Classic style chest of drawers

construction - pine, veneer - rosewood, Karelian birch, inlays - sycamore, birch, walnut, black oak, inlays - mother-of-pearl;
87 x 127.4 x 59.4 cm; Matvvy Yakovlevich Veretennikov, St. Petersburg, 4th quarter of the 18th century.
After conservation and repairs, during which damaged elements of the structure were replaced (frames inside on the sides, central laubody, back, rim of the top, legs).
Massive, with straight sides and front, three-drawer, decorated with inlaid vedutas and inlaid and inlaid floral tendrils, supported by four granular, converging legs.
The surfaces of the top, sides and front covered with light bordering, filled with dark veneer, in which rectangular fields surrounded by ribbons, black and braided with white; in the fields vedutas of the city with numerous towers of Orthodox churches, public buildings perched on the river. Vedutas on the front and sides, placed in the lower part, on the two lower faces of the drawers and in the same place of the sides. At the top on the face of the drawers under the top and in this place on the sides, floral decoration on the vedute and in the form of floral branches.

The chest of drawers is in the style of the furniture of Matvey Yakovlevich Veretennikov (Matvey Yakovlevich Veretennikov), an ebenist from St. Petersburg, active from about 1775-1825, a subject of Prince Nikolay Ivanovich Saltykov (Nikolay Ivanovich Saltykov 1736-1816), who also made furniture commissioned by Tsar Paul I Romanov, including for the palace in Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg.
Veretennikov made furniture in the classical style (classicism, empire, biederemeier), the surfaces often inlaid and inlaid in a manner analogous to the presented chest of drawers (fields filled with verdigris framed by strips decorated with floral tendrils). He decorated the furniture with views of cities along the river; one can recognize in them St. Petersburg on the Neva River with the dome of the Cathedral of the Resurrection, the portico of Nikolaevsky Castle, Palace Square and the tall windows of the Hermitage, the gate of the Petropavlovsk Fortress, the characteristic spire on the tower of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul.