Neoclassical Silvered Metal Shelf Unit with Glass, Attributed to Maison Jansen, circa 1940

Among the many vocabularies in which Maison Jansen worked — from English Regency to Louis XVI, from Art Déco to the spare neoclassicism of the post-war decade — it was perhaps the formal language of antiquity that the house handled with the most consistent authority. The neoclassical mode was not, for Jansen, a mere revival exercise: it was a living grammar, capable of generating new objects that carried the authority of ancient prototypes without slavishly reproducing them. The firm’s bibliothèques, étagères, and console tables in silvered or gilded metal articulate this grammar with particular clarity: they are at once furniture and architecture, domestic objects that propose the spatial relationships of a colonnade or an entablature.

This shelf unit, attributed to Maison Jansen, exemplifies the approach. The silvered metal frame — slender uprights, horizontal rails, and classical moulding profiles — creates a composition that reads as a miniature façade: a three-dimensional grid in which each shelf functions as a horizontal datum and each upright as a pilaster. The tinted glass shelves introduce a note of material modernity, their slight colour softening the austerity of the silvered metal and allowing displayed objects to float in a space that is simultaneously enclosed and transparent. At 79 cm wide and 89.5 cm tall, the unit has the authority of a principal piece.

The attribution to Maison Jansen rests on the consistency of this piece with documented Jansen production of the late 1930s and early 1940s: the quality of the metalwork, the proportions of the frame, and the combination of silvered metal with tinted glass are all characteristic of the house’s neoclassical shelving of this period. Pieces of this type were supplied to Jansen’s most prestigious clients — from private residences in Paris and New York to the great embassies and royal palaces the house served — and they retain today the cool authority that made them indispensable to the Jansen interior.