Derignee (Devignee, Deuguée or Derique(e), Robert

London; carver and gilder (fl. 1691–1707)

Derignee supplied carved and gilt furniture for the royal palaces in the reign of William and Mary.

In 1691 he made for Kensington Palace, at a cost of £20, ‘a great wainscott frame for a glass 10 feet long and seven feet wide in her Mat.s-closett, carved with figures and gilt gold’. In 1694 Robert Deuguée is recorded supplying ‘three frames for Pictures Richly carved with flowers’. In 1699 he charged £30 for carving two sconces ‘with ffestoones, fflowers and other ornaments’ for the late Queen's Gallery, Kensington; also for Kensington, two tables, two pairs of stands and two looking-glass frames, ‘all enriched with fine carved work… For the late Queenes Bedchamber at Kensington’, costing £70. This furniture was later gilded by John Pelletier, another refugee French craftsman.

Payment was made to Derignée for carver's work for Ralph, Earl and later 1st Duke of Montagu and recorded in the notebook of the Duke's man, Marc Antoine. Payments were for £10 in November 1698, £3 in March 1699, £31 14s for carver's work in July 1699, £20 for frames in November 1701 and a further £10 for carver’s work on 24 April 1707.

Source: DEFM; Turpin, ‘The Career of Cornelius Gole: An Unrecognized Cabinetmaker in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Furniture History (2014); Murdoch, ‘Jean, René and Thomas Pelletier, a Huguenot family of carvers and gilders in England 1682-1726.’ Burlington, (1997) Part I; (1998) Part II.