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Lot Essay
A virtually identical cellaret design was advertised by Conrath of North Audley Street, London as French 'Empire' in style in the trade periodical, The Cabinet Maker & Art Furnisher, January 1895. Conrath's ram-headed design and a cellarette of the same pattern are illustrated in F. Collard, Regency Furniture, 1985, p. 245. Another, at Balls Park, Hertfordshire, is illustrated in R. Edwards & P. Macquoid, The Dictionary of English Furniture, rev. ed., 1954, vol. III, p. 133, fig. 24; and a further example, formerly in the collection of the collector Colonel Norman Colville, was sold Christie's, London, 20 September 2001, lot 50.
The cellarets once belonged to the New York stockbroker, art collector and renowned philatelist Alfred H. Caspary (d. 1955), who housed them in his South Carolina Plantation, Bonnie Doon, which he purchased in 1931. (The original eighteenth-century house was torched by General Sherman's troops in 1865.) Caspary sold Bonnie Doon in 1954, the year before his death, to J. Peter Grace, the head of the W. R. Grace Company.
The cellarets once belonged to the New York stockbroker, art collector and renowned philatelist Alfred H. Caspary (d. 1955), who housed them in his South Carolina Plantation, Bonnie Doon, which he purchased in 1931. (The original eighteenth-century house was torched by General Sherman's troops in 1865.) Caspary sold Bonnie Doon in 1954, the year before his death, to J. Peter Grace, the head of the W. R. Grace Company.