The gallery is pleased to announce the sale of a second desk to one of the nation’s greatest general art museums. This unique secretary is signed in several places by Angelo Barbetti (1803-1880), and dated 1851. Barbetti pieces from the 1851 World’s Fair are conserved in London’s V&A museum, while frames by the master adorn the walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, and his work can also includes important projects of interior architecture in Gilded Age Newport mansions. The crest of the princely Russian Troubetzkoy family presides over this desk, consistent with research claiming Barbetti worked for prominent Russians, and adding another layer of history to the work.
Barbetti desk, an early and extremely fine work of Italian Renaissance Revival, on display in Gallery 126.