The carver and gilder Aitken Dott, who was established in Edinburgh's South Castle Street in 1842, advertised the regilding of old frames, as well as the manufacture of picture frames to any pattern. His South Castle Street label is applied to the back of this frame. The richly fretted and serpentined pier-glass frame, with its antique air-bubbled scallops and ribbon-scrolls wrapped by Roman acanthus, is designed in the George II French 'picturesque' manner. Garlands of fruit and flowers festoon the nature deity's 'shell' badge that is displayed in the cartouche of its open pediment, and they also entwine the water-reeds clasped to its rustic shell-capped pilasters. While another shell is clasped at the base, and is flanked by the water-issuing urns of river deities that are incorporated in the reeded corner trusses. The frame's fusion of earth, air and water elements serves to evoke Peace and Plenty. The cornice ornament relates to that of the frontispiece of the carver's pattern-book, Six Sconces, 1744 issued by Matthias Lock (d. 1765), while similar urn-enriched trusses had featured in one of Lock's mirror designs issued in the early 1750s in his New Book of Ornaments of Looking Glass Frames. Lock later collaborated with Thomas Chippendale in the publication of The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754. In the later 1760s the London upholder James Cullen (d. 1779), while assisting with furnishings of Hopetoun House, Edinburgh lent some of Lock's drawings to Lord Hopetoun and noted them as 'valuable being designed and drawn by the famous Mr. Matt Lock recently deceased who was reputed the best Draftsman in that way that had ever been in England' (A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, p. 164). Various pattern books of Lock's work were re-issued by Roger Sayer in 1768, and again from the 1830s to the 1860s by M. Taylor and John Weale (M. Heckscher, 'Lock and Copland: A Catalogue of the Engraved Ornament', Furniture History, 1979, pp. 1-23, pls. 1 and 39).