CIRCA 1735-40, IN THE MANNER OF WILLIAM KENT

This white-painted pier mirror relates to a magnificent giltwood example designed by William Kent (d. 1748), together with a corresponding console table, for the Green Drawing Room at Houghton Hall, Norfolk (S. Weber, William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, New Haven and London, 2014, p. 493, fig. 8.34). The guilloche border on the mirror offered here is found on picture and mirror frames and on a plaster ceiling at another celebrated Kent commission, Raynham Hall, Norfolk; see a painted mirror in the King’s Bedroom, a giltwood picture frame in the Belisarius Room and the plaster ceiling of the Great Hall (M. Ridgdill, Raynham Hall: An English Country House Revealed, Woodbridge, 2018, pp. 54, 56, frontispiece). Furthermore, the carved oak leaves and acorn border can be compared to swags rendered in marble on the Kent chimneypiece in the Dining Room at Raynham (ibid., p.161).

The design for the pier mirror was possibly inspired by a design for a chimney overmantel created for Sir William Strickland of Boynton Hall, East Yorkshire, and published by Isaac Ware in Designs of Inigo Jones and Others (c. 1731) (E. White, Pictorial Dictionary of British 18th Century Furniture Design, Woodbridge, 2000, p. 358, plate 34, but plate 31 in the original publication). The chimney piece and overmantel designs for Sir William Strickland in Ware’s publication have been confidently attributed to Kent (Weber, op. cit., p. 191). Two further comparable designs for pier glasses by Kent survive, held in the Prints & Drawings department, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, museum nos.: 19044 and 12957 14.