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This new volume in the Frick Diptych series features an essay by Frick curator Marie-Laure Buku Pongo paired with a contribution by world-renowned conductor and keyboardist William Christie.
These two cabinets, stamped BVRB, may well be the last pieces of furniture made by the celebrated Parisian cabinetmaker Bernard van Risenburgh II just before he retired in 1764 and sold his workshop to his son, Bernard van Risenburgh III, who finished them. The cabinets feature panels of black-and-gold Japanese lacquer of exceptionally high quality taken from a seventeenth-century Japanese cabinet, chest, or screen. Beginning in the 1730s, the older van Risenburgh worked almost exclusively with the influential marchands-merciers or merchants of luxury goods, who provided the cabinetmaker with the rare and costly Oriental lacquers and sometimes with the design for the furniture on which to mount them.
Marie-Laure Buku Pongo is assistant curator of Decorative Arts, The Frick Collection, New York.
William Christie is a conductor and harpsichordist. A specialist in the baroque and classical repertoire he is the founder of the ensemble Les Arts Florissants.