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Lot Essay
The firescreen panel of a French picturesque flower-wreathed cartouche, evoking the Elements with feathers, shell-scallops and a dragon-wing fused with Roman foliage, frames a scene inspired by Aesop's fable of 'The Fox and Cockerel' that provides the moral cunning often outwits itself. The Fox attempts to persuade a cockerel to leave its perch by informing him of the news of a universal truce amongst animals, but then learns from the cockerel of an approaching dog. The signature of the Huguenot weaver Danthon, who was working in the 1720s with the Soho tapestry maker Joshua Morris, has been recorded on a suite of seat upholstery with related flower-wreathed fables. The latter were acquired by Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh, who inherited the Uppark, Sussex estate in 1746 ( G. Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishings in England 1530-1840, London and New Haven, 1997, p. 153, fig 239).
Soho tapestry panels appear on the documented fire-screens supplied by Thomas Chippendale such as one with a fruit-eating parrot framed in a scalloped and foliated cartouche, which appears in a mahogany fire-screen supplied in 1758 for Dumfries House, Scotland (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, pls. 328-329, 331).
Soho tapestry panels appear on the documented fire-screens supplied by Thomas Chippendale such as one with a fruit-eating parrot framed in a scalloped and foliated cartouche, which appears in a mahogany fire-screen supplied in 1758 for Dumfries House, Scotland (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, pls. 328-329, 331).