This handsome bureau-cabinet, beautifully veneered in flame-figured mahogany is a masterpiece of the Gillow firm of London and Lancaster, and is executed in the chaste antique style promoted by Messrs A. Hepplewhite & Co.'s The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide, 1788. Its cabinet pattern, with doors ray-parquetried from elliptic 'Roman' medallions, derived from an engraving dated 1787 in the Guide (pl. 88) and featured in Gillow's 1788 sketch-book, where it stands on a straight-fronted rather than sloped bureau. They also introduced the elliptic medallioned patera handle-plate at this period (L. Boynton, Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800, Royston, 1995, figs. 132 and 134). The bureau section, with its fretted brackets, also derives from the Guide (pl. 40). If the bureau-cabinet was made for Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, it could have been commissioned by Lady Sabine Winn (d. 1798), widow of Sir Rowland Winn 5^th Bt. (d. 1785) and intended for her son Sir Rowland, 6^th Bt. (1775-1805) or daughter Esther (1768-1803). However there is a possibility that it was amongst the furniture brought to Nostell following a fire at Thorndon Hall, Essex, in 1878. The latter was built in the 1770s by the architect Samuel Wyatt (d. 1807), whose family had a close working relationship with that of the Gillows. So this cabinet might have been commissioned for Thorndon by Robert Petre, 9^th Baron Petre (d. 1801).