EDO PERIOD (LATE 17TH CENTURY)

This exotic jewel-casket, with fretted brass enrichments and 'antique' columns, incorporates one sliding panel concealing a compartment within its hollow-plinthed lid and another concealing a drawer in the right side. The lid's interior was originally fitted with a dressing mirror. 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 Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, (London, 1989), 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 R. Edwards, Dictionary of English Furniture, vol. I, 1954, p.111, fig.26) and another is at Burghley House.