A sober, architectural Art Deco sideboard by Jacques Adnet, executed in the early 1930s in the reductive moderniste idiom that defined the Compagnie des Arts Français under his direction from 1928. The case is veneered in finely figured palissandre (Brazilian rosewood), French-polished to a deep mirror finish that catches the eye with the warm crimson-mahogany undertone and pronounced ribbon-grain flammée characteristic of the species — the figure running vertically on the door fronts, drawer faces and side panels, and laid horizontally across the rectangular top to read the long axis of the piece.

The composition is a measured tripartite arrangement: a central tower of three graduated drawers flanked symmetrically by a pair of full-height cupboard doors, the whole set on a shallow shaped plinth that lifts the case minimally from the floor and runs out into a soft curved sweep at each end. The corners of the carcass are gently radiused — a quiet but important Adnet detail that softens the rectilinear geometry without breaking it — and the ends of the case are treated as continuous curved palissandre panels, returning the eye into the front. Hardware is reduced to five recessed chromed-metal pulls of an elongated lozenge or cartouche form set flush into the door and drawer fields, providing the only ornament against the otherwise unbroken veneer. A single keyhole on the left-hand door indicates an internal lock-and-key fitting.

The piece compresses the central themes of Adnet's mature 1930s production at the Compagnie des Arts Français: the celebration of a single luxurious veneer treated as an architectural surface, the radiused corner as a soft modernist signature, and the discreet use of polished chromed metal in place of carved wood or bronze ornament. Where Ruhlmann's contemporaneous grands meubles in palissandre carry ivory inlay, sabots and elaborate marquetry, Adnet pares the same exotic veneer back to pure planar geometry — anticipating, in case-piece form, the post-war French modernism he would help define through his collaborations with Hermès from 1947.

The proportions are domestic in scale and ceremonial in presence: a buffet de salle à manger designed to anchor a dining room or to serve as a console along a long wall in a salon, generous in length, low in profile, and finished on all sides for placement that allows the case to be read in the round.

Designer

Jacques Adnet (1900–1984) trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and worked initially under Maurice Dufrêne at La Maîtrise, the design studio of Galeries Lafayette. In 1928 he was appointed director of the Compagnie des Arts Français, the design house founded in 1919 by Louis Süe and André Mare, and over the following two decades he transformed it from a vehicle for ornamental art décoratif into a leading laboratory of French modernism. Adnet's signature vocabulary developed across the 1930s and matured in the 1940s and 1950s: lacquered and dark-polished hardwood case pieces, polished metal frames, frosted and mirrored glass surfaces, and — most famously — his celebrated post-war collaborations with Hermès on saddle-stitched leather-clad furniture and accessories from 1947 onward. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, contributed to major commissions including interiors at the Élysée Palace, and remains a cornerstone of the French modernist canon, alongside Jean-Michel Frank, Eileen Gray, Jean Royère and Jean Prouvé. His work is held in the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and the Mobilier National.

Provenance: Private Collection, Paris