A pair of klismos armchairs by Pierre Antoine Bellangé (1757-1827)

Solid mahogany and mahogany veneered, bois citron
With barrel back, the curved tablet crestrail above a square upholstered backrest flanked by downswept scrolled arms ending in lotus flowers terminals raised on square plinths flanking an upholstered seat raised on fluted sabre legs.

Paris circa 1815

Upholstered with green woolen cloth and black trimmings.

Pierre-Antoine Bellangé (1757-1827), master in 1788, was leading a large workshop in rue Neuve Saint Denis. He supplied many pieces of furniture for Imperial houses, such as chateau de Laeken in Brussels or Palais de Saint Cloud near Paris. In 1812 he was commissioned with the execution of the furniture of the Roi de Rome main drawing room at the Palais des Tuileries.
Under the Restauration in 1817, with the Return of the Bourbons, he was granted a royal warrant and the title of fournisseur breveté de la couronne. In 1818 he won a commission which ensures him an international reputation: the furnishing of the Oval Room at the Withe house for President James Monroe. He associated with his son Louis Alexande Bellangé in 1820 and retired in 1825.

Modelled on the ancient Greek Klismos chair with deeply curved back, these chairs reflect the 'antique' influence of the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns of 1798 as popularized by Baron Vivant-Denon in his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte published in 1802. A drawing for a closely related chair by Charles Percier, was intended as a model for Georges Jacob by 1790, and this new vocabulary of ornament was swiftly adopted by ornemanistes such as Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, architects and designers to Napoleon I, and published afterward in Recueil de décorations intérieures (1801 and 1812). Similar chairs were also published by Beauvallet and Lenormand in Fragmens d’architecture, sculpture et peinture dans le style antique (1804), and appeared in the annual issues of La Mesangère “collection de meubles et d’objets de goût”. They were very fashionable, in Paris and abroad, during the two first decades of 19th century.

Although it is unsigned, this pair of armchairs, who appeared to be a one-off commission, can be formally identified as a work of Pierre Antoine Bellangé.
The overall beautiful quality, as well as many stylistic details, are very typical of Bellangé’s workshop. The curved back and the caliber of those seats are identical to a mahogany Empire barrel back bergère signed P.Bellangé, sold at auction in Alençon in 2017. The double scroll pattern of the inlay on the curved crestrail tablet is figured in the Bellangé album of drawings for furniture designs, in the collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum.

The sculpture of the downswept armrests is also very iconic of the Empire seats signed by Pierre Antoine Bellangé. They are frequently carved with bundles of rushes, like the seats delivered to the Marechal Berthier (Cordier cat. PAB 58), or carved with a large palm leaf like the seats from the former Bauveau collection, supplied for the Comtesse du Cayla bedchamber at the castle of Saint Ouen. Our chairs combine these two patterns, a palm leaf and a bundle of rushes, like the seats delivered to the Prince de Condé at Chantilly Castle (cat. PAB 100).