A spare, architectural side table by Jacques Adnet, executed in the early 1930s in the reductive moderniste idiom that defined the Compagnie des Arts Français under his direction. The table is built from two upright slab sides in dark-stained palissandre (Brazilian rosewood), French-polished to a deep mirror finish that reads almost black under direct light while retaining the warm undertone and faint ribbon-grain figure characteristic of the species. The upper edge of each slab is softened by a generous quarter-round roll-over that wraps inward to cradle the top. Spanning between the two sides, a rectangular sheet of frosted sablé glass sits flush, its etched surface diffusing light to a cool pale green where it meets the polished palissandre flanks. The whole is held in tension by two parallel chromed tubular-steel stretchers that pass cleanly through the slab sides — one immediately beneath the glass top, one set lower as a structural tie — their polished cylindrical bodies and exposed end-caps providing the only ornament.
The piece compresses the central themes of Adnet's mature 1930s production into a single object: the dialogue between rich exotic veneer and industrial polished steel, between opaque dark wood and translucent etched glass, and the use of chromed tubular metal as a finished decorative element rather than a hidden support. Where Ruhlmann's contemporaneous work celebrated palissandre figured under clear French polish and accented with ivory, Adnet — who took over the Compagnie des Arts Français in 1928 — pushed the same exotic veneer toward a darker, more architectural register, treating the wood as a polished planar surface to be set against chrome and glass rather than as a vehicle for marquetry display.
The proportions are domestic: a bout de canapé or table de salon, designed to flank a sofa or armchair, low enough to slide a tray onto and narrow enough to read as architecture rather than furniture in a tightly composed room.

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 in the 1930s and matured in the 1940s and 1950s: lacquered and dark-stained 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, Palm Beach, Florida