Commode à vantaux ca. 1775-79 with later alterations David Roentgen German This important Roentgen commode, as well as another example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (W 51-1948), both have an illustrious provenance. Their histories may have begun in the royal apartments at Versailles. During the nineteenth century this example now at the Metropolitan Museum belonged to Baron Mayer de Rothschild, a member of the distinguished banking and art-collecting family, who kept it at Mentmore Towers, his palatial and splendidly appointed residence in Buckinghamshire. In 1964 it went under the hammer in London and fetched the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of furniture, attracting tremendous media attention.1The New York and London commodes are related closely to each other and to the latter’s nearly identical counterpart at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, with which it once formed a pair in the collection of the grand duke of Sachsen-Weimar.2 All three pi