Lot Essay
This wardrobe is decorated with acanthus-scrolled arabesques framing four landscape vignettes painted in the chinoiserie manner of John Stalker and George Parker's Treatise of Japanning, 1688. One depicts the sporting and wrestling youths of antiquity, another Chinese figures in a garden, while two others portray peasants carousing or skittle-playing. The mixture of European scenes in such settings recalls the case of a French harpsichord manufactured by Jean-Antoine Vaudry in 1681 and painted with scenes adapted from Jacques Stella's engravings published in 1667 (J. Hardy, 'Western Japanning', Colloquies on Art and Architecture in Asia, no. 11, 1981, pp. 159-173 and pl. 4, fig. a)