Lot Essay
This exotic jewel-casket, with fretted brass enrichments and "antique" columns, incorporates one slide concealing a compartment within its hollow-plinthed lid and another concealing a drawer in the right side; while its lid's interior was originally fitted with a dressing-mirror. Its surface of black lacquer is richly embellished with silvery bas-relief vignettes depicting lakeside gardens and pavilions framed by columns at the canted corners. Such "juwelcantoorkens" were commissioned by the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century; and one such luxurious casket, with beribboned key, features amongst porcelain and gold in a "vanitas" painting of a silk-hung cabinet executed at the court of Louis XIV by Simon Bernard de Saint-Andre (d.1677) (see Thornton, P., Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, London, 1978, fig. 239). At Longford Castle, Wiltshire, there is a similar casket, which has been displayed since the mid-18th century on a gilt-wood stand (see Edwards, R., Dictionary of English Furniture, vol. 1, 1954, p.111, fig. 26). A rare striking feature of the cabinet is its almost exclusive use of silver rather than gold lacquer for the design. Few examples in this style of export lacquer are known, another is the Chatsworth chest.