MID-18TH CENTURY

The present glossy golden-flowered cabinet, with its trompe l'oeil lacquer japanning, is conceived in the George II 'Modern' style promoted by Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director of 1754 and relates to various designs for 'China Shelves' illustrated in Chippendale’s third edition of 1762, pl. CXLII and CXLIII. These cabinets served primarily for the display of porcelain tea-services in reception dressing-rooms that were fashionably hung in Chinese paper 'à la Français'. Called 'shelves for china', they supplanted the Chinese lacquered tray-on-stand, such as that acquired by the East India Company Director Sir Robert Child and inventoried many years later as an 'India Tea Table' in the floral 'Blue India Paper Dressing Room' at Osterley Park, Middlesex (see M. Tomlin, 'The 1782 Inventory of Osterley Park', Furniture History, 1986 p.114). While the present cabinet is designed with tray-railed shelves for the display of porcelain, additional vases would have furnished the floor beneath its table-frame. A pair of prototype lacquer-panelled and japanned china-shelved night-tables was provided about 1750 by the Mayfair cabinet-makers William and John Linnell and designed en suite with their temple-canopied bed, conceived in Chinese 'wedding kiosk' fashion for Badminton House, Gloucestershire (H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, figs. 218 and 1). The present china-shelves further relate to the lacquer-panelled shelves designed by the workshop for the apartment created by the architect James Paine for Lady Curzon at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire. With the Etruscan-black colouring and buffet-like display of forty four pieces of china, Lady Curzon's shelves continued in fashionable service in Kedleston's 'à la Français' State Dressing Room created by the architect Robert Adam (d. 1792) (Hayward, ibid., fig. 219; and the 1804 Kedleston Inventory in the possession of The National Trust). A closely related cabinet with pagoda top was sold Dealing in Excellence: A Celebration of Hotspur and Jeremy, Christie’s, London, 20 November 2008, lot 140 (£133,250 including premium).