LATE 17TH CENTURY

The screen's moulded frame with flowered centre and corners relates to picture frame patterns illustrated in D. Marot's Nouveau Livre d'Ornements pour l'Utilité des Sculpteurs et Orfèvres of circa 1700. Known as an ecran à coulisse because the cheval fire-screen would originally have had a sliding leaf, a closely related screen is illustrated in a Parisian engraving of 1688 (P. Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, New Haven and London, 1978, fig. 245). With its fluted and cassolette-capped columnar supports tied with a fretted ribbon-guilloche stretcher, it relates to a Marot-style firescreen at Hampton Court Palace dating from around 1700 and attributed to Jean Pelletier (d. 1723). One of the same period is at Knole Park, Kent and a third was supplied around 1715 to Richard Temple, Baron Cobham, and is attributed to James Moore (d. circa 1733; see: R. Edwards The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1964, pp. 434 and 435, figs. 3,4 and 6)
Furniture formerly at Whitehall Palace which burned in 1698, and now at Knole, Kent, bears the branded initials `WP', but the stamp `W' on the screen offered here is thus far not recognised.