A CHINESE EXPORT GILTWOOD AND BLACK AND GILT-JAPANNED GIRANDOLE

The Grecian palm-flowered and poetic laurel-festooned pier-glass, with Etruscan pearl-wreathed medallion frame, reflects the George III antique fashion promoted by the Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d.1792). In view of its proportions and its girandole of reeded vase candle-nozzles issuing from wave-voluted Roman foliage and a lacquered medallion of India (Chinese) foliage, it probably accompanied the lacquer or japanned dressing-table of a fashionable reception dressing-room hung in Chinese flowered paper. In particular it can be associated with a surviving 1773 design by the Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (d.1796) for a Mr Price, and which featured a similarly framed oval girandole overmantel mirror crowned by a laurel-festooned sacred urn (see H Hayward, 'The Drawings of John Linnell in the Victoria & Albert Museum,' Furniture History, 1969 fig. 57.).
The inventory label indicates that the mirror was acquired by the connoisseur William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (d.1925) from M Harris & Sons on the 5 May 1916.