La Dauphine

No. 004

Art Déco Console. c. 1938

One for One | Status: Available in Chicago

La Dauphine is the small piece, the one that did the daily work. A table d'appoint in walnut and ebonized wood — two-toned in the late Art Deco vocabulary, with curved cabriole legs softening the high geometry of the period — c. 1938, from the working register of Parisian furniture. Modest in scale, made in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine workshops where French furniture has been made for four hundred years. Honest, unrestored. Authenticity assessed.

French atelier production, c. 1938
La Dauphine belongs to the late Art Deco populaire: the furniture produced in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine workshops for the prosperous middle class, not the grands ébénistes of the 8th arrondissement. The two-tone combination of walnut veneer and ebonized wood is the period's democratized luxury, a chromatic contrast that referenced lacquer and exotic materials without the cost. The cabriole legs are the concession to an earlier French sensibility, curved where the rest of the period was straight, which places this piece at the end of the Deco arc, c. 1938, when the style was loosening before the war closed everything down.
Private Home of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, France. Acquired 2026.
Authenticity professionally assessed.
Presque Studio, Chicago, USA
29¼ × 15 × 24¾ (inch)

Close-up of a wooden surface with visible wood grain patterns.

Walnut Burl Veneer

Close-up of dark brown wooden surface showing wood grain and knots.

Ebonized wood

Close-up of a polished, reddish-brown wood surface with natural grain patterns.

Solid wood structure

Interior of a room with blue curtains, a fireplace, a small black writing desk, a chair, and decorative items on shelves and mantle.

How we authenticate >

A 3D wireframe model of an art deco style rectangular table with four curved legs and additional features underneath.

Studio imagery rendered from photographs of the original piece.

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This furniture goes well with…

The book.

Mémoires d'un Tricheur- Sacha Guitry (1935)

Mémoires d'un Tricheur is Sacha Guitry's 1935 autobiographical novel of a Parisian raconteur. The autobiography of a card cheat and storyteller looking back across his life from a café table. Guitry wrote it as a single sustained voice, half memoir and half confession, in the casual conversational French of someone telling stories to friends across a long evening. The book is the kind that gets quoted from memory in the right kind of conversation, often by hosts who want to sound clever without sounding studied.

The record.

J’ai Deux Amours - Josephine Baker (1930)

J'ai Deux Amours is the song Joséphine Baker recorded in Paris in 1930, written for her by Vincent Scotto and Géo Koger, who built it around her actual circumstance: an American performer who had become so identified with Paris that she could no longer name a single home. The song became her signature, played on radio across France through the 1930s, and remained the song she opened her shows with for the next forty years. Baker herself was the most famous Black performer in Europe between the wars, the muse of Le Corbusier and Hemingway, and a member of the French Resistance during the war. The song is short (just 3 minutes), and works best played at the volume where it half-disappears into a room of people talking, the way it would have at the salon parties she sometimes attended.

The pour.

Dubonnet on the rocks - Paris (1864)

Dubonnet is a French quinquina, a wine-based aperitif fortified with quinine, herbs, and spices, made since 1846 in Paris. It became the dominant Parisian apéritif of the 1920s and 1930s, drunk slowly on terraces and in bourgeois apartments across the long afternoon, where the same glass could last two or three hours without ending the conversation. Cassandre's 1932 advertising posters - Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet, three frames showing a man drinking and the typography completing itself - became one of the canonical works of Art Deco graphic design, now held at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The drink and its poster were already part of Parisian visual culture by the time Le Monceau was made.

The art.

Portrait of Tadeusz Łempicki - Tamra de Lempicka (1928)

Portrait of Tadeusz Łempicki is the unfinished portrait Tamara de Lempicka painted of her first husband in 1928, during the year their marriage ended. Lempicka was the dominant portraitist of Parisian Art Deco; her clients were the high-bourgeois women and men of the 16th and 8th arrondissements, painted in the metallic palette and elongated figures that became the period's visual signature. The painting is one of the few works of the period that depicts a man in a chair in the formal seated pose Le Monceau's fauteuils club were made for.