Three Graces Chest of Drawers
The three-graces chest of drawers is a piece of furniture designed in the Rococo style that Friedrich II commissioned to furnish the “Upper Concert Room” in the New Palace in Potsdam .
The body made of oak was built in 1769 by the cabinet maker Heinrich Wilhelm Spindler the Elder. J. and richly decorated in the workshop of the ornamental sculptor Johann Melchior Kambly with tortoiseshell , ivory, mother-of-pearl and silver-plated bronze fittings. Behind the flap on the front there are two drawers with classical ornamentation. The veneered cover plate shows a shepherd's idyll popular in the Rococo with an Arcadian landscape, a monopteros and resting shepherds.
The chest of drawers got its name from the depiction of the mythological motif of the "Three Graces" on the front, which symbolize happiness, happiness and glamor. Iconographically , the representation refers to the construction of the guest castle, with which the power and strength of Prussia should be demonstrated after the successful Seven Years War . Frederick II had the central dome crowned with a group of figures of the "Three Graces" wearing the Prussian royal crown.
The chest of drawers was restored in 2006/2007 with financial support from the Cornelsen Cultural Foundation and placed in the "Green Damask Chamber" in the New Palais on January 24, 2008, the 296th birthday of Frederick II. To celebrate the 300th birthday, the Three Graces chest of drawers is to be returned to its original location in 2012 in the “Upper Concert Room”.
Web links
- Afra Schick: Johann Friedrich and Heinrich Wilhelm Spindler. The furniture orders of Frederick the Great for the New Palace . In: Frederick the Great and the Court . Contributions to the second colloquium in the series "Friedrich300" from 10./11. October 2008, ed. by Michael Kaiser and Jürgen Luh ( online publication on perspectivia.net , accessed on February 21, 2013)