Plate 46.—Cabinet belonging to Earl Granville. Boulle work of about 1740.
Plate 47.—Top of writing table in the Saloon, Roehampton House. Period of Louis XV.
Plate 48.—Encoignure, signed J. F. Oeben, in the Jones bequest, Victoria and Albert Museum.
His pupil, J. F. Oëben, became "ébéniste du roi," with a lodging in the dépendances of the Arsenal in 1754. He was marqueteur especially. Examples of his work are both at South Kensington and in the Wallace collection, and in the Gallerie d'Apollon at the Louvre is the great secretary bureau, which he was making for Louis XV. at the time of his death, in or about 1765. His widow carried on the establishment; her foreman, J. Henry Riesener, completed the unfinished work. He was also a German, born in 1735 at Gladbach, near Cologne, and coming to Paris quite young entered Oëben's atelier. On his death he was made foreman, and two years after, when he was thirty-two years of age, married his master's widow. The year following 1768 he was received as master menuisier ébéniste. In 1776 his wife died, and six years after he married again, but was divorced as soon as the new legislation allowed it. When he was married the first time he had no fortune, but fifteen years after he declared in his marriage contract that there was then owing to him by the King, the royal family, and other debtors 504,571 livres, without counting the finished objects in his warehouses, his models of bronze, his jewels, and personal effects, and several important life annuities. Between 1775 and 1785 he received from the Garde Meuble 500,000 livres, so profitable had the production of furniture of the highest class become. He was in full work at the time of the Revolution, and two of his finest pieces bear the dates 1790 and 1791 in their marquetry. When the furniture of the royal residences was sold, Riesener bought back several pieces, being aided by Charles Delacroix, the husband of his first wife's daughter, who directed the sale at Versailles. He tried to sell these again, but with poor success, and when he died, on January 8th, 1806, at the age of 71, he was again almost without fortune. His beautiful bureau secretary in the Wallace collection, made for Stanislas Leczinski, King of Poland, and dated 1769, shows him at his best. The workmanship is superb, and the design most pleasing, almost the only point to which exception may be taken being the crude green, obtained by staining, here and there. The half-length of Secrecy in the oval cartouche at the back is as good as the best Italian figure work, and was often reproduced by him. The flower panels are particularly delicate and beautiful. There is an upright secretary, also by him, in the same collection almost equally delicate and beautiful in its marquetry decorations. The diaper patterns so characteristic of this period are most beautifully executed, but are not very interesting, and the mountings take the interest rather from the marquetry, becoming more and more delicately designed and elaborately worked. The principal woods used by Riesener were tulip and rose wood, holly, maple, laburnum, purple wood, and sometimes snake wood. His contemporary, David Roentgen, used principally pear, lime, and light-coloured woods, burnt for the shades.