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Lot Essay
This golden parquetry-panelled wardrobe, with its pinnacled and embattled cornice and Elizabethan black-chequer inlay, typifies the Old English 'Elizabethan' style adopted in the 1860s by the 'artist' Charles Bevan (d. 1873). He was established in London's Margaret Street as a 'Medieval Art Designer', and one of his related sycamore wardrobes featured amongst his 'Baildon Lodge' furnishings, that were executed for the Yorkshire industrialist Titus Salt Junior and discussed in the 1867 'Building News' (1 March) (The Baildon wardrobe's acquistion by the Leeds City Council is discussed by Adam White in the National Art Collections Fund: Review, 1997, p. 81). Charles Bevan, after establishing a partnership with his son George Alfred Bevan, moved the firm to High Holborn in the early 1870s, where they traded as 'Designers, Wood Carvers, and Manufacturers of Art Furniture'. Amongst Charles Bevan's work illustrated in the early 1870s in The House Furnisher and Decorator was the davenport that had been previously illustrated in The Building News, 1865. In August 1872, the journal lauded 'the great benefits Messrs. Bevan have conferred on the public by introducing really high art into our homes...'
Amongst the furniture that he designed for execution by other firms was James Lamb of Manchester's bookcase exhibited at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, and two cabinets exhibited by Messrs. Gillow of Oxford Street at the 1872 London Exhibition before their acquisition by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). This wardrobe was executed by the celebrated Leeds firm of John Marsh & Edward Jones who later traded from 1868 in partnership with Mr Cribb, 'Medieval Cabinet-Makers'. The present wardrobe also relates to Bevan's 'Plain Oak Cabinet' discussed in the 1868 Building News.
Amongst the furniture that he designed for execution by other firms was James Lamb of Manchester's bookcase exhibited at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, and two cabinets exhibited by Messrs. Gillow of Oxford Street at the 1872 London Exhibition before their acquisition by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). This wardrobe was executed by the celebrated Leeds firm of John Marsh & Edward Jones who later traded from 1868 in partnership with Mr Cribb, 'Medieval Cabinet-Makers'. The present wardrobe also relates to Bevan's 'Plain Oak Cabinet' discussed in the 1868 Building News.