Antique Mechanical Desk signed "Lesage"

Here we are at the Packenger's warehouse. I apologize for the nail guns going off, but we're doing an impromptu video on this pretty interesting desk from 1830 to 1835. Now, it is a mechanical one. You push this back and that will disengage, well, these metal bars, which now give you access to all of these drawers, which are made in solid mahogany, by the way, and that kind of gives us an idea of the level of this piece. It's not a royal-level showpiece, but it's really among the finest domestic furniture that you could have at this point in time. And it is by a maker whose work we've covered in another video, Antoine-Nicolas Lesage, who might not even be a maker, by the way, but we'll get to that. First things first, this is how this beautiful piece works. The drawer is actually a desk, the facade of which folds down, and we can see inside that there's a beautiful color contrast here, and this is burled elm, one of the indigenous lighter woods that the French began to experiment with during the 1820s, perhaps a reaction to what had been a very long use of darker Napoleonic mahogany, so a change in the ideas and aspirations of the period, an aesthetic change came with that as well, and we start to see the use of light woods throughout the 1820s, and then it seems that by the late 1820s, the early 1830s, they go back to a darker wood on the outside, but they still use the light wood on the inside. Now, another detail about this piece and the process of getting it presentable, one that really amused me and surprised me, is that this piece had been embellished, we say, that's a euphemism for some dealer at some point covered it in fake bronzes, which weren't that bad looking from a distance in a way, but there was something very much off about them, and I haven't quite gotten the new little pulls delivered from the restorer. She's having them turned, and then they'll have to be polished and stained to match this lemon wood of the exterior, but that's what there would have been originally, little pulls here, and up close, you can actually see, however, the shadow lines from the fake bronzes that were on this desk for 50 or 60 years. We removed those, and most amazingly, underneath them was this original kind of charming marquetry typical of the late Charles X period. Now, this was still showing when it had the fake bronze, and that was something that really bothered me, and it had holes that had been patched, so I had first thought that maybe the main central bronze, which would have been needed to make this look harmonious, had been lost since the piece was made, but I suppose it was just the fake bronze from the 1970s that they managed to lose. Anyway, the piece looks much better now, and when you take a look at the line of this leg with those wonderful claw feet typical of the period, it strikes me as something that might have been made by Pierre-Antoine Bélanger. We see a sort of parity between this leg and the legs that are drawn in the Bélanger album, and that leads me to this other thought that I've had that's corroborated by the few scholars that have written about Antoine-Nicolas Lesage, whose stamp is up there, I'll show it to you, is that Lesage was perhaps not even actually a furniture maker, although we give him credit for this, and the UK's National Collection Trust purportedly has a Lesage desk, but perhaps Lesage just ran a beautiful store like a marchand-mercier, these types of merchant dealers of the time, and he was buying pieces from different makers. So anyway, that's my little reflection on Lesage. The piece is a meuble de milieu in French, a middle-of-the-room piece, meaning that it's finished on all sides, and I think today you'd probably put this up against a wall, but at the time, you would actually put this sideways up against a wall with one of these, well, sort of. You'd put it up against the window in any case, and that way, the light would come in from the window and help you to be able to write during the day without having shadows everywhere, but then this side of the desk would be facing one end of the room, and this side would be facing the other rooms of a large bourgeois Parisian apartment or a very large country house, and so people would walk in from over there, they would walk in from over there, and you would appreciate all sides of the desk. Generally speaking, with these types of desks, one clue as to how they were used is that one side will be seriously sun-bleached. Somehow that's not the case with this piece, but that's because of how they were placed in the room with the light coming in to éclairer your letter. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to take a look at this while it's here and out because it might get directly shipped to a customer, and so I won't be able to see it. I don't know, he's measuring, so whenever this video comes out, it might actually still be available, but I wanted to get the video out of the way in case I don't have a chance to do so again, and another thing I was gonna show you guys is that the key to the piece is actually kind of interesting. It's the exact type of key that you really want to pray never to lose because they're very hard to remake. It's a key, the teeth of which are poking out of the top of the column, really complicated little key that works this one lock that locks the entire desk, all of the drawers, thanks to the mechanism in the back, and at some point, I took some B-roll of working on this desk, of taking out the writing shelf to clean it. Of course, I had a French polisher clean up the French polish, but before that aesthetic conservational work, I took the piece apart, and so I'll try to show you some of those video clips of the way this mechanism works in the back, but essentially, there are steel levers back there that are pushed by the back of this cover, and which then release clips on the back of all of the drawers, allowing you to open them. So anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed taking a little closer look at this interesting, unusual piece of furniture, really emblematic of the late Charles X period. It's Louis Philippe and it's dating, but it's still really anchored in what we might call the decorative arts idea of the Charles X period with these inlays, the two tones of color, and if you get anything out of these videos, please do subscribe to the channel. It would be much appreciated. Thank you.