The Home Beautiful: A Bureau Mazarin, 1685-1700

Bureau Mazarin
Marquetry of brass, ebony, ivory, mother-of-pearl and shell
French, 1685-1700
This and all related images from:
The Victoria & Albert Museum

This type of writing desk which features eight legs and a bank of drawers flanking an opening meant to accommodate the knees is known today as a “bureau Mazarin.”  This term became popular in the Nineteenth-Century, and we should note that these desks have no real connection to those made in the era of Louis XIV and France's chief minister at the time, Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661).  This style of desk didn’t come into fashion until the 1670s.  So, it’s curious that the Cardinal’s name began to be used to describe the fashion during the 1800s.

Many surviving bureaux Mazarins are some of the best examples of the fine craftsmanship of Seventeenth-Century French ébénistes (cabinet-makers) and several models are listed in the inventories of the palace of Versailles.  The desks often doubled as dressing tables.  

This bureau Mazarin, in marquetry of brass, ebony, ivory, mother-of pearl and clear tortoiseshell or horn, boats a central drawer and door which is flanked on either side by three drawers, supported respectively by four scroll legs terminating in a stretcher.  It was made between 1685-1700 in Paris by Vanrisamburgh, Bernard I (1655-1738).