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Lot Essay
This cabinet, with its galleried top for china-display and its Chinese fan-like medallion flowered with shrubs in the 'Chinese' manner, was intended for the dressing-room of a fashionable 1770's apartment. The floral marquetry pattern relates to Chinese taffetas painted with meandering shrubs such that feature in an apartment at Osterley Park that was furnished in 1779 by the Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (d.1796). The large acanthus-wrapped cartouche enclosing flowering vines and the use of exotic woods such as padouk appears on a group of commodes attributed to Linnell and discussed by Lucy Wood in her Catalogue of Commodes, London, 1994, no.8, pp.98-105. Interestingly, the stylized manner of inlay to the stand recalls a Continental influence of makers such as George Haupt or Christopher Furlogh, both of whom were under the employ of Linnell in the late 1760's.
This cabinet once belonged to the collector and connoisseur Frank Green. The cabinet was acquired from Moss Harris in 1912 at the time that Green was refurbishing the Treasurer's House in York with the assistance of the firm Watts and Company and under the direction of J.L. Davenport. The firm of Watts was founded in 1874 by former employees at Morris and Co. and served as significant rivals to the latter in the field of home furnishing. The cabinet appears in a photograph of the West Sitting Room, a room furnished in chintz and marquetry which exemplifies the revived interest in late Georgian interiors (see M. Hall, "'Furniture of Artistic Character': Watts and Company as House Furnishers, 1874-1907', Furniture History, 1996, fig.18).
This cabinet once belonged to the collector and connoisseur Frank Green. The cabinet was acquired from Moss Harris in 1912 at the time that Green was refurbishing the Treasurer's House in York with the assistance of the firm Watts and Company and under the direction of J.L. Davenport. The firm of Watts was founded in 1874 by former employees at Morris and Co. and served as significant rivals to the latter in the field of home furnishing. The cabinet appears in a photograph of the West Sitting Room, a room furnished in chintz and marquetry which exemplifies the revived interest in late Georgian interiors (see M. Hall, "'Furniture of Artistic Character': Watts and Company as House Furnishers, 1874-1907', Furniture History, 1996, fig.18).