The architecture of this George II triumphal-arched cabinet, with its garlanded cornice, pilasters enriched with 'antique boy heads' festooned with Roman acanthus, and its voluted and acanthus-wrapped trusses perched on recessed cabinets, relates to a 'medal-case' pattern published in Thomas Langley's, City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740 (pl. CLIV). Its pediment corresponds to his 'Truscan Book Case' pattern (pl. CLVII), and its Grecian ribbon-fret featured amongst his 'Decorations for Cabinet-works' (pl. XCVIII). Langley (d. 1751), described as an 'eminent Surveyor and Architect', contributed to the contemporary interest in the Roman or Vitruvian style of architecture promoted by the 16th Century architect Andrea Palladio, and was the author of Five Orders of Architecture, 1727. A more richly-carved cabinet of this form, likewise glazed in the manner of a Palladian or Venetian window, was illustrated in P. Macquoid, History of English Furniture, The Age of Mahogany, 1906, fig. 98.

There is a further related cabinet in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, illustrated in R. Edwards and P. Macquoid, The Dictionary of English Furniture, London, rev. ed., 1954, vol. I, p. 181, fig. 33. Another similar cabinet was in the collection of the Dukes of Buckingham at Stowe House, Buckingham, and was bought at the 1848 Christie's sale by Edward Manson, the younger partner of George Christie (d. 1887) who was the principal auctioneer at the Stowe sale (illustrated in P. Whitfield, 'Bankruptcy and Sale at Stowe: 1848', Apollo, June 1973, p. 604, fig. 16).