Lot Essay
The wardrobe is likely to have been commissioned at the time of Mary Frances Grosvenor's marriage in 1842 to Thomas, 6th Earl of Macclesfield. Amongst the principal architects promoting a 'revived domestic gothic' or antiquarian furnishings was Anthony Salvin (d.1881), who fused Tudor-Elizabethan with Jacobean and Stuart elements in furniture designed in the late 1820s for Mamhead, Devon. The library designed for John, Earl of Erne by Edward Blore at Crom Castle, Ireland, in the mid-1840s, combines Solomonic columns with applied shaped panels in a very similar style (H. Montgomery Massingberd and C.S. Sykes, Great Houses of Ireland, London, 1999, pp. 62-3). Apart from Salvin and Blore, a third early Victorian exponent of this antiquarian idiom was William Burn (1789-1870) who was employed at Shirburn in 1863 to build the stables (H. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, London, 3rd. ed., 1995, p. 191).