The marble-topped porcelain display-cabinet, with its pilaster-flanked bookcases and Grecian-truss feet, is conceived in the early 19th Century 'antique' style after the French manner. The design, combined with japanned ornament accompanying lacquer-veneered panels, reflects the ecclectic fashion introduced in the George IV period, when Chinese wall-papers appeared in fashionable drawing rooms as at Abbotsford, Roxburghshire (see: C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, London, 1989, p. 183). The shell-inlaid panels, known as lac-burgauté, are likely to derive from 17th Century screens such as that illustrated in '2000 Years of Chinese Lacquer', Exhibition Catalogue, Hong Kong, 1993, no. 94.
A closely related cabinet with Japanese lacquer panels was sold from the colleciton of the late Mrs. Basil Fielding, Beckley Park, Oxon, in these Rooms, 14 November 1991, lot 205