Jean-Baptiste Charles Marcel Coard was born on June 30, 1889, into a wealthy family of bankers and annuitants. Despite his father’s reluctance, he enrolled at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in its architecture section, studying there until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In 1913, while still young, he opened a decorator-upholsterer shop at 137 bis boulevard Haussmann, where he remained until 1926, advertising complete old and modern decoration. He became closely associated with the celebrated collector Jacques Doucet, for whom he designed some of his most significant furniture, and he also decorated the château belonging to Jean Cocteau’s brother near Tours, producing work of an entirely different character. He owned a fine personal collection of Far Eastern objects and worked with renowned cabinetmakers including Chanaux and Pelletier, as well as Roumy, who executed pieces of remarkable complexity on his behalf. Coard’s death is dated to 1974 by most sources, though a minority give 1975, and no exact day or place of death is documented. No catalogue raisonné has been published for his work, and attribution today rests heavily on documented provenance and the judgment of specialist dealers, particularly Galerie Marcilhac in Paris, the clearest current point of representation for his work.

Coard made only unique pieces in rare and precious materials for an elite clientele of enlightened collectors, most notably Jacques Doucet, for whom he created furniture including a celebrated canapé gondole. His Macassar ebony and mother-of-pearl domed cabinets, now held in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, exemplify his command of exotic materials. For Jean Cocteau’s brother at Champgault, he produced an eclectic mixture of styles within a single house: simple painted wood furniture alongside sculptures by Joseph Csaky purchased from the Rosenberg gallery, mirrored slats integrated into the walls, and a limed oak entrance table carved with an adze and inlaid with a black opaline plate. Furniture from his cabinetmakers’ workshops was typically stamped with his name followed by a parrot profile, his trademark. In the 1940s his style evolved to incorporate wrought iron, marble, and a more humanist sensibility recalling the work of Jean-Charles Moreux, though he continued to work primarily for private clients. His auction high is the Important Canapé Gondole from the Doucet commission, which sold for £974,500, roughly $1.4 million, at Phillips in London in April 2016, a result Phillips described as breaking his previous auction records.

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