IN THE MANNER OF THOMAS CHIPPENDALE

The serpentined 'commode clothes-press', conceived like a 'clothes-chest' on stand and incorporating drawers, epitomises the French 'picturesque' style illustrated by Thomas Chippendale (d.1779) in his The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Directors, published from 1754-1762. A rectangular 'Cloth Press', engraved in 1753 and issued in Chippendale's Director (pl. CXXVI), featured doors with panelled frames that were indented and rounded at the corners. The doors of this commode, with its indented 'cupid's-bow' front, display richly-figured and mirror-veneered tablets, which are flowered in the hollowed-corners of their reed-ribboned frames. A Venus-shell cartouche is tied by a trellised ribbon to the voluted frame, which is enriched with reeds and Roman foliage. The shell, as well as the cabochon-enriched leg terminating in involuted feet, appears in patterns for 'French Commode Tables' illustrated in the 1762 edition of the Director (pl. LXVII). Likewise the commode's richly sculpted carrying-handles, fusing scalloped shells with Roman foliage, relate to patterns for brass handles illustrated in the Director, 3rd ed., 1762 (pl. CXCIX). The pelta-shaped drawer-handles correspond to those adopted by Chippendale for a breakfast-table supplied in 1759 for Dumfries House, Scotland (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, fig. 399.)

Such furniture, designed for bedroom apartment window-piers, was often executed in pairs with one in the bedroom and the other in its adjoining dressing-room. The pair to this commode formed part of the collection of Henry Hirsch assembled since 1900 at his London house in Park Lane, and was discussed by Percy Macquoid in Country Life, 25 October 1924. It was sold from the Henry Hirsch collection, in these Rooms, 10 June 1931, lot 83.