Golden hour by Brian

What the Met keeps of A. Damon & Cie, a Paris furniture workshop at 74 Faubourg Saint-Antoine: seven sheets of pen, ink and wash. A chair, an armchair, a stool, a table, a commode, a cabinet, a mantelpiece. Consecutive accession numbers, 62.600.615 to 621, all accessioned in 1962. Each record in the catalogue stands alone and none mentions the others, so I put all seven on one page.

Four of them still carry a number from the workshop's register: 1111 for the chair, 3619 for the armchair, 4206 for the stool, 6123 for the table. If that was one running series, it went into the thousands. Four numbers is what survived.

And printed in light blue on the mat under the chair: TOUT DESSIN NON RENDU SERA FACTURÉ. Every drawing not returned will be invoiced. Someone at that address got tired of losing sheets to clients who kept them.

The chair is 14 by 12 centimetres and its seat is mauve. I can't tell you whether anyone ever sat in it. I can tell you the drawing is still here and the workshop isn't.

All seven are public domain. Records: the chair, and the rest under the same credit line, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, 1962.