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Lot Essay
The bookcase, with triumphal arched and trellis-fretted temple pediment, is designed in the Roman fashion, with the octagon compartments of its mosaiced glazing recalling the ornament of the Temple of the sun and poetry deity Apollo as featured in R. Wood's Ruins of the Temple at Palmyra, 1753. The pattern relates to those of a bookcase illustrated in Thomas Chippendale's, Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Directors, 1754-1762 (lst ed. pl 69 and 3rd ed. pl 95); and another illustrated in A Society of Upholsterers, Cabinet-Makers' Household Furniture in genteel Taste for the Year 1760 (pl.68). Concealed behind commode doors, veneered in tablets of fine flame-figured mahogany, are clothes-press trays and drawers. The latter's medallion-plates evoke lyric poetry; and with their embossed Apollo sunflowers wreathed in Venus pearl-strings reflect the Etruscan fashion popularised by the architect Robert Adam. The pattern, accompanied by poetic laurel-wreath rings, features in an l8th century Birmingham metal-worker's pattern book (N. Goodison, The Victoria & Albert Museum's Collection of Metal-Work Pattern books, Furniture History, 1975, fig.36 no. 3965).
The ogee bracket foot profile, red wash to the underside, treatment of the dentilled cornice and distinctive tacks for binding the bookcase with blankets and twine during shipping are all characteristics that this bookcase shares with a distinctive group of furniture executed for Dumfries House, Ayrshire. Supplied to the 5th Earl of Dumfries between 1759-63, the furniture belonging to this group at Dumfries is scantly documented, but all these characteristics are shared with the linen press supplied by Thomas Chippendale in June 1763 (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, vol. 1, p.138). The possibility that Chippendale and his Scottish partner James Rannie could also have supplied this bookcase to Lord Dumfries' neighbour, Sir James Hunter Blair for Dunskey House, Wigtownshire cannot be discounted. The fretted pediment, however, was a popular feature also adopted by Edinburgh cabinet-makers such as William Brodie, who introduced it on one of his clothes-presses made in 1786 (see F. Bamford, A Dictionary of Edinburgh Furniture Makers, Leeds, 1983, pl.27).
The ogee bracket foot profile, red wash to the underside, treatment of the dentilled cornice and distinctive tacks for binding the bookcase with blankets and twine during shipping are all characteristics that this bookcase shares with a distinctive group of furniture executed for Dumfries House, Ayrshire. Supplied to the 5th Earl of Dumfries between 1759-63, the furniture belonging to this group at Dumfries is scantly documented, but all these characteristics are shared with the linen press supplied by Thomas Chippendale in June 1763 (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, vol. 1, p.138). The possibility that Chippendale and his Scottish partner James Rannie could also have supplied this bookcase to Lord Dumfries' neighbour, Sir James Hunter Blair for Dunskey House, Wigtownshire cannot be discounted. The fretted pediment, however, was a popular feature also adopted by Edinburgh cabinet-makers such as William Brodie, who introduced it on one of his clothes-presses made in 1786 (see F. Bamford, A Dictionary of Edinburgh Furniture Makers, Leeds, 1983, pl.27).