Lot Essay
The dressing-table, in golden satinwood, embellished with oval medallions and tablets paned in Etruscan-black ribbon, typifies the late 18th-Century Gillow style and the fashion for furnishing bedroom apartments with exotic and light-coloured woods. It relates to patterns for 'A Bason Stand and a Shaving Table' illustrated in Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director of 1763, (pl.LIV), and a 'Lady's Dressing Stand' published by Thomas Shearer in The Cabinet-Maker's London Book of Prices, 1788, (fig.1). Its pattern evolved from a sketch of 1770 for a table, also featuring an 'open cross rail' and lozenged-ribbon tablets inside its 'turn-over' tops, illustrated in the Estimate Sketch Books of Gillows of London and Lancaster (see L. Boynton (ed.), Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800, Royston, 1995, fig. 29). The table may have been purchased for Dorothy Wynne (d.1809), John Wynne's mother, at the time of her marriage in 1776, and would demonstrate that the family had patronised Gillows before the turn of the century.