Lot Essay
The handsome bookcase, with its fluted pilasters enriched with golden Pompeian-pillars and flowered bas-relief tablets, reflect the French/antique fashion promoted around 1800 and popularised by the connoisseur Thomas Hopes Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807. Intended to evoke lyric-poetrys triumph, their doors are mosaic-parquetried in rayed lozenge compartments recalling Romes Temple of Venus; while their flowered cornices display palm-enriched libation-paterae recalling the sun-god Apollo, as Mt. Parnssus poetry deity. Related architecture and ornament featured on a contemporary mahogany bookcase bearing the label of the Fleet Street upholsterers and cabinet-makers [Robert] Herring & Son.. They are recorded as trading from no. 109 between 1784 and 1839 (see C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, fig.491)
With the bookcase's robust 'antique' architecture and 'Churchill' label, it may have been commissioned around 1815 by the bibliophile George Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough (d.1840), and housed part of the celebrated library at White Knights, Berkshire, which he aggrandised with the assistance of the architect John Buonarotti Papworth (d. 1847).
With the bookcase's robust 'antique' architecture and 'Churchill' label, it may have been commissioned around 1815 by the bibliophile George Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough (d.1840), and housed part of the celebrated library at White Knights, Berkshire, which he aggrandised with the assistance of the architect John Buonarotti Papworth (d. 1847).