This bureau de dame relates to the oeuvre of the celebrated ébéniste Abraham Roentgen (d.1793) of Neuwied. The son of a Protestant, Abraham Roentgen studied in Paris, Rotterdam and principally England, settling in London in 1731 as a specialist marqueteur. Returning to Germany in 1750, Roentgen continued to retain strong links with his fellow craftsmen in England and, in 1756, he dispatched one of his assistants to London to be trained under the direction of his former employer, Gern (William Gomm). In 1766, he paid a brief visit to London, returning with an English apprentice to Neuwied, and this bureau may well represent the fruition of Abraham's collaboration with his English apprentice

The serpentine acanthus-enriched ribbon cartouche inlay of the interior, with its lily and flowered branch trophy, relates to that on an encoignure by Roentgen illustrated in J.M. Greber, Abraham and David Roentgen, Starnbey, 1980, vol. 2, fig. 250, while the crossbanded C-scroll frame to the floral marquetry is shared by a bombé commode of circa 1765-68 (fig. 253). Moreover, although the ormolu hoof sabots are apparently unrecorded, they certainly appear in carved wood as leg terminals in Roentgen's oeuvre, for instance the bureau in fig. 279 and the table in fig. 271.