Lot Essay
The George II lady's bureau/dressing-table, intended for a reception dressing-room apartment, would have been furnished with a dressing-mirror as featured on the 1730s 'Union Suites' executed by the Soho cabinet-maker John Hodson (see A. Coleridge, 'John Hodson and some cabinet-makers at Blair Castle', Connoisseur, April 1963, p. 230, fig. 15). Its elegantly serpentined and acanthus-enriched frame, with its water-bubbled cartouche and trussed pillar legs terminating in Ionic waved volutes, would have been designed to harmonise with the 'French Easy Chairs' introduced to bedroom apartments decorated in the fashionable 1740s French manner, and later popularised by Thomas Chippendale's, Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Director, 1754. With its medallioned brasses and tablets of fine marble-figured walnut framed by reed mouldings and ribbon-banded with golden inlay in the French fashion, it can be related to furniture produced by St. Paul's Church-Yard firms such as John Ody, who traded 'At the Castle' or Messrs Coxed and Woster 'At the White Swan', who advertised the manufacture and sale of all sorts of 'Scutores, Desks, and Buro's...' (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Leeds, 1996, figs. 703 and 251).