does. Apollo, god of the arts, music, poetry and prophecy, is the standard classical shorthand for secular learning and for the patronage of culture; a Renaissance owner who put Apollo on the door of a cabinet was declaring, in the same visual language used on countless Italian and French studioli of the period, that the object inside belonged to a person of taste and letters. Jerome, the scholar-saint who translated the Bible into Latin in a wilderness cell surrounded by his books, is the standard shorthand for exactly the opposite half of the same idea: contemplative, textual, penitential learning, sanctified rather than secular. A cabinet that put a pagan god of culture at its centre and a Christian scholar-saint at its crown was not making a private esoteric argument. It was making the entirely ordinary and very widely documented Renaissance argument that classical learning and Christian devotion were two faces of one educated life, an argument repeated on hundreds of surviving studioli, book-cases, and cabinet fronts of the period. This record finds no evidence, and no scholar cited in the Getty's own bibliography argues, that the programme carries any narrower or more private meaning than that. The absence of a hidden programme is itself the finding here: this is a proud, legible, entirely orthodox humanist-Christian statement of what its owner wanted a visitor to think of him, not a coded message.

An unknown maker, a withdrawn attribution, and a name that will not quite attach

No documentary evidence names who built this cabinet. The Getty Museum, which has spent more research effort on this single object than on almost anything else in its decorative arts department, states the position plainly: the maker 'has yet to be established.' That sentence sits in the Museum's own public-facing catalogue text, not in a footnote, and this record follows it.

For most of the twentieth century the cabinet carried an attribution to Jacques I Androuet du Cerceau, the engraver, architect and ornament-designer whose published furniture etchings, gathered as an album around 1580, were among the most widely circulated pattern sources in Northern Europe. The Getty's own linked-data record for the object carries a formal attribute-assignment marking that attribution 'Obsolete,' with an end date of 2005, the year before Jack Hinton and Arlen Heginbotham published the technical study that re-dated the cabinet. Du Cerceau's furniture designs were never intended, on the evidence of specialists who have studied the surviving album, to be built literally; they were what one bookseller's catalogue description of the plates calls 'repertories of ideas,' pattern sources meant to be adapted by cabinetmakers, goldsmiths, embroiderers and other craftsmen working in entirely different media. An attribution built on stylistic resemblance to a pattern book that nobody expected to be followed exactly was always going to be fragile, and it did not survive the 2001-2006 reexamination.

In its place the Getty now offers, carefully hedged, a different name: Hugues Sambin, the Dijon-based architect, sculptor and ornament designer whose own engraved pattern book of anthropomorphic terms, published in Lyon in 1572, supplied exactly the vocabulary of masks, scrolling foliage and hybrid figures visible on this cabinet's doors. The Getty's own text states the case as a possibility, not a finding: 'it is possible that the most renowned Burgundian cabinetmaker of the period, Hugues Sambin, produced the piece,' adding, with real honesty about the limits of the evidence, that 'even if neither artist contributed to this cabinet, their designs for similar cabinets and decoration almost certainly influenced the artist who did.' That sentence is the single most useful thing the Museum says about attribution, because it tells a reader exactly how much weight the Sambin name can bear: not authorship, but atmosphere. The cabinet was made by someone working inside the visual world Sambin and du Cerceau had built with their engravings, not necessarily by either man.

Hugues Sambin, the man behind the proposal

Sambin (c. 1520-1601) was a documented figure of considerable local standing in Dijon, the seat of the old Duchy of Burgundy. Trained originally as a menuisier, a woodworker, he built a career that spanned sculpture, architectural design and print publishing, and he signed the preface to his own book 'Hugues Sambin, Architecteur en la ville de Dijon,' a title he clearly felt he had earned. His major documented architectural commission is the building that housed the Parlement of Burgundy at Dijon, constructed from 1572, the same decade this cabinet was made; he also worked on the Parlement of Besancon and on temporary festival architecture for the royal entries of Henri II and Charles IX into Dijon. His book, 'L'Oeuvre de la diversite des termes dont on use en architecture,' printed at Lyon in 1572, is devoted entirely to term figures, the hybrid human-and-pedestal supports that classical theorists such as Vitruvius mention only in passing and that neither Vignola nor Palladio bothered to illustrate. Sambin made that neglected ornamental form his specialty, and pieces of French Renaissance furniture carrying exactly that vocabulary of carved terms are, as a class, sometimes loosely called cabinets in the manner of Sambin by the trade and by some scholars, without any claim that he personally carved them.

The direct link between Sambin scholarship and this cabinet's rehabilitation is documented and specific. In 2001 the Musee national de la Renaissance at Ecouen, outside Paris, mounted an exhibition on Sambin, resulting in the catalogue 'Hugues Sambin: Un createur au XVIe siecle' by Alain Erlande-Brandenburg and others. According to the Getty's own account of its reexamination, a Getty curator travelled to Ecouen to meet the scholars behind that exhibition, and it was that visit which triggered the Museum's decision to reexamine its own long-doubted cabinet from scratch. A French academic project on a documented regional master directly produced the rehabilitation of an American museum's rejected object. That is a plainer and better-evidenced story than any claim that Sambin personally held a chisel to this wood, and it is the story this record tells.

J. Paul Getty bought it against his own curators' advice, for $1,700

The cabinet entered the Getty collection in 1971, bought by J. Paul Getty himself and, on the Museum's own account, over the objections of the curatorial staff who were supposed to be advising him. Their objection was not vague unease. The cabinet was, in the Museum's own words, 'in suspiciously pristine condition,' and its surface was coated in coloured wax, the classic nineteenth-century trick for making new carving look old. The professional judgement of the day, stated by the Museum itself, was that the object was 'a product of the Renaissance Revival of the 19th century, when American industrial magnates snapped up Renaissance-style furniture, including many fakes, from cash-strapped European aristocrats.' This was not an eccentric worry specific to one object. The market for French Renaissance and pseudo-Renaissance furniture sold to American Gilded Age collectors has its own scholarly literature precisely because the two categories were and remain difficult to tell apart at a glance; Wolfram Koeppe's 1994 study of exactly that market, cited in the Getty's own bibliography for this object, exists because so much of what nineteenth-century Paris workshops built in the goinginto-eclipse Henri II revival style was subsequently sold, knowingly or otherwise, as the genuine sixteenth-century article.

The price tells the same story more bluntly than any adjective could. Getty paid $1,700 for the cabinet in 1971. Fifty years earlier, around 1921, it had reportedly carried an asking price of $46,640, a figure the Museum's own exhibition materials give without further attribution but which sits squarely inside the years when Duveen Brothers held the piece (the firm bought it in 1916). Converting by the published US Consumer Price Index, $46,640 in 1921 corresponds to roughly $870,000 in 2026 purchasing power, and $1,700 in 1971 corresponds to roughly $13,800 in 2026 purchasing power; both figures use the CPI method published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as compiled by in2013dollars.com, and both are approximations, not appraisals. Whatever the exact 1921 asking price bought, in real terms the object's recognised market value collapsed by roughly two orders of magnitude between an early-twentieth-century dealer's asking price and the price a doubtful buyer was willing to pay half a century later. That collapse is the price of being called a fake, expressed in dollars, and it is the single clearest number in this entire record.

Unexhibited for thirty years, and then a French exhibition changed everything

Having bought a cabinet his own staff believed was a fake, Getty did not display it. The Museum's own account is direct: the object was 'never displayed in the Getty Museum until now,' referring to the 2005-2007 exhibition that told this very story. For roughly three decades the cabinet sat unseen in storage, catalogued as a probable nineteenth-century deception, while the Museum's decorative arts department built its reputation on objects nobody doubted.

The reversal began in 2001, and it began outside the Getty entirely. When curators in France organised the Ecouen exhibition on Hugues Sambin described above, a Getty curator travelled to meet the scholars working on it. On returning, according to the Museum's own account, that curator decided to launch a full reexamination of the Getty's own cabinet. The Museum does not name the curator in the exhibition text quoted here, though Gillian Wilson, who founded and led the Getty's Department of Decorative Arts from the Museum's early years and who by 2001 had spent three decades building its European furniture and sculpture holdings, is the person most plausibly in that role on the strength of her tenure and title; this record states that identification as a plausible inference from her documented position and dates, not as a fact stated by the sources consulted, because none of the sources fetched for this record names her specifically in connection with the 2001 Ecouen visit.

What the tree rings, the carbon and the tool marks actually said

The reexamination that followed was multidisciplinary, and the Getty's own exhibition materials describe each strand of it in enough detail to be usable by a student rather than merely asserted.

Dendrochronology, tree-ring dating, was applied to the cabinet's structural oak panels. The wood cannot lie about its own growth rings once matched against a regional reference chronology, and the result placed the felling of the oak tree used for the cabinet's structural panels in late 1574 or early 1575, in Burgundy. Factoring in the months needed to season the timber and the time needed to build a large, elaborately carved cabinet, the Museum states plainly that this result 'coincides with the date of 1580 painted on the cabinet.' The painted date and the felled tree agree with each other, which is exactly the kind of independent-lines-of-evidence convergence that authentication depends on.

Oak can be dated by its rings; the cabinet's decorative walnut, with its irregular grain, cannot, so the team turned to radiocarbon dating instead. Tiny samples were taken from the walnut and from the frayed edges of the silk and linen lining found in the middle drawer. All of the samples returned dates between 1400 and 1600, a two-hundred-year radiocarbon window that is consistent with, though far less precise than, the 1580 date supplied by the dendrochronology and the painted inscription. Radiocarbon dating cannot by itself prove a sixteenth-century date; what it can do, and did here, is rule out the specific hypothesis under test, that the wood and lining were nineteenth-century materials made to look old. A radiocarbon result of 1750-1900 would have confirmed the fake theory outright. A result of 1400-1600 does the opposite.

The third line of evidence was the oldest kind of connoisseurship there is: looking closely at tool marks. The rough, unseen surfaces on the back of the cabinet carry marks left by a hand-held saw and by a type of plane in use during the sixteenth century, not later machine-assisted tools. More tellingly, both the walnut and the oak components carry identical impressions from a 'bench dog,' a toothed iron clip used to hold wood steady on a workbench, indicating that the two different woods were worked on the same bench at roughly the same time rather than assembled from parts of different ages. Underneath a later covering of red velvet, conservators found old nail holes from an earlier lining, holding traces of the original sixteenth-century fabric that still lines the drawer beneath the newer covering, and further analysis of the tacks and tack holes on the cabinet's doors provided additional physical confirmation. None of these three strands of evidence, tree rings, radiocarbon dates, or tool marks, was individually sufficient on its own to overturn thirty years of curatorial doubt. Together, converging on the same decade from three unrelated scientific and observational methods, they were.

A 1596 inventory, a sister cabinet in Besancon, and the first name in the chain

Alongside the laboratory work, Getty curators went back into the archives, and found the earliest documented reference to an object that may be this one. A post-mortem household inventory of the estate of Fernand Gauthiot, lord of d'Ancier, of Besancon, taken between 1 April and 12 May 1596, describes two French Renaissance cabinets. One of the two is identified with a cabinet now in the Musee du Temps in Besancon, which independent scholarship has definitively dated to 1581. The other, the Getty's own materials state, 'may be the Getty cabinet.' Curators compared the carved and painted decoration of the two objects closely and found, in the Museum's words, 'minute clues and subtle coincidences of style' suggesting the two cabinets may have come from the same artist or workshop group. This is precisely the kind of connection the Getty's own provenance record reflects when it lists 'Possibly Gauthiot d'Ancier (Besancon, France), by 1596' as the earliest identifiable owner: the word 'possibly' is doing real, honest work in that sentence, because the identification rests on an inventory description matched to physical evidence, not on a name written on the object itself. This record grades that link as documented for the existence of the 1596 Besancon inventory and its description of two French Renaissance cabinets, and as argued, not documented, for the specific identification of one of those two cabinets with the object now at the Getty.

If the identification holds, it places the cabinet in Burgundy, in a household of the regional nobility, within roughly sixteen years of its manufacture, which is exactly the kind of early, geographically consistent provenance link that gives an authentication case its strongest support. It also gives this cabinet a documented sibling: the 1581 Besancon cabinet is a fixed, independently dated comparandum sitting in a public French collection today, against which every stylistic claim about this object can be checked by any reader able to travel to the Musee du Temps.

A three-century silence, then Debruge-Dumenil's vast Paris collection

Between the 1596 Besancon inventory and the middle of the nineteenth century, no source consulted for this record places the cabinet anywhere. That gap, roughly two hundred and fifty years, is recorded here as a gap rather than bridged with invention.

The chain resumes with Louis-Fidel Debruge-Dumenil (7 December 1778 - 6 December 1838), a Paris collector whose holdings in decorative arts, arms, ceramics and medieval and Renaissance objects had grown, by the time of his death, to a scale a specialist database of French art historians describes in the thousands of objects. His son-in-law, the scholar Jules Labarte, catalogued the collection in a published 'Description des objets d'art qui composent la collection Debruge-Dumenil,' and it was this Labarte catalogue, not an auctioneer's list, that fixed the collection's reputation as one of the most important assemblages of medieval and Renaissance decorative art formed anywhere in the nineteenth century. Debruge-Dumenil died in 1838; his heirs retained the collection for twelve years afterward before finally dispersing it at the Hotel des Ventes Mobilieres in Paris across a marathon sale running from 23 January to 12 March 1850. The Getty's own record places this cabinet in that sale's tenth session, on 2 February 1850, as lot 1500, sold to the next owner in this chain, Prince Soltykoff. A collection catalogued so thoroughly and sold in a single documented public sale gives this link in the chain unusually solid footing: this record grades Debruge-Dumenil's ownership and the 1850 sale as documented.

Prince Soltykoff, the 1861 sale, and a date that the Getty's own database gets wrong

The buyer at the 1850 Debruge-Dumenil sale was Prince Pierre, also written Petr or Pyotr, Soltykoff, a Russian-born nobleman who had settled in Paris around 1840 and built one of the era's most admired collections of medieval and Renaissance decorative art in his own right. Soltykoff's collection was dispersed at the Hotel Drouot in Paris beginning 8 April 1861, a sale itself remembered as one of the landmark decorative-arts auctions of the nineteenth century; a significant share of what was sold there is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Getty's own record places this cabinet in that sale as lot 275, sold on to the next owner, John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough.

This is also the point in the chain where independent verification catches a real error, and it is worth stating exactly what the error is rather than silently repeating either the wrong figure or the right one without comment. The Getty's own linked-data record for this object labels this ownership event 'Prince Soltykoff (1806-1859).' Those dates belong to a different man: Alexey (Alexis) Saltykov, a Russian traveller, artist and writer, one of Prince Pierre Soltykoff's younger relatives, who is independently documented as living 1806-1859 and who is separately recorded selling his own book and print collection at Drouot under his own name. The collector who actually owned this cabinet, sold his collection in the landmark 1861 sale, and is independently tracked by the RKD art-historical database, the National Gallery of Art's own provenance files, and the British Museum's authority records, lived 1804-1889. This record follows the 1804-1889 dates, sourced independently of the Getty, and flags the Getty's own internal date label as a probable data-entry conflation between two different men who shared a family name and a first initial. It is exactly the kind of small cataloguing error this publication exists to catch, and it changes nothing about the provenance chain itself: the Soltykoff who owned this cabinet from 1850 to 1861 is Prince Pierre Soltykoff, regardless of which set of dates a database field attaches to him.

The mystery of the late-1850s additions

The Getty's own date field for this object does not simply say 1580. It says 1580, with minor additions in the late 1850s. That detail places the alteration squarely inside Prince Soltykoff's eleven-year ownership window, 1850 to 1861, since he is the only owner in the documented chain who held the cabinet at any point in that decade. No source consulted for this record, including the Getty's own published bibliography, states specifically what was added, altered or replaced in the late 1850s, or names who carried out the work. It is entirely possible, and consistent with ordinary nineteenth-century collecting practice, that Soltykoff had the cabinet conserved, re-lined, or had a missing or damaged element restored to make it presentable for exhibition in his own collection or for eventual sale; it is equally possible the additions are more substantial. This record states plainly that the specifics are not known from the sources consulted, and records it as an open question rather than guessing at an answer the evidence does not support.

Blenheim Palace, and a sale that predates the family's famous financial crisis

The buyer at the 1861 Soltykoff sale was John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough (1822-1883), the owner of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and an ancestor of Winston Churchill. The 7th Duke's later financial difficulties at Blenheim are extensively documented: by the 1870s the family was in serious trouble, and the Duke sold the Marlborough Gems, a celebrated collection of ancient gems and cameos assembled by an earlier Duke, in 1875, reportedly raising around 10,000 pounds, and in 1881 secured a private Act of Parliament, the Blenheim Settled Estates Act, specifically to permit the sale of estate property that had previously been legally protected, using it to sell the Sunderland Library and raise a further 60,000 pounds. The Blenheim collection was also famously sold off in a large Christie's picture sale of 1886, three years after the 7th Duke's death, under his son.

This cabinet's own departure from the Marlborough collection does not appear to belong to that well-known crisis. The documented financial liquidation at Blenheim runs from the mid-1870s through 1886; the cabinet, on the Getty's own account, passed from the 7th Duke to Baron Achille Seilliere at a date the Museum's record does not pin down precisely, but which, for reasons set out in the next section, is more likely to fall in the 1860s than in the 1880s. If that reasoning holds, this cabinet left Blenheim as an ordinary private sale by a collector still solvent enough to be exercising taste rather than raising cash under legislative compulsion, a genuinely different transaction from the gem and library sales that followed a decade or more later. This record states that distinction as the balance of the evidence rather than as a certainty, because no source consulted gives an exact year for the Marlborough-to-Seilliere transfer.

Baron Achille Seilliere, a posthumous sale, and a second correction to the chain

Baron Francois-Florentin-Achille Seilliere (1813 - 14 May 1873) was a banker, an administrator of the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Est and of the Credit Foncier, and the owner of the Chateau de Mello in the Oise, which he filled with furniture, clocks, enamels, paintings and precious objects on a scale contemporary accounts describe as turning the chateau into a private museum. He was, independently, a noted book collector; his library was significant enough to be the subject of its own bibliographic history.

Here the chain requires a second correction of the same kind as the Soltykoff dates. Seilliere died in 1873. The sale that dispersed his collection, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and catalogued by the dealer C. Mannheim under the title 'Catalogue des objets d'art de haute curiosite et de riche ameublement provenant de l'importante collection de feu M. le baron Achille Seilliere,' ran across several days in May 1890, seventeen years after his death; the French word 'feu' in that title means precisely 'the late,' confirming this was an estate sale conducted by Seilliere's heirs, not a sale by the man himself. It follows that Seilliere's own acquisition of the cabinet from the Duke of Marlborough's collection must have occurred while he was alive, that is, at some point between 1861, when the Duke bought it, and 1873, when Seilliere died, and not in the mid-1880s, a timeframe that would place the purchase a decade after the buyer's death. This record therefore states the Marlborough-to-Seilliere transfer as falling within 1861-1873, bounded by two documented facts, Marlborough's 1861 purchase and Seilliere's 1873 death, rather than repeating an unsourced mid-1880s estimate that cannot be reconciled with Seilliere's own dates. The precise year within that twelve-year window is not established by any source consulted for this record and is carried forward here as an open question.

The 1890 sale itself is well documented: the Mannheim catalogue lists this cabinet at pages 80-81, as lot 540, illustrated, among the objects sold from Seilliere's Chateau de Mello estate.

Davis Brothers, Duveen Brothers, and the Anglo-American decorative arts trade

The cabinet's next documented owner is a London firm the Getty's own record names as Davis Brothers, which sold it on to Duveen Brothers, Inc. on 14 June 1916. This record has not been able to independently confirm the precise identity or history of a London dealership trading specifically under the name Davis Brothers in this period; the closest documented figure found in the course of this research is Charles Davis, a London antique dealer recorded selling a suite of tapestry-covered furniture to Duveen Brothers in June 1910 for 24,000 pounds, a transaction of the right kind, in the right decade, with the right trading partner, but this record does not assert that Charles Davis and Davis Brothers are the same dealership without a source that says so directly, and none of the sources consulted makes that connection explicitly. It is recorded here as an open question rather than resolved by assumption.

What is unambiguous is the buyer. Duveen Brothers, founded by the Dutch-born brothers Joseph Joel Duveen and Henry J. Duveen and built into its dominant position under Joseph Duveen's leadership between 1909 and 1939, was for the first four decades of the twentieth century the single most influential firm in the trade of European art and antiques to American collectors, a business built, in Joseph Duveen's own later paraphrase, on the observation that Europe had a great deal of art and America had a great deal of money. The firm's dealings in French decorative arts and Renaissance-attributed furniture specifically are documented at length in Charlotte Vignon's 2019 study for the Frick Collection, which discusses this cabinet directly, citing it at page 228-229 with an illustration. Duveen Brothers held the cabinet for close to half a century, from 1916 until the firm's entire remaining inventory was sold in 1964.

Norton Simon buys the whole of Duveen, and sells the cabinet on within seven years

Duveen Brothers effectively ceased trading with the death of Joseph Duveen in 1939, and the firm's remaining stock sat largely unsold for a quarter-century afterward. On 18 April 1964, the industrialist and collector Norton Simon, through the Norton Simon Foundation, purchased the entirety of what remained: close to 800 objects, spanning Flemish tapestries, Italian marble sculpture and Old Master paintings, together with the Duveen gallery building itself at 18 East 79th Street in New York and its four-thousand-volume reference library and archive. The negotiated price, according to Sara Campbell's institutional history of the deal, was 4,000,000 dollars, structured in part to fund a pension for most of the outgoing Duveen staff. It was, by any measure, one of the single largest wholesale transfers of an entire dealer's inventory in the history of the American art trade, and this cabinet was one of the roughly 800 objects that changed hands in it.

Norton Simon did not intend to keep most of what he had bought. Through a series of decorative arts and furniture sales across the 1970s, the Foundation worked to recoup a substantial part of its four-million-dollar outlay, retaining primarily paintings, a small number of sculptures and porcelains, and a handful of other pieces; of the original Duveen purchase, roughly 130 objects remained in the Norton Simon collections in the long run. This cabinet was sold off in that dispersal, at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York on 7 May 1971, as lot 193, where it was bought by J. Paul Getty for the museum that bears his name, at the price of 1,700 dollars discussed above. The Norton Simon Foundation's ownership of this specific cabinet therefore lasted only seven years, a brief stopover inside a single much larger transaction, and the object was already carrying the taint of the 'probably a fake' verdict by the time it changed hands again.

What is unresolved

Several genuine gaps remain in this record, recorded here rather than smoothed over. The identity of the maker is unresolved and, on the Getty's own repeated statement, may never be resolved; Hugues Sambin remains a proposal supported by stylistic and archival circumstance, not a documented attribution. The exact nature of the late-1850s additions made during Prince Soltykoff's ownership is not described in any source consulted. The precise year the cabinet passed from the 7th Duke of Marlborough to Baron Achille Seilliere is not stated in any source consulted, and can only be bounded, not fixed, by the two death and purchase dates that are documented. The identity of the London firm 'Davis Brothers' and its possible relationship to the documented dealer Charles Davis is unconfirmed. The fate of the cabinet's original top panel showing Saint Jerome, described by the Getty as no longer present, is not addressed by any source consulted. And the full text of the 2006 Burlington Magazine article by Jack Hinton and Arlen Heginbotham, the single most detailed technical account of the reexamination, was not directly accessible during the preparation of this record; every technical claim drawn from that reexamination here is instead sourced to the Getty Museum's own public exhibition materials, which describe the same findings in the Museum's own words.