A Louis XVI mahogany chaise ponteuse à l'étrusque by Georges Jacob

Solid mahogany, not signed
Louis XVI period, Paris by 1785
Green silk gourgouran upholstery

The perfectly round seat rests on two fluted front legs and sabre-shaped back legs, while the openwork back is topped by an armrest. The rear uprights are joined by a baluster.

This chair is notable for the highly innovative design of its backrest, whose openwork mahogany latticework imitates the strapping used on antique chairs. It is framed by two vertical uprights in the shape of Lituus, which are the ritual sticks of Etruscan augurs, terminating in curved crosses. These highly distinctive motifs, who appeared in Parisian furniture in the mid-1780s, were described at the time as a ‘new form of the Etruscan style’ (formes nouvelles du genre étrusques).

Inspired by the discoveries made at Pompeii and Herculaneum, notably thanks to the publications made by the Abbé de Saint-Non following his Grand Tour in Description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, published in Paris in 1781, these antique forms were transposed into the Parisian decorative arts by Georges Jacob, the most famous parisian seat maker, under the impetus of painters and ornamentalists such as Hubert Robert, Jacques Louis David and Jean Démosthène Dugourc. The most famous example is undoubtedly the mahogany Etruscan-style furniture delivered for the Queen's dairy at Rambouillet in 1787, the backs of which feature the same openwork motifs. It was made by Georges Jacob after designs provided by Hubert Robert (1733-1808). It is one of the rare examples of avant-garde furniture ever delivered for the Crown, whose tastes were always very conservative.

Another distinctive feature of our chair is the use of mahogany, a novelty that appeared in France at the end of the 1760s, thanks to the Anglomania of the Parisian elite. As the organisation of guilds reserved the use of exotic woods for cabinet-makers, the first mahogany chairs were curiously not made by joiners, whose traditional activity was this, but by cabinet-makers such as Pierre Garnier, Jean François Leleu, Jacques-Laurent Cosson, Louis Moreau and Joseph Stockel.
Georges Jacob, who ran one of the capital's leading joinery workshops, was able to break free from this very strict organisation of guilds, no doubt thanks to the orders he received from the King and the Queen through the Garde Meuble de la Couronne or from the Duc de Penthièvre. He was the first joiner at the end of Louis XVI's reign to make mahogany chairs, which were notable at the time for their use of solid mahogany. The posterity and success of these mahogany chairs throughout the following century sometimes obscures the fact that, at the end of the Ancien Régime, they were the rarities of a small elite eager for novelty.

Finally, this chair is characterised by its very specific use: gambling. The 18th century saw the development of specific chairs for each domestic activity, and the ‘voyeuse chairs’ bear witness to the passion of Ancien Régime society for gambling. According to Buffon, this ‘ greedy passion, the habit of which is ruinous ’, was at its height at the end of the 18th century, when people gambled big. These ‘voyeuses à califourchon’ or ‘ponteuses’ were placed in gaming halls (the term ‘ponter’ means to bet), and enabled male players to sustain long games of lansquenet, tric trac, chess, quadrille or piquet, sitting astride with their chest resting on the backrest; or members of the assembly to follow the games taking place at the tables, standing behind a player and leaning on the armrest. Because it was not acceptable for women to sit astride a horse, a second type of gaming chair also came into being: the kneeling voyeuses, which resembled the prie-Dieu.

Our model, although unsigned, can be attributed with certainty to Georges Jacob by comparison with other rare known examples of this chair model, including a pair of mahogany chairs stamped G.IACOB, with an identical open latticework backrest, sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 2016 (Ader, 16 December 2016, lot no. 303). The chairs sold at Ader differed from ours only in the shape of the seat, which had a straight front side. Here, the highly original openwork back is combined with a perfectly round seat, which is another of Georges Jacob's signatures in the construction of his ponteuse chairs, like the lyre-back ponteuse chair from the former Perrin collection, reproduced in Kjellberg, page 462, figure C, or the ponteuse chair from the Remy collection, reproduced in Madeleine Jarry, Le siège Français, fig. 225