AN ANGLO-INDIAN IVORY TABLE BUREAU-CABINET

LATE 18TH CENTURY, VIZAGAPATAM

細節

AN ANGLO-INDIAN IVORY TABLE BUREAU-CABINET
Late 18th Century, Vizagapatam
Decorated overall with trailing flowers and foliage borders, the broken moulded cornice with two panels, each with a stylised tiger, above a long frieze drawer with pavillions and trees, the panel above four short drawers with conforming panels, flanked on each side by a door, the panel with a tall tree in front of two pavilions, enclosing two pigeon-holes and three short drawers, the bureau-section with a hinged slope enclosing a fitted interior with nine variously-sized small drawers and three pigeon-holes, the front of the slope with pavillions interspersed with trees, above a conforming-panelled drawer, the sides with conforming panels, on shaped bracket feet, minor restorations, the long drawers in the bureau section, previously fitted
37 in. (94 cm.) high; 24 in. (61.5 cm.) wide; 11 in. (28 cm.) deep

拍品專文

This writing and dressing-box/jewel case is embellished with Calcutta vignettes and conceived as a pedimented bureau-cabinet in the mid-18th Century Dutch manner. It belongs to a group of exotic ivory-veneered furniture that was executed under the direction of the Dutch and English East India Companies at Vizagapatam, Andhra State on the Coromandel Coast for retail in Madras and Calcutta (A.K.H. Jaffer, 'The Furniture Trade in Early Colonial India', Oriental Art, vol. XVI, no 1, Spring 1995, p. 12-13). The fall of a closely related 'bureau', engraved with a view of Lowther Castle taken from Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britanicus, London, 1717, formerly in the collection of J. W. Janssens (govenor-general in 1811) is now in the Rijksmuseum (J. Veenendaal, Furniture from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India, The Hague, 1985, p. 159).
Another closely related bureau was sold anonymously, Christie's New York, 30 January 1993, lot 136.