The 'tallboy' chest-of-drawers stands on serpentined bracket trusses as featured in a pattern in Thomas Chippendale's, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754 (pl. 85). This chest's fine figured mahogany drawers are fitted with elegant pateraed handles and fretted escutcheon plates as feature on furniture manufactured in the 1760s at Thomas Chippendale's St. Martin's Lane workshops (see C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, pls. 203 and 267).
The trefoiled cusps were popularised by Batty Langley's Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved in the Gothick Mode, 1742 and appear in illustrations of William Kent's antiquarian novelties such as his York pulpit which featured in John Vardy's Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent, 1744.
Its entablature is wreathed in the Roman antique manner with a fluted ribbon band which serves to tie a mediaeval arched lambrequin, that reflects the romantic old English fashion introduced by the antiquarian Horace Walpole at his Strawberry Hill villa in the 1750s. This Gothic trim also dresses a bookcase pattern issued by Chippendale and others in their Household Furniture in genteel Taste for the Year 1760, by the Society of Upholsterers, Cabinet-Makers etc. (pl. 56).