These large George III festive bacchic urns, in the form of vine-wreathed wine-kraters, were designed in the French 'antique' manner for John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (d. 1809). They garnished the stove-house wall adjoining his celebrated gothic garden tea-house, whose thyrsus-like dome was constructed as a monumental pineapple. This wonderfully exotic tea-and-stove house was conceived in 1761, the year that Dunmore was appointed a Representative Peer for Scotland, and its design is credited to the court architect Sir William Chambers (d. 1796). Chambers, who designed a number of equally exotic pavillions for Princess Augusta's Kew gardens, was also renowned for his Franco-Italian style. The source for these vases with their reed-bound and foliated stems on square plinths, is a satyr-handled vase featured in a 'Suite de Vases Composée dans le Gout de l' Antique, published in Paris in 1760 after designs by Joseph Marie Vien (d. 1809). The pineapple tea-house features on the cover of H. Headley and W. Meulenkamp's Follies, a Guide to Rogue Architecture in England, Scotland and Wales, 1986.