This handsome temple-pedimented cabinet is among the grandest type of cabinet-furniture produced in 18th Century Dublin. It is designed in the Roman manner derived from Sebastiano Serlio's 16th Century treatise on architecture, and made fashionable by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork (d.1753), who served as George II's Lord Lieutenant and Treasurer of Ireland. Executed for a bedroom apartment, it combines a multitude of uses, serving as bureau-dressing-table, as well as clothes-press and chest-of-drawers. Its cabinet is surmounted by a flowered and voluted pediment fretted with a dentilled ribbon, while its triumphal-arched panels of richly- figured mahogany are framed by antique-fluted and reed-enriched Composite pilasters. These same features appear on a closely related clothes-press cabinet, enriched with giltwood flowers and foliate cartouche, that is likely to have been commissioned by Valentine Richard Quin (d.1789) around the time of his inheritance in 1744 of Adare, Co. Limerick (sold by the Earl and Countess of Dunraven, Adare Manor, Christie's house sale, 9 June 1982, lot 329 and Johnston Antiques, Exhibition of Irish Georgian Furniture, 1998 no. 1). Whereas the Adare chest-of-drawers stands on bacchic lion-paw feet, this one has serpentined 'truss' brackets in the 'Modern' style popularised by Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754.

A closely related cabinet, but with fluted quadrant angles and with slightly different design of panelled doors was sold anonymously, Sotheby's New York, 25 January 1997, lot 205 ($57,500). A further similar cabinet, previously at Elveden Hall, Norfolk, was sold by The Earl of Iveagh, Elveden Hall, Thetford, Norfolk, Christie's house sale, 21-24 May 1984, lot 424.