THE CARVING PROBABLY 17TH CENTURY, REMOUNTED IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY

The richly carved overmantel is conceived in the romantic Williamite style of the 1830s. Its Elizabethan Composite architecture with a triumphal arch of trussed and hermed pilasters relates to an overmantel of the 1590s in the banqueting hall at Franks, Kent and illustrated in Joseph Nash's Mansions of England in Olden Time, 1st series, 1839 (pl. 17). With its festive satyr-mask, jewelled ribbon-frets and cusp-arched niches it relates in particular to the Elizabethan 'Great Bed of Ware', that was famed by Shakespeare and illustrated by Henry Shaw in Specimens of Ancient Furniture, 1836 (pl. XXXVII). Shaw assisted with the antiquarian Elizabethan embellishment of Audley End, Essex for Richard Neville, 3rd Lord Braybrooke (d. 1861), author of a History of Audley End, 1836, and assisted the architect Richard Bridgens, who featured Elizabethan patterns in Furniture with Candelabra and Interior Decoration, 1833 (2nd ed., 1838).