Neoclassical Brass Coffee Table with White Marble Top, Maison Jansen, France, circa 1940

This neoclassical coffee table by Maison Jansen represents the house’s most assured design mode — the rigorous, elegant vocabulary of classical antiquity translated through the sensibility of the foremost Parisian atelier of the twentieth century. The table is built on four tapered brass legs of refined proportions, connected at the base by a stylised horizontal stretcher whose undulating profile introduces a note of ornamental softness into the otherwise rectilinear composition.

The marble top is a rectangle of white veined stone — most likely Carrara or a comparable fine Italian marble — whose cool, luminous surface provides the perfect material contrast to the warmth of the gilded brass below. The veining of the marble gives the surface a unique character: the soft grey tracery within the white ground creates an effect of depth and movement. The top rests within a narrow brass frame that aligns precisely with the stone’s edge, giving the junction between the two materials a clean and precise finish.

Maison Jansen, the legendary Paris house founded in 1880, was the greatest decorating firm of the modern era, counting among its clients the royal families of Europe, the White House, and the Shah of Iran. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the house produced a range of brass and marble coffee tables that became emblematic of its style — pieces in which the neoclassical tradition was subjected to a rigorous process of simplification and refinement, producing furniture of enduring relevance.

Measuring 95 by 47 centimetres with a height of 43.5 centimetres, this table is perfectly proportioned for a salon or drawing room. The combination of white marble and polished brass has lost none of its authority over the decades: as fresh and commanding in a contemporary interior as it was on its creation, it remains one of the most desirable expressions of the Jansen sensibility.