CIRCA 1870, ATTRIBUTED TO HOLLAND & SONS

The oak wardrobe/clothes press, with Elizabethan linen-folds and florid gothic ornament, derives from the Victorian New Palace of Westminster style invented in the 1840s by A.W.N. Pugin (d. 1856), architect and author of Gothic Furniture in the style of the 15th century, 1835. A related Westminster Palace bookcase and cabinet, dated to the early 1850s, are illustrated in M.H. Port's, The Houses of Parliament, London, 1976 (figs. 189 and 193); while a related clothes-press design featured in the 1852 Estimate Book (Westminster Library) of Messrs Gillow, whose tender for furnishing the House of Commons had been accepted in the previous year. However, The House of Lords tender was granted in 1856 to the Mount Street firm of Messrs Holland & Son, who had been involved in the Palace furnishings since the early 1830s. The present wardrobe appears to be the one featured in 1920 in the 1st Duke of Westminster's Tower Bedroom at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, which was fitted up in the 1870s by Messrs Holland & Sons (see 'Eaton Hall, Cheshire', Country Life, XLVII, 1920; and the bedroom photograph illustrated in Christie's Woburn sale catalogue, September 2004, p. 440).