Lot Essay
The marquetry and ormolu-enriched bookcase is designed in the early nineteenth century French antique or Pompeian manner. Its trellis-grilled doors are flanked by paired columns that frame triumphal-arched panels inlaid with dancing nymphs celebrating the vintage. These thyrsae-bearing bacchantes, displayed on palm-flowered brackets, are engraved after the Etruscan style; and, like the figurative decoration introduced to Napoleon's banqueting room at Malmaison in 1800, they derive from wall paintings at Herculaneum that were first reproduced in the 1757 volume of Le Antichita di Ercolano Esposte, 1755-92, Naples. The cabinet's 'Grecian' architecture and figurative inlay reflects the style associated with the cabinet-maker George Bullock (d. 1818) of Tenterden Street (see H. Blairman & Sons, George Bullock, Cabinet-Maker, 1988). Related brass-inlaid figures feature on Bullock's vase-capped 'portfolio' pedestals illustrated in Rudolph Ackermann's The Repository of Arts, 1816, as well as on a rosewood 'Cabinet Bookcase' illustrated by Ackermann in 1823 (see P. Agius, ed., Ackermann's Regency Furniture and Interiors, 1984, pls. 85 and 131).