The elegant fire-screens epitomise the George III fashion introduced to bedroom appartments around 1770 with their combination of exotic Oriental and antique ornament. Their colourful Chinese paper vignettes have Etruscan-pearled frames of Roman 'pelta' shield form, and their poles are supported on flower-festooned and tripod-altar pedestals with bacchic ram-monopodia. The Chinese vignettes relate to those in framed panels, which were supplied in 1764 to Edward, 5th Lord Leigh for Stoneleigh, Warwickshire by Thomas Bromwich and Leonard Leigh, Paper Stainers of Ludgate Hill (sold Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire, Christie's house sale, 15 October 1981, lot 67). Bromwhich may also have supplied for Erdigg, Wales the similar vignettes that were displayed in medallions and tablets after the 'antique' manner, and pasted on pink paper in a china closet created around 1770 (National Trust Guide Book, Erdigg, London, 1995, p. 53). Erdigg contains an overmantel-mirror that is surmounted a ram-headed altar and likely to have formed part of the furnishings introduced by Philip Yorke under the direction of the architect James Wyatt (d. 1813) in the early 1770s. These shield-shaped firescreens certainly reflect the Wyatt style, and may have possibly originated from the same room.

A pair of related polescreens previously at Boveridge Park, Dorset with ram monopodia joined by a concave-sided platform stretcher, was sold anonymously, in these Rooms, 12 December 1974. A further pair of similar screens, part of the Upton House Suite, was sold from the collection of the late Dr. and Mrs. Jules C. Stein, Christie's New York, 19 April 1986, lot 137.