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Lot Essay
The temple-pedimented bureau-cabinet, with projecting antique-fluted pilasters and 'Pan' reed enrichments, is designed in the George II 'Modern' fashion as popularised by B. Langley's, The City and Country Builders and Workmans Treasury of Designs, 1740.
It fuses 'picturesque' ornament with the 'Romano-British' fashion promoted by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington; and romantically associated with the antique architecture of Vitruvius, author of the celebrated Roman architectural treatise, as well as that of the 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio and the English 17th century court architect Inigo Jones (d.1652).
The bookcase tympanum is hollowed for a plinth-supported bust in the manner of Langley's 'Tuscan Book Case' pattern (pl.157); while the beautiful marble-rippled tablets of its French-fashioned 'commode' doors are recessed and wreathed by festive ribbon-bands that are serpentine-fretted in ancient pre-Vitruvian fashion. The latter's conjoined 'cupid-bow' form, serving as a 'lyric-poetry' trophy and appropriate embellishment of a bedroom apartment dressing-room or cabinet, can be related to Langley's adjoining pattern which reissued a pattern for French-fashioned dressing-table glass that was similarly shaped and crowned by a Venus-shell badge (Langley, ibid., pl. 156).
The celebrated Clerkenwell cabinet-maker Giles Grendey (d.1780) adopted this same 'Modern' architecture for a clothes-press that bears his mid-1740s label and is inscribed 'Giles Grendey, St. Johns Square, Clerkenwell, London. Makes and Sells all Sorts of CABINET GOODS, Chairs, Tables, Glassses, etc.'(C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig. 433). A related mahogany clothes-press featuring the label of Philip Bell, of St Paul's Churchyard is also designed in the same manner with similar shaped door panels (ibid., p. 100, fig. 101).
It fuses 'picturesque' ornament with the 'Romano-British' fashion promoted by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington; and romantically associated with the antique architecture of Vitruvius, author of the celebrated Roman architectural treatise, as well as that of the 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio and the English 17th century court architect Inigo Jones (d.1652).
The bookcase tympanum is hollowed for a plinth-supported bust in the manner of Langley's 'Tuscan Book Case' pattern (pl.157); while the beautiful marble-rippled tablets of its French-fashioned 'commode' doors are recessed and wreathed by festive ribbon-bands that are serpentine-fretted in ancient pre-Vitruvian fashion. The latter's conjoined 'cupid-bow' form, serving as a 'lyric-poetry' trophy and appropriate embellishment of a bedroom apartment dressing-room or cabinet, can be related to Langley's adjoining pattern which reissued a pattern for French-fashioned dressing-table glass that was similarly shaped and crowned by a Venus-shell badge (Langley, ibid., pl. 156).
The celebrated Clerkenwell cabinet-maker Giles Grendey (d.1780) adopted this same 'Modern' architecture for a clothes-press that bears his mid-1740s label and is inscribed 'Giles Grendey, St. Johns Square, Clerkenwell, London. Makes and Sells all Sorts of CABINET GOODS, Chairs, Tables, Glassses, etc.'(C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig. 433). A related mahogany clothes-press featuring the label of Philip Bell, of St Paul's Churchyard is also designed in the same manner with similar shaped door panels (ibid., p. 100, fig. 101).