Cabinet

While New York City’s cabinetmakers and decorators dominated the American market for luxury interior decorations during the country’s Gilded Age, Philadelphia also supported premier artisans and designers. A. and H. Lejambre was one such firm that flourished Philadelphia during the latter half of the nineteenth-century. Founded by the French émigré John Peter Alphonse Lejambre (d.1843), during its heyday, it was run by his widow Anna, (d. 1878), their son, Alexis (d. 1862), and later, his son, Henri Lejambre. Like Herter Brothers, Louis C. Tiffany and others, the Lejambre firm imported French textiles, furniture, and decorations, in addition to its cabinetmaking operation. The furniture made in the late 1870s and early 1880s in the Aesthetic style is notable for its delicate forms, luxury materials, fine craftsmanship, and rectilinear lines. Distinctive to Lejambre is its marquetry decoration of insects, as the seen in the brass, copper, and mother-of-pearl grasshoppers. This refined cabinet, one of a known pair, and the most ambitious form produced by the firm known today, would have exhibited ceramics or other small objet d'art collected in the period.