Ruhlmann Small Side Table in Macassar Ebony

About the Item

Classic French Art Deco small side table/bench by Ruhlmann, 1925, in solid macassar ebony, with new veneered inset top. This small table was used as a small bench and istogether with the original inset padded top. 14" square x 19" high. Signed on inside stretcher with branded signature. Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) The most renowned of all French designers from the first half of the 20th Century, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann was born, lived and worked his entire life in Paris. The son and grandson of industrialists, commercial building painters, he was prepared for the management of the family business and at 17 entered it as a decorative painter. Following his military service in 1900, where he met architects whose friendship had an influence on his development, he began to draw his own furniture. In 1907, at the death of his father, he took over direction of the family firm and emphasizes its aim toward decorative research. The contacts he had made while working for his father, including architect Charles Plumet, couturier Jacques Doucet, Frantz Jourdain, and Tony Selmersheim encouraged the young man’s interests and in 1911 he showed his work for the first time. In 1913 he showed at Le Salon de Automne and became recognized as France’s leading proponent of luxurious furniture. By 1919 he had founded, with Pierre Laurent, a separate full-service interior design studio. Ruhlmann was the equal of the greatest ebenistes of the 18th Century. He knew how to find and creae a new curve and when he used a curved profile or sinuous lines their rhythms are thoughtful and reasoned. He combined a taste for rare materials: violet wood, amaranth, ebony macassar, amboyna, rosewood, inserts of tortoise, shagreen, gilt bronze, silver and ivoire, all with a sense of purity. Luxurious furniture with an aristocratic elegance, the works of Ruhlmann present the characteristics of an authentic personal and complete style. Ruhlmann’s Hotel du Collectionneur at the pivotal L'Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris blended traditional classical luxury with Parisian Modernism. He designed the tearoom of the 1926 luxury oceanliner Ile-de-France, French government commissions including interiors for the Palais de l’Elysee (the French White House), numerous private residences, including the palace of the Maharaja of Indore. Ruhlmann was not a woodworker himself. His furniture was fabricated by other cabinet shops until 1923 when he created his own cabinetmaking atelier. By 1927 he employed 27 master cabinetmakers (ebenistes), four finishers, 12 upholsterers, many apprentices and 25 draftsmen.Though his career was fairly brief – he died at the age of 54 – he restored to furniture the essential virtues of the masterpiece – purity of lines, harmony of volume, liberated from any overly-decorative excess. He claimed never to have made a profit on his finely executed furniture, using the family’s traditional business to underwite the losses. Upon his death in 1933, as per his previous instructions, in-house orders were completed and the firm was then dissolved.

Creator:

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (Designer)

Dimensions:

Height: 19 in (48.26 cm)Width: 14 in (35.56 cm)Depth: 14 in (35.56 cm)

Style:

Art Deco (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Macassar

Place of Origin:

France

Period:

1920-1929

Date of Manufacture:

1925

Condition:

Refinished.

Seller Location:

Philadelphia, PA

Reference Number:

Seller: #12231stDibs: LU84377026873

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Shop All Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

Endeavoring to create exquisite work that would endure forever, designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann defined the grandeur of the French Art Deco movement of the 1920s. His luxurious storage cabinets, seating, other furniture and interiors garnered considerable popularity alongside the growth in post–World War I Paris’s population of newly wealthy residents.

The Paris-born Ruhlmann was the son of a decorating contractor, a business he took over in the early 1900s and expanded into furniture and interior design. But by the end of his career, he was best known for being a skilled ensemblier, a term for a designer who not only makes furniture and decorates spaces but rather personally crafts each and every piece required in the space, from doorknobs to sofas. This practice ensured that the space was harmonious and consistent with Ruhlmann’s vision, and it contributed to the lasting popularity of his designs.

Ruhlmann enjoyed the patronage of the newly affluent and was encouraged by the popularity of Art Deco. While the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements were early influences, he is renowned for the modernity of his Art Deco–era designs, which reflected the celebratory nature of the times, including an integration of opulent flourishes; luxurious materials like Macassar ebony, amboyna burl, ivory and precious metals; and skilled craftsmanship and construction techniques.

Renowned all over the world, Ruhlmann was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to design a cabinet in 1925, embellishing its curved door with a sophisticated floral motif by way of an ornate marriage of wood and ivory veneer. Also in 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, arguably the exhibition that introduced Art Deco on an international level, his pavilion was the most popular.

By the time the economic depression of the 1930s materialized, Ruhlmann’s exorbitantly expensive designs were no longer viable. But the majesty and elegance of the ’20s remain an important part of design history, and Ruhlmann has been described as “perhaps its finest exponent.”

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