Console table

The asymmetrical cartouche of this small console, as well as its winged C and inverted C scrolls and use of rocaille decoration reveal quintessential elements of the Rococo style prevalent in Continental Europe from 1730s onward.

This console was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling and seat furniture of Maison Leys, a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave the panels with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.