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Lot Essay
This golden bookcase celebrates lyric poetry with its 'triumphal-arch' and temple-pediment cornice wreathed by 'Apollo' palms accompanied by 'Venus' pearl-strings and its frieze enriched with 'Apollo' sunflowered medallions displayed in tablets that are tied in an antique-fluted ribbon-guilloche. In its distinctive use of marble-figured veneer of yew-wood, it recalls the documented oeuvre of the Soho cabinet-makers Messrs Mayhew and Ince. While the bas-relief Roman medallions recall the mosaiced ceiling of the poetry deity's temple engraved in R. Woods' Ruins of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra, 1753, the projecting pilasters' palm-flowered 'Diocletian' capitals reflect the influence of Robert Adam's Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, 1762.
Its base, like Lady Curzon's celebrated Kedleston bookcase, is equipped with drawers, while its commode doors are trellised in golden brass filigree as adopted for fashionable George II bedroom apartment furnishings such as the 'pier commode table' at Holkham Hall, Norfolk (A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, fig. 368 and J. Hardy and H. Hayward, 'Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire', Country Life, 26 January, 1978, fig 6.)
Its base, like Lady Curzon's celebrated Kedleston bookcase, is equipped with drawers, while its commode doors are trellised in golden brass filigree as adopted for fashionable George II bedroom apartment furnishings such as the 'pier commode table' at Holkham Hall, Norfolk (A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, fig. 368 and J. Hardy and H. Hayward, 'Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire', Country Life, 26 January, 1978, fig 6.)