Pair of Corner Cupboards

While extremely decorative, this pair of triangular corner cupboards contains little space for storage. The cupboards are only two feet wide and too shallow to function as pedestals for any but small sculptures. In addition, if they are not screwed to the wall, they will topple over when their heavy, four-foot-high doors are opened.Produced around 1765, these cupboards' straight lines and the forms of the gilt-bronze mounts exemplify the earliest phase of the Neoclassical style. A major component of this style was the use of large-scale motifs drawn from classical antiquity: rosettes, laurel garlands, a scrolling frieze, and column-like ridges down each side. This pair and another pair, now missing, furnished a small mezzanine apartment in Versailles.