Lot Essay
The mirrored and golden veneered George III 'Lady's Cabinet' is appropriately inlaid for the window-pier of the fashionable French/antique or Etruscan styled reception dressing-room, such as the Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d.1792) introduced in the 1770s. Reflecting Adam's 'Columbarium' vase-chambers, recalling poetic accounts of sacrifices at love's altar in antiquity, a laurelled and palm-flowered urn dresses the table's hinged frieze drawer; while flowered Grecian altar-tripods dress the door tablets of the 'commode', whose Grecian scrolled base is fretted in a cupid-bow. The inlay, including the Apollonian sunflowered cornice with trompe l'oeil flutes, relates to the fashion popularised in particular by the Soho firm of Messrs Mayhew and Ince (see C. Cator, 'The Earl of Kerry and Mayhew and Ince', Furniture History, 1990, pp. 37-33). Similar ornament featured in Thomas Chippendale Junior's Sketches of Ornament, 1779 (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, figs. 28-30).