Design for a hall stove

This George III design for a triumphal-arched stove with a column is in the French/antique fashion popularised in the 1770s by the court architect Sir William Chambers (1723-1746). With its enflamed cassolettes and poetic laurels festooned from paterae and a shell-decked keystone, it also relates to the work of the court architect John Yenn (d.1821), who was employed by Chambers from 1776 as a clerk of works at Somerset House. Related veil-draped cassolettes feature on a set of shell-decked pier-tables designed by Chambers in 1773 for Blenheim Palace; and the latter in turn relates to a Yenn design for a laurel-festooned table (H. Roberts, 'Furniture for the 4th Duke of Marlborough', Furniture History, pp.117-149 fig 7; and P Ward-Jackson, English Furniture Designs of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1958, fig. 261.). Chambers included similar acanthus-sccrolled pilasters on his bookcase design of the mid 1760s for The Hoo, Hertfordshire (see J. Harris and M. Snodin, Sir William Chambers, London, fig. 246).