François-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter

François-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter oversaw one of the most successful and influential furniture workshops in Paris, from 1796 to 1825. The son of Georges Jacob, an outstanding chairmaker who worked in the Louis XVI style and Directoire styles of the earlier phase of Neoclassicism and executed many royal commissions, Jacob-Desmalter, in partnership with his older brother, assumed the family workshop in 1796. Freed from the Parisian guild restrictions of the Ancien Régime, the workshop was now able to produce veneered case-pieces in addition to turned and carved seat furniture. When his brother died, Jacob-Desmalter drew his father from retirement and began to develop one of the largest furniture workshops in Napoleonic Paris.
Furniture in the Empire style produced by the firm of Jacob-Desmalter et Cie in rue Meslée, Paris, mainly employed mahogany veneers with gilt-bronze mounts. Seat furniture forms, of mahogany when they were not painted or gilded, derived inspiration from seats and thrones of Antiquity, recognizable in details from bas-reliefs and on Greek vases.