ATTRIBUTED TO GILES GRENDEY

This handsome bureau chest-of-drawers is designed in the George II 'antique' manner, with arched-truss feet, fine pelta-scrolled brass escutcheons, and a Doric 'tabernacle' interior framed with antique-fluted pilasters. The same desk fittings feature in a 'bureau-bookcase' that has glazed compartments which derive from a 'Tuscan-columned' bookcase pattern in B. Langley's, The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740 (pl. CLVII). The latter, sold anonymously, in these Rooms, 6 July 1989, lot 112 which bears the 1740s trade label of Giles Grendey (d.1780), the St John's Square, Clerkenwell cabinet-maker, chair-maker and timber merchant who was celebrated in his day as 'a great Dealer in the Cabinet Way' (C. Gilbert, The Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig. 452). The label advertised that Grendey made and sold 'all sorts of Cabinet Goods', and the quality of the present desk and its timber merits an attribution to his workshops.