MID-19TH CENTURY

Details

AN EARLY VICTORIAN 'ANTIQUARIAN' OAK WARDROBE
MID-19TH CENTURY
The rectangular cavetto cornice surmounted by an heraldic achievement of a Viscount's coronet and blank escutcheon flanked by lion supporters, above a pair of strapwork-panelled doors applied with 17th century carved figures of a gentleman and a lady flanked by Solomonic half-columns, enclosing a cotton-lined interior with brass hanging-rail, on a shaped apron and plinth
93 in. (236 cm.) high; 78¼ in. (199 cm.) wide; 24½ in. (62 cm.) deep

Provenance

Thomas Parker (1811-1896), 6th Earl of Macclesfield, Shirburn Castle, who in 1842 married (as his 2nd wife) Lady Mary Frances Grosvenor, and by descent at Shirburn.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

Like the previous wardrobe, this one, with its Solomonic columns and fretted cornice enriched with heraldic lions, is also likely to have been commissioned at the time of Mary Frances Grosvenor's marriage in 1842 to Thomas, 6th Earl of Macclesfield. Its doors are embellished with bas relief figures with right hands raised. Amongst the principal architects promoting a 'revived domestic gothic' or antiquarian furnishings was Anthony Salvin (d.1881), who fused Tudor-Elizabethan with Jacobean and Stuart elements in furniture designed in the late 1820s for Mamhead, Devon. The library designed for John, Earl of Erne by Edward Blore at Crom Castle, Ireland, in the mid-1840s, combines Solomonic columns with applied shaped panels in a very similar style (H. Montgomery Massingberd and C.S. Sykes, Great Houses of Ireland, London, 1999, pp. 62-3). Apart from Salvin and Blore, a third early Victorian exponent of this antiquarian idiom was William Burn (1789-1870) who was employed at Shirburn in 1863 to build the stables (H. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, London, 3rd. ed., 1995, p. 191)

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