This ormolu-mounted desk, with its ribbon-tied medallions framed by inlaid and Grecian-fretted ribbons, is designed in the robust Louis XVI manner introduced to the Berlin court by Johann Gottlob Fiedler (d.1797) following his appointment in the late 1770s as Hoftischler or cabinet-maker to Friederich Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia (d.1797), who succeeded as King Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1786. Its medallion-centred and lozenge-trellised cylindre, its fretted apron and its pearl-ringed and fluted-columnar legs terminating in Roman acanthus-bud feet echo the principle elements of his celebrated commodes of the mid 1780s. The latter include a commode in the Kopenick Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, another in the Wallace Collection, London, one formerly in the Schlossmuseum, Berlin and one by Catherine, Countess of Clanwilliam, sold in these Rooms, 13 June 1991, lot 90. The desk's elegant geometric inlay of flowered medallion in trellised parquetry and beribboned borders would have harmonised with contemporary taste for elaborately inlaid floors in cabinet-rooms or studies, and corresponds, in particular, to the parquetry laid in King Friederich Wilhelm II's apartment at Berlin Castle in the mid 1780s (see H. Kier, Schmuckfussboden in Renaissance und Barock, 1990, fig. 174)
Henrietta Adela Hope (d.1913), was the daughter of Henry Thomas Hope (d.1862), who around 1850 employed the French architect P.-C. Dusillion to design a French-style house in Duchess Street, London. She married Henry Pelham Alexander Clinton, 6th Duke of Newcastle (d.1879), and her Surrey house, the Deepdene, was sold by her second son Lord Henry Francis Pelham-Clinton-Hope in 1917