The desk, whose triumphal-arched recess is echoed by the panel-framed ends, is designed in the George II 'Roman' style and richly carved with French-fashioned mouldings on an antique-stippled ground. Shell badges of the Nature deity Venus are displayed in the hollowed cornice, whose wave-scrolled guilloche is also enriched with Roman acanthus. While flowers are tied in the ribbon-guilloche of torus mouldings that frame the drawers and their golden brass enrichments comprising large serpentined cartouches or escutcheons for the locks and handles. Shell-enriched spandrels and similarly flowered torus mouldings feature on a related desk belonging to Arthur Ingram, 6th Viscount Irwin (d. 1736), and which may have been amongst the furniture supplied for his London house in the mid-1730s by the celebrated Long Acre cabinet-maker William Hallett (d. 1781) and later moved to Temple Newsam, Yorkshire (C. Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House, vol. III, 1998, no. 829). This library-table form evolved from the bureau-dressing-table with drawer-fitted pedestals of the early 18th Century. A related pattern features on a 1730s trade-sheet issued by Thomas Potter (ibid. p. 827). A desk with similarly panelled ends is illustrated in P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, rev. ed., 1954, vol. III, p. 246, fig 15). The pattern for the end carrying-handles features in an 18th Century brass manufacturer's pattern-book (no. 451). (T. R. Crom, An Eighteenth Century English Brass Hardware Catalogue, Florida, 1994, fig 66).