Small Faux-Bamboo Bronze Coffee Table with Smoked Glass Shelf by Maison Baguès, French Work, Circa 1940

This charming small coffee table in patinated bronze is executed in the faux-bamboo manner, one of the most beloved decorative conceits of the French applied arts tradition. The sinuous bronze tubes, carefully wrought to simulate the characteristic nodes and internodes of natural bamboo, support a shelf of smoked glass whose dark, translucent quality provides a sophisticated chromatic contrast with the warm bronze. The whole is animated by a spirit of refined playfulness entirely characteristic of the Maison Baguès's incomparable decorative vocabulary.

Maison Baguès, founded in 1840 on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, was one of the most celebrated French houses for decorative bronze and brass objects, renowned above all for its virtuosic manipulation of naturalist motifs — branches, leaves, flowers, birds and notably bamboo — rendered in exquisitely worked metal. The faux-bamboo technique, imitating the organic irregularity of natural bamboo in cast or wrought bronze, was a house speciality, producing pieces that combined a witty, chinoiserie-inflected exoticism with the highest standards of Parisian metalwork. During the 1930s and 1940s, Baguès faux-bamboo bronzes were among the most coveted objects in the grand Parisian interior.

This coffee table would be an enchanting addition to any interior, from the grandly classical to the discreetly eclectic. Its faux-bamboo structure brings a note of naturalist fantasy to the sitting room or boudoir, while the smoked glass shelf provides a practical surface for the display of objects or the service of drinks. A jewel of French decorative bronzework, bearing all the hallmarks of the Maison Baguès's great tradition.