CIRCA 1735

The handsome bureau of fine-figured and rose-coloured Asian hardwood or padouk, is conceived in the George II 'modern' fashion featured in B. Langley's, City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740. Such Chinese padouk furnishings were highly prized in the dressing and reception rooms of fashionable bedroom apartments, which were decorated with Chinese silks and papers as well as with china-equipped tea-tables. It is likely to have been accompanied by a pier-glass in furnishing a window-pier, with its fall-front concealing a well fitted 'prospect', whose Roman triumphal-arch 'tabernacle' compartment is flanked by antique-fluted Doric pilasters. Its façade is embellished in the French 'pictuesque' manner with acanthus-wrapped and trellis-fretted cartouches or engraved eschutcheons, whose central lozenged compartments are garlanded with fruit-and-flowers, while the reed-scrolled handles display the shell-badge of the nature-deity Venus. It is possible that the 'prospect' drawers were once equipped with a silver toilet service, as the 'JD' maker's mark has also been recorded on a dressing-box dated to the mid-1730s (A. Grimwade, London Goldsmiths 1697-1937: Their Marks & Lives, London, 1982, no. 3632). A closely related handle pattern can also be found in an 18th century Birmingham brass-maker's catalogue (T. R. Crom, An Eighteenth Century English Brass Hardware Catalogue, Florida, 1994, p. 57. no. 386).