Key facts

Product:
Side tables
Manufacturer:
Phillips
Architonic ID:
4102855
Launched:
1930
Country:
United States
Category:
Furnishings

Product description

Pair of Side Tables from the Maharaja's Palace in Indore, 1930-1933 executed by Tischlerei Johann Eckel, Berlin-Lankwitz; painted wood, alpaca and glass (2)
251/2 x 311/2 x 131/2 in.
(64.8 x 80 x 34.3 cm)

This pair of consoles, sophisticated exercises in an elegant minimalist style, featured at one end of the grand banqueting room, conceived and entirely furnished with pieces designed by Muthesius. The consoles were designed en suite, with the long dining table, seating 30, and the low cabinets also in black-finished wood and glass with crisp metal trim. The room was lit by pairs of metal torchères and by lights under glass within recesses in the dining table. The console tables are just discernable in a photograph of the banquet room illustrated in a 1979 issue of Gran Bazaar.
The dining table would be laid with the finest porcelain, with Puiforcat silver and Lalique glass. "Turbaned retainers bring the food hastily through underground corridors. After dinner, guests walk out in the gardens, too hot to enter by day, but brilliantly gay by night with floodlights set in the tree tops" ("Palace of a Raja: 1934 Style," Fortune, February 1934, p. 66).

Provenance:
Palace of the Maharaja of Indore, India
Sotheby's Monaco, May 25, 1980, lot 226
Illustrated:
L'artificio e l'Illusione in un Teatro Moderno d' Epoca - Il Modo e la Forma di Eckart Muthesius, Gran Bazaar, Italy, July-August 1979
Reto Niggl, Eckart Muthesius:
The Maharaja's Palace in Indore, Architecture and Interior, 1930, Stuttgart, 1996, p. 104