CIRCA 1710

This bureau-cabinet, with its triumphal-arched mirrors and stepped pediment, is designed in the French/antique fashion popularised around 1700 by the engraved works of the French architect, Daniel Marot (d. 1752). Its ornament of golden Chinese garden vignettes, on a richly varnished and red-japanned ground, had been popularised as fashionable for 'Chinese' or 'India' style bedroom-apartments following J. Stalker and G. Parker's publication of A Treatise on Japaning and Varnishing, Oxford, 1688. Such furniture was a speciality of the St. Paul's Church Yard cabinet-makers such as John Belchier (d. 1753), whose label has been recorded on a similarly decorated bureau dating from the 1730s (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Leeds, 1996, fig. 69). The London cabinet-makers’ trade in such japanned wares was much boosted by the great difficulties in trade with China, making the acquisition of authentic lacquer extremely difficult at this date, whilst trade with Japan was impossible as they had largely closed their borders to the west. 

The maker of the present cabinet is also likely to have executed a further red-japanned bureau-cabinet acquired by William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (d. 1925), as this shares the same pediment and similar Chinese-fretted stand and bulbous vase feet (A. C. Tait, 'Furniture at the Lady Lever Art Gallery', Apollo, October 1947, fig. 7). Interestingly, the Neame cabinet is marked ‘B’ to the reverse offering the tantalising possibility that it could have once formed one of a pair. A second red-japanned bureau-cabinet, acquired by Lord Leverhulme in 1923, also shares the same pattern of pediment and fretted stand, but has brackets in place of turned feet (sold from The Leverhulme Collection, Thornton Manor, Sotheby’s house sale, 26 June 2001, lot 221, £190,500). A further green Japanned bureau bookcase, again almost certainly originating from the same workshop, was sold Christie’s, London, 22 April 2004, lot 60 (£106,050).