A REGENCY GILT-BRASS-MOUNTED INDIAN ROSEWOOD SECRETAIRE CABINET

This cabinet is designed in the French/antique fashion promoted around 1800 by George IV, when Prince of Wales, by connoisseurs such as Thomas Hope and by Rome-trained architect C.H. Tatham. It was later popularised by Thomas Sheraton, whose related ‘Bookcase’ pattern with hermed busts of Homer and Hesiod, featured in The Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer and General Artist’s Encyclopedia, 1804-6 (pl. 4). The French fashioned chimerae mounts, in the manner of Vulliamy, correspond to ‘the ornaments in frieze finished in bronze’ featured on a marble-top pier-commode table supplied in 1806 by Messrs Nicholas Morel & Robert Hughes to Lord Bradford for Weston Park, Staffordshire. The latter was designed in 1805 together with a French-fashioned bookcase with Egyptian hermed pilasters that furnished the Drawing room of Lady Bradford’s apartment. Morel had also worked with the architect Henry Holland on the Carlton House Palace for the Prince of Wales.