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Lot Essay
This mahogany lady's bureau dressing-table, enriched with tablets of silken figured satinwood, is designed in the George II 'modern' fashion popularised by Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754, and combines Chinese, antique and Gothic elements. The top is ribbon-banded with a railed Chinese fret inlay, while the reed-banded and hollowed leg pilasters are festooned with Roman-acanthus husks and terminate in Doric triglyphs as featured on the Director's table-frame for a 'Chinese' bedroom cabinet (pl. CXXIII). The frieze is similarly inlaid with tablets and conceals candle-slides at the sides and a dressing and writing-drawer in the facade, while its stretcher-tray, hollowed in the 'altar' manner, serves for a basin and ewer.
The Director's influence on Chippendale's contemporaries was immediate, and indeed was emulated even in Chippendale houses, the guttae foot for instance being employed at Dumfries House on a breakfast-table executed by Samuel Smith in 1756 (illustrated in C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, p. 220). One possible candidate for the authorship of this table is the Wakefield firm of Messrs. Richard Wright and Edward Elwick, whose partnership flourished between 1747-1771. In particular, the idiosyncratic design derived from Chippendale patterns and the use of sabicu as a contrasting timber, allied with the exceptional construction and the use of boxwood 'fret' borders is reminiscent of their work at Wentworth Woodhouse for the 2nd Marquess Rockingham (d.1782), of which only a part was sold in the Wentworth sale in these Rooms, 8 July 1998. However, several firms in the St. Martin' Lane area were equally capable of producing such a table, and the same sumptous satin veneer with mahogany crossbanding and boxwood lines also appears on the unattributed writing-cabinet at Althorp, where a suite of furniture originally from Lady Spencer's bedroom at Spencer House after designs by James Stuart also displays a contrasting sabicu interlaced greek-fret on a fustic ground (illustrated in P. Thornton and J. Hardy, 'The Spencer Furniture at Althorp', Part III, Apollo, March, 1968, figs. 4,5,9).
The Director's influence on Chippendale's contemporaries was immediate, and indeed was emulated even in Chippendale houses, the guttae foot for instance being employed at Dumfries House on a breakfast-table executed by Samuel Smith in 1756 (illustrated in C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, p. 220). One possible candidate for the authorship of this table is the Wakefield firm of Messrs. Richard Wright and Edward Elwick, whose partnership flourished between 1747-1771. In particular, the idiosyncratic design derived from Chippendale patterns and the use of sabicu as a contrasting timber, allied with the exceptional construction and the use of boxwood 'fret' borders is reminiscent of their work at Wentworth Woodhouse for the 2nd Marquess Rockingham (d.1782), of which only a part was sold in the Wentworth sale in these Rooms, 8 July 1998. However, several firms in the St. Martin' Lane area were equally capable of producing such a table, and the same sumptous satin veneer with mahogany crossbanding and boxwood lines also appears on the unattributed writing-cabinet at Althorp, where a suite of furniture originally from Lady Spencer's bedroom at Spencer House after designs by James Stuart also displays a contrasting sabicu interlaced greek-fret on a fustic ground (illustrated in P. Thornton and J. Hardy, 'The Spencer Furniture at Althorp', Part III, Apollo, March, 1968, figs. 4,5,9).