A LATE GEORGE III SATINWOOD AND ROSEWOOD SECRETAIRE-BOOKCASE

Thomas Sheraton's, Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, 1793 (pl. 28) illustrated a 'Secretary and Bookcase' embellished with Roman medallions, and noted that its lower section served as a clothes-press. His design was 'intended to be executed in satinwood and the ornaments japanned. It may, however, be done in mahogany and in place of the ornaments in the friezes, flutes may be substituted'.
The commode doors are inlaid with medallions of festive Grecian figures bearing a torch, tazza and thyrsae, in the fashion inspired by P.F.H. d'Hancarville's publication on vases entitled A Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon.William Hamilton, Naples, 1766. These also featured on the case of a 1784 pianoforte by the Wardour Street craftsman, Robert Stodart (C. Musgrave, Adam and Hepplewhite Furniture, London, 1996, fig. 171). The writing-fall medallions evoke poetry and ancient history and, with their female figures attending a sacred urn and an armorial trophy recalling the Palazzo dei Conservatori's 'mourning Dacia', relate to the medallions on a 1780s commode at Stourhead,Wiltshire, that has been attributed to Thomas Chippendale Junior (ibid, fig. 126).