Gilded wood marquise stamped Georges Jacob

Slightly curved gilded wood marquise resting on four small fluted feet. The seat belt and the upper crosspiece of the backrest are carved with a piaster frieze. The legs are surmounted by a rosette, itself surmounted by a scraper. The arm brackets are composed of molded balusters embellished with acanthus leaves. The backrest is framed by two detached fluted columns topped by an Ionic capital. The top of the backrest is shaped like a gendarme's hat.
Stamped Georges Jacob, and stamped with a "T" mark.
Louis XVI period
Restoration, modern upholstery, partly gilded
H. 94.5 x W. 120 x D. 67.5 cm


The marquise in our study is stamped by the famous Georges Jacob. He came from a Burgundian family of farm workers. Sent to Paris as a young man, he began his training as a journeyman joiner with Delanois, joiner to Madame Du Barry. This gave him a front-row seat to the neoclassical style, of which the last royal favorite was a great lover. Jacob became a master in 1765. By this time, he was already using a neoclassical style for his furniture, alongside a production that was still more subdued Louis XV. By setting up his own workshop, George Jacob created what was to become one of the greatest artistic centers of French joinery in the late 18th century. He received royal commissions from 1773 onwards, and remained one of the most sought-after suppliers to official bodies even after the Revolution. His prestigious clients include Marie-Antoinette, the Count of Provence, Duke Charles Théodore of Bavaria and Deux-Ponts, and even painter Jacques-Louis David. In 1796, he left a prosperous workshop to his sons Georges II Jacob and François-Honoré, who merged their activities under the name "Jacob Frères".

Thanks to the carpenter's biography, we can easily date our marquise to between 1765 and 1796, the period to which Georges Jacob affixed his own stamp. However, for greater precision, we can estimate our marquise to date from the years 1766-1767, when the armrest supports, hitherto set back from the front legs, are once again positioned flush with the latter.

As far as stylistic analysis and comparisons with the productions of its creator are concerned, here are the results of our research. We know that Georges Jacob left a large production of Louis XVI chairs: among these, the most common are the straight-backed chairs, which are still widely found today. Seats with gendarme hat backs, such as ours, are rarer and all the more interesting.

Georges Jacob's reputation can be attributed to the extreme care he lavished on the ornamentation of his chairs. We credit Jacob and his master Delanois with some of the decorative carvings, in particular the connecting dice centered on a rosette, as seen on our seat. The sculpture is always fine and rigorous: our work shows this in the precision of its decoration, particularly on the upper crosspiece of the backrest, which is gadrooned around its contour and hollowed with a channel at its heart. Georges Jacob goes so far as to introduce the Ionic order on the back columns, a decorative element found on a bergère attributed to Jacob and sold at Sotheby's as lot 331, during the April 18, 2015 sale. The flat surface is banished from our marquise, thanks to finely striated cartouches on the connecting dice and on the brackets of the upper crosspiece of the backrest. Finally, the craftsman's technical mastery is visible in the very structure of our canopy, which is curved and therefore more complex to build. Georges Jacob delivered a suite of concave marquises to Madame la Comtesse de Provence for her music pavilion in Montreuil in 1784 (see lot 12, sale November 13, 2019, Christie's).