This cabinet formed part of the elegant George IV Grecian furnishings commissioned by Captain James Ogilvy-Fairlie of Coodham for his Ayrshire villa, near Kilmarnock. It formed one of a pair of cabinets supplied en suite with a mirror-fronted sideboard which incorporated mirror-fronted pedestals for classical busts.
The classical form and French-style ormolu-enrichments reflect the Regency style associated with George Bullock (d. 1818), cabinet-maker of the Grecian Rooms, Piccadilly. In particular, its silk-backed tablets of ribbon-tied thyrsii derive from the decoration of the pedestal-cabinet which Bullock supplied in 1815 for Sir Walter Scott's celebrated plaster copy of the Stratford bust of Shakespeare which was destined for Abbotsford, itself a very influential Scottish interior. Bullock's work, together with that of Morgan and Sanders and their successors Messrs. Durham of the Strand, was publicised by Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of the Arts, 1809-28. A related Grecian-pedimented, ormolu-mounted and mirror-backed cabinet featured in one of Ackermann's engravings published in 1823 while this cabinet's inlaid banding featured in another published in the previous year (see: P. Agius, Ackermann's Regency Furniture and Interiors, Marlborough, 1984, pp.141 and 144).