We would like to share the news that Carlton Hobbs LLC has been awarded the 2009 Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair Patron’s Award for the Finest Work of Art for our Metamorphic Secretaire à Abattant Within a Cork Ruinwork Case, issued by Sir Timothy Clifford, former director of the National Gallery of Scotland. We were thrilled to have been invited to exhibit at the fair, and are proud to share such a stunning, historically significant work!

THE SECRETAIRE:

The secretaire is a metamorphic masterpiece, where a sleek piece of furniture is disguised behind a singularly decorative façade modeled as a ruin. A mechanism must be triggered in order to transform the piece and reveal the secretaire à abattant of polished mahogany with finely cast gilt-brass mounts beneath, lending it to a rare group of prized pieces of mechanical furniture especially popular in the royal or imperial courts of Europe. Such complex mechanical pieces were almost exclusively made by German craftsmen. The exterior of the present cabinet is covered completely in cork designed to resemble an architectural ruin. Because of its coloration and porous qualities, cork is the ideal material for recreating the crumbling and deteriorating stone structures of the ancient world, and in the 18th century the art of modeling in cork, or phelloplastics, was born.

Although the present secretaire is thought to be the only existing example of a piece of furniture veneered in cork, it is consonant with the taste for rooms designed as architectural landscapes, often in ruin, referred to as “fictive architecture” or “l’architeture au pinceau” (architecture with the brush), where the painted simulation of columns, arches, etc. cloak the walls and ceilings. The fashion for ruin rooms corresponds with the height of the Grand Tour tradition, and in the mid-1700s a number of architects including William Chambers, Germain Boffrand, and Robert Adam began to create interior and outdoor masterpieces reflecting the romance of ancient Rome. The appeal of these rooms arises from the challenge they pose one’s sense of reality by placing the spectator in a bucolic, romanticized atmosphere and evoking from him a feeling of total transportation. The present secretaire corresponds closely to this style of interior and would have fitted harmoniously into a room of this type.