37. GOTTLIEB IWERSSON (master and court shatullmaker in Stockholm 1778-1813, castle carpenter circa 1784), writing desk, high quality late Gustavian Stockholm work, signed in ink “Gottlieb Iwersson Kongl: Slots Snickare ock Schattullmakare i Stockholm 1794".

Veneered and solid mahogany, brass fittings, top edge with tooth cut and beaded, contoured corner posts, three boxes inlaid with brass mouldings, upper box with leather-clad desk and drawer interior, box wood in one, construction with fillings between drawers, openwork corner brackets, carrara marble slab, height 85, 105 x 53 cm

PROVENANCE: Bukowski Auktioner, Internationale höstauktionen, 1994, no 390

Gottlieb Iwersson was born on 9 June 1750 in Malmö and was the son of carpenter and alderman Olof Iwersson and Greta Pehrsdottter. At the age of 16, Iwersson started as a carpenter's apprentice with his father and in 1769 he was discharged as a journeyman. The conditions for becoming a champion in Malmö proved to be a long time and Iwersson therefore applied to Stockholm and worked as a scout with Nils Dahlin and Petter Liunggren. Iwersson's long training from master to master, no less than nine years, was far from uncommon in Stockholm in the latter half of the 18th century. For it was part of the carpenters' office's policy at this time to regulate the influx of new masters in order to prevent, as far as possible, troublesome competition. This circumstance caused several carpenters in impatient anticipation to use the opportunity to bypass office by seeking mastership as ebenists under the court of chancery. Another possibility was to seek patronage from the king through certain channels and be commissioned to make a piece of furniture for him. This approach had been taken advantage of by the journeymen and future court chattels Lorentz Nordin, Samuel Pasch and Georg Haupt, who in this way had more or less forced themselves the mastership of the chancery.

Iwersson directly requested Gustav III to make a master's test, an order for a secretary, whose drawing dated 21 March 1778 was approved by the king. The secretariat, a cabinet with writing flap “en abattant” for Gustav III, has clear inspiration from Georg Haupt's 1774 executed mineral cabinet for the Prince of Condé. However, the intarsia work with the national coat of arms on the flap and mind images for art and science on the underlying box shows a remarkable proficiency in this technique, in which Haupt was the undisputed master. On 21 May 1778, Iwersson was admitted as a master of the office and the following year he opened his own workshop.

As a master of office, Iwersson came to occupy a leading position in his profession, highlighted by his appointment around 1784 as a royal carpenter and scatullmaker. His workshop, when it was at its largest in the 1790s, employed six to nine gesellers, a comparatively high number. The activities included not only the production of furniture, but also the construction of fixed room furnishings, which fell within the carpenters' area of expertise, such as inlaying or repairing parquet floors.

Until the mid-1780s, Iwersson began to apply the new furniture style most closely following English models, introduced at the beginning of the decade by, for example, the Ebenists Anders Scherling and Lars Almgren in Stockholm, commonly known as the late Gustavian style. It did not appear like the previous one with inlays of various woods and decorative metal fittings, but with smooth mahogany surfaces and narrow brass moldings. However, Iwersson continued for a limited period the production of furniture in the traditional Haupt style. In the last decade of the 18th century and the first of the 19th century, his furniture is consistently of dark mahogany, often embellished with cannelled pilasters with gilded capitals as well as with ornamentally designed mouldings of metal in geometric figures, reminiscent of French directorie-style furniture.