I've tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to discover if Andre Groult’s most famous furniture design, the Anthropomorphic Dresser from 1925, was the inspiration for the sentient wardrobe character from Disney's 1991 Beauty and the Beast. I swear it totally is. The first time I saw the dresser was at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, circa 2007 when I lived there as a student. I was certain that some lucky Disney illustrator had stood where I was standing and thought to herself, Eureka!
The dresser, or “Chiffonnier Antrophomorphe,” was, and is, one of the most remarkable objects I will ever see. Picture a narrow-ish chest of drawers. Picture a narrow-ish chest of drawers with no right angles. Picture a narrow-ish chest of drawers with no right angles and a curvilinear outline that looks like a voluptuous hourglass-shaped body. Oval keyhole covers in the top drawers, crafted from ivory, look like eyes; rounded feet, also ivory, look like cute little cat paws. Groult must have been on mushrooms, or maybe absinthe, which I guess was probably the mushrooms of the 1920s, when he first sketched the design for this thing. I mean this dresser is literally covered in sharkskin. Vegans and vegetarians, myself included, would be horrified.
But looking at any piece of furniture he designed kind of makes me feel this really funky sense of uncertainty about whether what I’m looking at is an object or a living being. Even the slightly less biomorphic stuff—-a sweet side table with curvy legs, a welcoming armchair with sloping shoulders—-feel somehow, I don’t know, human. Surely the Disney illustrator, who I’m still convinced was inspired by Groult’s dresser, felt this way too.
-Eugenie Dalland