.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
The Grecian-black cabinet is conceived as a marble-topped 'pier-commode-table' in the French antique fashion. The reeds of its Pompeian palm-flowered pillars as well as the plinth's stump-feet are spiralled, like Jupiter's thunderbolts, as featured in furniture patterns in T. Hope's Household Furnture and Interior Decoration, 1807 and George Smith's, Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808. Its pictorial façade of Chinese figures with caged birds in a waterside landscape reflects the Chinese fashion promoted by the embellishment of Brighton's Marine Pavilion for George, Prince of Wales, later George IV.
Its 'papier mâché' panels are fine examples of the manufactures executed at the Works that Henry Clay (d. 1812) established in 1802 in London's King Street, Covent Garden. Clay, who had styled himself since the 1790's as George III's 'Japanner in Ordinary', took pride in his 'new material for painting' as being: 'infinitely superior to any substance hitherto used for its surface and durability' (R. Prosser, Birmingham Inventor and Inventions, Birmingham, 1881, p. 39). Clay's business continued until 1822 and will be the subject of Yvonne Jones' History of Clay's Manufactory, to be published in 2007 by the Antique Collector's Club. The same brand appears on another of his cabinets with similar panels (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig. 203).
Its 'papier mâché' panels are fine examples of the manufactures executed at the Works that Henry Clay (d. 1812) established in 1802 in London's King Street, Covent Garden. Clay, who had styled himself since the 1790's as George III's 'Japanner in Ordinary', took pride in his 'new material for painting' as being: 'infinitely superior to any substance hitherto used for its surface and durability' (R. Prosser, Birmingham Inventor and Inventions, Birmingham, 1881, p. 39). Clay's business continued until 1822 and will be the subject of Yvonne Jones' History of Clay's Manufactory, to be published in 2007 by the Antique Collector's Club. The same brand appears on another of his cabinets with similar panels (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig. 203).