This commode is inspired by a small group 🥃of furniture recognised for the originality of its Chinese lacquer decoration. The polychrome lacquered panels with very nuanced colors of red, brown and yellow are on a gold background, instead of the more traditional black lacquered background. The subject matter is presented by large, sculpted reliefs, finely carved and enhanced with small touches of gold. The strong color contrasts which are accentuated by the reliefs, allow for the decoration to stand out very clearly.

A lacquer screen in Empress Eugenie’s Chinese Museum and Salon at the Palace of Fontainebleau illustrates what these panels must have looked like before being adapted to the shape of the furniture they came to enrich. This screen, which came from the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne (the Royal furniture store responsible for the order, upkeep, storage and repair of all the furniture, art, and other movable objects in the French royal palaces), was dismantled in order to be applied to the woodwork in the Chinese cabinet, revealing Queen Marie-Antoinette’s taste for lacquered decoration. The iconography is inspired by the literature of ancient China and in particular from a novel entitled Shui-hu-Zhuan (At the Water's Edge) which tells a vast epic. 'This adventure novel is about the meeting of outlaws, vagrants and insurgents from all walks of life; thus, over the course of encounters and chances, duels and battles, these big-hearted brigands, living from hunting and fishing, thefts and looting, form a band entrenched in the vast swamps on the edge of water - from which they launch their vigilante expeditions' (E. Julian, op. cit.). This commode has a very extensive gold background to the front and the sides. The riders, here depicted as hunters of fox, deer or falcons evoke the engraved representations from the Book of Chinese Drawings, after the originals from Persia, India, China and Japan by Jean-Antoine Fraisse and published in 1735. This publication was dedicated to the Duc de Bourbon and offered a whole repertoire of motifs taken from the collections of the Princ𝓡e de Condé.

The vast majority of furniture with this type of lacquer was produced by the cabinetmaker Jean Demoulin. The most well known are two commodes which belonged to the Duc de Choiseul at the Château de Chanteloup; one commode now kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tours (inv. 1794-2-1) (Fig.1) and the other at Château de Talcy (T n.145). These two pieces of furniture are stamped J. Demoulin, a cabinetmaker active in Paris during the mid-18th century. Other pieces of furniture with similar decoration and which bear the same stamp ဣare the commode sold Sotheby's Monaco 14 June 1997, lot 84 and a fall-front secrétaire sold at Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 25 June 1937, lot 97.

Another commode attributed to Demoulin with very similar decoration is in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (inv. 36240) a🙈nd was included in the exhibition on the secrets of French lacquer (see A. Forray-Carlier, n.33.). On this occasion, it was analyzed and X-rayed, making it possible to conclude that the decoration, of high quality, was in fact a Parisian achievement, thereby offering a fine example of the ability of Parisian lacquer painters to imitate Chinese lacquer when the latter was a scarce commodity.