Bernard II van Risamburgh - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Bernard II van Risamburgh, sometimes Risen Burgh (working by c 1730 — before February 1767) was a Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

ian ébéniste
Ébéniste
Ébéniste is the French word for a cabinetmaker, whereas in French menuisier denotes a woodcarver or chairmaker. The English equivalent for "ébéniste," "ebonist," is never commonly used. Originally, an ébéniste was one who worked with ebony, a favoured luxury wood for mid-seventeenth century...

of Dutch and French extraction, one of the outstanding cabinetmakers working in the Rococo

Rococo

Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...

style. "Bernard II's furniture is brilliant in almost every respect. His carcasses are beautifully shaped, his mounts and marquetry are always in complete balance even when extremely elaborate, and there is a logic to his works that allows the eye to comprehend them effortlessly," wrote Ted Dell.

His father, Bernard I van Risamburgh (died 1738), born in Groningen

Groningen (province)

Groningen [] is the northeasternmost province of the Netherlands. In the east it borders the German state of Niedersachsen , in the south Drenthe, in the west Friesland and in the north the Wadden Sea...

, was already working in Paris in 1696, when he was living in the heart of the furniture-making district, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and was marrying a Frenchwoman. Bernard II's initials BVRB stamped into the carcasses of his furniture, as was the requirement under the regulations of the Paris guild

Guild

A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society...

, long masked his actual identity, though the quality of work bearing the stamp Burb showed that the unidentified maker was in the forefront of his field. Francis J.B. Watson observed that his full last name was a bit long to fit onto the metal maindron that punched the letters into the wood, often under the marble top, rather than, as sometimes suggested, a symptom of enforced anonymity that would redound to the advantage of the marchands-merciers
Marchand-mercier
A marchand-mercier is a French term for a type of entrepreneur working outside the guild system of craftsmen but carefully constrained by the regulations of a corporation under rules codified in 1613.. The reduplicative term literally means a merchant of merchandise, but in the 18th century took...

, the decorator-dealers for whom BVRB often worked. He is the Bernard who is occasionally mentioned in Parisian sale catalogues, which fact places him in the rarefied company of ébénistes whose names were familiar to connoisseurs, such as "Boulle

André Charles Boulle

André-Charles Boulle was the French cabinetmaker who is generally considered to be the preeminent artist in the field of marquetry, even "the most remarkable of all French cabinetmakers." His fame in marquetry led to his name being given to the fashion he perfected of inlaying brass and...

", "Cressent

Charles Cressent

Charles Cressent was a French furniture-maker, sculptor and fondeur-ciseleur of the régence style. As the second son of François Cressent, sculpteur du roi, and grandson of Charles Cressent, a furniture-maker of Amiens, who also became a sculptor, he inherited the tastes and aptitudes which were...

", Oeben

Jean-François Oeben

Jean-François Oeben, or Johann Franz Oeben was a French cabinetmaker whose career was spent in Paris. He is the maternal grandfather of the painter Eugène Delacroix....

" and "Riesener", the only other cabinetmakers ever mentioned by name.

Bernard was already received as a master in the guild by the time the sequence of surviving books begins in 1735, and he was already working for the marchands-merciers, for his stamp appears on a commode veneered with lacquer panels that was delivered by the marchand-mercier Hébert for the use of Marie Lesczinska at Fontainebleau

Château de Fontainebleau

The Palace of Fontainebleau, located 55 kilometres from the centre of Paris, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. The palace as it is today is the work of many French monarchs, building on an early 16th century structure of Francis I. The building is arranged around a series of courtyards...

in 1737, and the trade card of Simon-Philippe Poirier, perhaps the best-known of the marchands-merciers, is sometimes found affixed to furniture stamped BVRB. Furniture that once belonged to Mme de Pompadour also bears his stamp and can even be recognized in her portraits.

Watson credited Bernard with the introduction of marquetry

Marquetry

Marquetry is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs or pictures. The technique may be applied to case furniture or even seat furniture, to decorative small objects with smooth, veneerable surfaces or to freestanding pictorial panels...

of trails of leaves and flowers in end-cut quartered veneers, often of purplewood, sometimes highlighted with stained horn and ivory set in plain matched panels of veneers of tulipwood

Tulipwood

Most commonly, tulipwood is the pinkish yellowish wood yielded from the tuliptree, found on the Eastern side of North America and also in some parts of China. In the United States, it is commonly known as tulip poplar or yellow poplar, even though the tree is not related to the poplars. In fact,...

. The lacquer

Lacquer

In a general sense, lacquer is a somewhat imprecise term for a clear or coloured varnish that dries by solvent evaporation and often a curing process as well that produces a hard, durable finish, in any sheen level from ultra matte to high gloss and that can be further polished as required...

panels on many pieces of Bernard's output, such as the commode

Commode

A commode, commode with legs, or commode on legs is any of several pieces of furniture. The word commode comes from the French word for "convenient" or "suitable", which in turn comes from the Latin adjective commodus, with similar meanings.Originally, in French furniture, a commode introduced...

and two pairs of corner cabinets in the Royal Collection

Royal Collection

The Royal Collection is the art collection of the British Royal Family. It is property of the monarch as sovereign, but is held in trust for her successors and the nation. It contains over 7,000 paintings, 40,000 watercolours and drawings, and about 150,000 old master prints, as well as historical...

or the commode stamped BVRB at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

(illustration), or the uncharacteristically box-like pair of low cabinets in the goût grec
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

in the Frick Collection

Frick Collection

The Frick Collection is an art museum located in Manhattan, New York City, United States.- History :It is housed in the former Henry Clay Frick House, which was designed by Thomas Hastings and constructed in 1913-1914. John Russell Pope altered and enlarged the building in the early 1930s to adapt...

, New York will have been supplied to him by the marchand-mercier who commissioned such pieces, for expensive Japanese lacquer cabinets and screens, to be disassembled and incorporated in the furniture, were out of the reach of a craftsman acting on his own. Their market, too, was at the point of entry, Amsterdam, as trade with Japan was firmly in the hands of the Dutch VOC Opperhoofden

VOC Opperhoofden in Japan

VOC Opperhoofden in Japan were the chief traders of the Dutch East India Company in Japan during the period of the Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the Edo period.Opperhoofd is a Dutch word which literally means 'supreme head[man]'...

. An even more luxurious finish, employing Sèvres porcelain plaques, was invented by Poirier, apparently, for he maintained a monopoly of the factory's production of these;, and Bernard was the first cabinetmaker to apply them to furniture: the earliest piece bearing porcelain plaques bears plaques of Vincennes porcelain

Vincennes porcelain

The Vincennes porcelain manufactory was established in 1740 in the disused royal Château de Vincennes, in Vincennes, east of Paris, which was from the start the main market for its wares.-History:...

, before the manufactory was taken under official royal patronage.

Royal château marks and inventory numbers painted on many of his surviving works, related to corresponding entries in the daybooks of the Garde-Meuble du Roi, attest to his role in supplying ébénisterie to the Crown over more than two decades, often through intermediaries such as Thomas-Joachim Hébert

Thomas-Joachim Hébert

Thomas-Joachim Hébert was a leading Parisian marchand-mercier supplying the court of Louis XV of France.In the 1720s Hébert commissioned furniture from the workshops of André-Charles Boulle...

and Lazare Duvaux

Lazare Duvaux

Lazare Duvaux was a Parisian marchand-mercier, among the most prominent designers and purveyors of furnishings, gilt-bronze-mounted European and Chinese porcelains, Vincennes porcelain and later Sèvres porcelain and all the small, refined luxuries that appealed to Mme de Pompadour, one of his...

; he also provided furniture for the marchand-mercier Charles Darnault.

Bernard removed from his late father's workshops in the Grande Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine to the rue Saint-Nicolas by 1752; by 1765 he was living in rue Charenton. In ill health, he retired in 1764, selling his workshop to his eldest son, Bernard III, on 18 October— it was reduced to three workbenches— and died soon thereafter. Bernard III van Risamburgh continued his workshop, but without success; he was recorded as a modeller in plaster at the time of his death, in 1799/1800. Since Bernard II's gilt-bronze furniture mounts are of distinctive designs, not ordinarily seen on furniture by other ébénistes, it is often speculated what role the younger Van Risamburgh, never admitted to the guild of menuisiers-ébénistes, played in their production.

Examples of Bernard II Van Risamburgh's work can be found in all the major museums. In the United States, the major assemblages of his output are the Wrightsman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

and the J. Paul Getty Museum

J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...

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