Appropriate to a lady's secretaire-cabinet, the medallion revealed beneath festive ribbon-tied drapery, depicts Erato, Muse of Love Poetry, bearing a lyre, as illustrated on the Sarcophagus of the Muses, at the Capitoline Museum (now in the Louvre) engraved in Montfaucon's L'Antiquité Explique, 1727. The lower doors are inlaid with oval paterae centred by Apollo's sunflower. Derived from the Louis XVI secretaire à abattant of the type supplied by Thomas Chippendale to Harewood House c.1772 (see: C. Gilbert, The Life & Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol.II, fig.96); its marquetry is a refined version of that found on a suite of corner cupboards and commode with 'Etruscan' medallions supplied by Messrs. Mayhew & Ince to Sir Douglas Home's Pall Mall house in 1773 (see: A Short History of Spencer House, London, 1991, p.24).