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Lot Essay
This remarkable, intricately crafted Indo-Portuguese ebony, ivory and rosewood inlaid cabinet-on-stand was in the celebrated collection of Frederick Richards Leyland (1831-92), a wealthy Liverpool shipping magnate, patron of the arts, and pioneer of the Aesthetic Movement, at 49 Prince’s Gate, Kensington. (1) No doubt the antiquarian look of this cabinet appealed to Leyland and in May 1892, the cabinet is shown in three photographs of the ‘Drawing Room’ (also known as the ‘Italian Room’) at Prince’s Gate taken by the leading English firm of architectural photographers, Bedford Lemere & Co; these photographs were commissioned by Leyland’s children shortly after his premature death on 4 January 1892 (Historic England, BL11530, 31, 32; Duval, op. cit., f/n 31). On 26-27 May 1892, the cabinet was sold in the contents sale of 49 Prince’s Gate and Leyland’’s country seat, Woolton Hall, near Liverpool, by Christie’s to the dealer, Durlacher Bros., for £78.15; the house was sold a month later by Osborn & Mercer on 17 June 1892 (Christie’s, op. cit., lot 313). (2)
As a leading exponent of the Aesthetic Movement, Leyland’s circle included James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), Albert Moore (1841-93) and Morris & Co. His collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, Italian Renaissance paintings (Botticelli, Giorgione, Lippi), English, French, German and Italian furniture and Oriental blue and white porcelain, and rugs at 49 Prince’s Gate was an eclectic amalgam chosen principally for its aesthetic beauty, and cohesion in the interiors. While the exterior of the house, a contemporary wrote, ‘offers no interest; the inside has been transformed by the architects Norman Shaw and [Thomas] Jeckyll aided by a man of exquisite taste, Mr. Murray Marks, into a dwelling of perfect harmony, where nothing offends the eye and everything charms it’ (Child, op. cit., p. 82). (3) The result was a veritable ‘Palace of Art’ or ‘temple of Aestheticism’, one of the grandest aesthetic interiors of the 1870s and 1880s. (4)
Although 49 Prince’s Gate is renowned above all for Whistler’s Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, the Bedford Lemere photographs show the other rooms to be correspondingly opulent. (5) The present cabinet is illustrated in the intermediate Drawing Room, one of three interconnecting rooms separated by screens that when removed formed a single long salon of 94 feet long, decorated ensuite with Italian coffered ceilings with integrated pendant lamps. The collection of Old Master paintings in this room comprised ‘The Virgin and Child Enthroned’ attributed to Hans Memling in 1892, now reattributed to Goswijn van der Weyden, which was hung above the present cabinet, at least three paintings by Sandro Botticelli including the Decameron of Boccaccio set, now in the Prado, Madrid, and John the Baptist attributed to Leonardo da Vinci in 1892, but now recognised as studio of. The 1894 Christie’s sale catalogue lists at least four pieces of Indian or Indo-Portuguese furniture in Leyland’s collection, substantiated by Theodore Child’s contemporaneous description of the intermediate salon, ‘The furniture is composed of divans, chairs, inlaid Indo-Portuguese cabinets and a harpsichord by Ruckers, with a finely painted and lacquered case. On the walls… are some notable pictures – Sir John Millais’ ‘Saint Agnes’ Eve’, Rossetti’s ‘Salutation’, Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Burial of Christ’, Burne-Jones’s six panels representing Day, Night and the four Seasons, and the same painter’s exquisite picture called ‘Venus’s Mirror’ (Christie’s, op. cit., lots 311-314; Child, op. cit., p. 84). The morning room to the right of the entrance hall also contained ‘cabinets of Indian, Tyrolese, and Italian work, beautifully inlaid’ (ibid., p. 82). In 1892, the Art Journal also noted ‘the Indo-Portuguese cabinets… which Mr. Leyland seems to have latterly turned his attention’ (Prinsep, op. cit., p. 138).
This cabinet illustrates an interesting phase in the history of taste, and in particular the fashion for Indo-Portuguese furniture sparked by two exhibitions held at the South Kensington Museum, the ‘Special Loan Exhibition of Spanish and Portuguese Ornamental Art’ (1881), and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). (6) Leyland may well have been inspired to acquire his Indo-Portuguese furniture by Marks, who in the late 1870s had entered into partnership with the old-established firm of Durlacher, and exhibited an 18th century Spanish steel casket in the 1881 exhibition. (7) More importantly, there were two Goa cabinets on display, one lent by another renowned antique dealer, Frederick Davis of 100 New Bond Street, no 562, ‘Large cabinet, marquetry work, ebony, ivory, and coloured woods. Portuguese. Probably Goa work. Beginning of 18th century’, and a second by the museum itself, no. 822, ‘Cabinet and stand, cedar wood, inlaid with ebony and ivory in pattern of scroll foliage and birds. Portuguese, 17th century, probably manufactured at Goa, India. Height, 4 ft. 4 in.; width, 2 ft. 1 in. 11/. 781.-‘65’.
THE CABINET
The present cabinet, is distinguished by the fact that it incorporates earlier elements with Mughal-influenced Gujarat design and colouring, in particular the use of green tinted ivory. It is comparable with writing boxes and table cabinets produced in Gujarat and Sindh in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example a small fall-front cabinet, and a cabinet on stand in the Victoria and Albert Museum. (8) Each of these pieces is decorated with scrolling floral and foliate motifs very similar to those on the present piece.
Two Goanese contadors are also in the Victoria and Albert Museum (9). The former is raised on a stand with identically shaped feet inlaid with a bird form which, according to Jaffer, has been identified by scholars as jatayu, king of the vultures - a central figure in the Ramayana (ibid., p. 57). The latter contador, fitted with rows of drawers as on the present piece, is fitted with almost identical pierced gilt-copper mounts.
The present cabinet is most closely comparable with a six drawer table cabinet in the Grao Vasco Museum, Viseu, Portugal. Dated to 1675-1685 its top is identical in design to the top and sides on the present piece, and the drawers are also closely related. This table cabinet could very possibly have been made in the same workshop.
Another comparable cabinet sold Sotheby's New York, 27 April 2007, lot 285.
(1) ‘The Private Collections of England; Mr. Frederick Leyland’, Athenaeum, no. 2866, 30 September 1882, pp. 438-440; ‘The Private Collections of England: Mr. Frederick Leyland’, Athenaeum, no. 2869, 21 October 1882, pp. 534-535.
(2) ‘49 Prince’s Gate’, Osborn & Mercer, 17 June 1892;
(3) A. Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, New Haven & London, 2010; G.C. Williamson, Murray Marks and his Friends, London and New York, 1919; S. Weber Soros, C. Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer, 1827-1881, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 190-199.
(4) L. Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography, Washington, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 147.
(5) P. Ferriday, ‘Peacock Room’, Architectural Review, CXXV, 1959, pp. 407-414; N. Cooper, The Opulent Eye: Late Victorian and Edwardian Taste in Interior Design, New York, 1976, pp. 28-29, pls. 38-41; D.S. Macleod, Art and the Victorian middle class: money and the making of cultural identity, Cambridge, 1996.
(6) Ornamental Art, South Kensington Museum, London, 1881.
(7) C. Wainwright, ‘A gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuffe’: Murray Marks, connoisseur and curiosity dealer’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14 no. 1, 2002, pp. 161-176.
(8) A. Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India, London, 2002, pp. 28-32, nos. 7 and 8.
(9) Ibid., pp. 56-59, no. 21 and 22.
As a leading exponent of the Aesthetic Movement, Leyland’s circle included James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), Albert Moore (1841-93) and Morris & Co. His collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, Italian Renaissance paintings (Botticelli, Giorgione, Lippi), English, French, German and Italian furniture and Oriental blue and white porcelain, and rugs at 49 Prince’s Gate was an eclectic amalgam chosen principally for its aesthetic beauty, and cohesion in the interiors. While the exterior of the house, a contemporary wrote, ‘offers no interest; the inside has been transformed by the architects Norman Shaw and [Thomas] Jeckyll aided by a man of exquisite taste, Mr. Murray Marks, into a dwelling of perfect harmony, where nothing offends the eye and everything charms it’ (Child, op. cit., p. 82). (3) The result was a veritable ‘Palace of Art’ or ‘temple of Aestheticism’, one of the grandest aesthetic interiors of the 1870s and 1880s. (4)
Although 49 Prince’s Gate is renowned above all for Whistler’s Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, the Bedford Lemere photographs show the other rooms to be correspondingly opulent. (5) The present cabinet is illustrated in the intermediate Drawing Room, one of three interconnecting rooms separated by screens that when removed formed a single long salon of 94 feet long, decorated ensuite with Italian coffered ceilings with integrated pendant lamps. The collection of Old Master paintings in this room comprised ‘The Virgin and Child Enthroned’ attributed to Hans Memling in 1892, now reattributed to Goswijn van der Weyden, which was hung above the present cabinet, at least three paintings by Sandro Botticelli including the Decameron of Boccaccio set, now in the Prado, Madrid, and John the Baptist attributed to Leonardo da Vinci in 1892, but now recognised as studio of. The 1894 Christie’s sale catalogue lists at least four pieces of Indian or Indo-Portuguese furniture in Leyland’s collection, substantiated by Theodore Child’s contemporaneous description of the intermediate salon, ‘The furniture is composed of divans, chairs, inlaid Indo-Portuguese cabinets and a harpsichord by Ruckers, with a finely painted and lacquered case. On the walls… are some notable pictures – Sir John Millais’ ‘Saint Agnes’ Eve’, Rossetti’s ‘Salutation’, Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Burial of Christ’, Burne-Jones’s six panels representing Day, Night and the four Seasons, and the same painter’s exquisite picture called ‘Venus’s Mirror’ (Christie’s, op. cit., lots 311-314; Child, op. cit., p. 84). The morning room to the right of the entrance hall also contained ‘cabinets of Indian, Tyrolese, and Italian work, beautifully inlaid’ (ibid., p. 82). In 1892, the Art Journal also noted ‘the Indo-Portuguese cabinets… which Mr. Leyland seems to have latterly turned his attention’ (Prinsep, op. cit., p. 138).
This cabinet illustrates an interesting phase in the history of taste, and in particular the fashion for Indo-Portuguese furniture sparked by two exhibitions held at the South Kensington Museum, the ‘Special Loan Exhibition of Spanish and Portuguese Ornamental Art’ (1881), and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). (6) Leyland may well have been inspired to acquire his Indo-Portuguese furniture by Marks, who in the late 1870s had entered into partnership with the old-established firm of Durlacher, and exhibited an 18th century Spanish steel casket in the 1881 exhibition. (7) More importantly, there were two Goa cabinets on display, one lent by another renowned antique dealer, Frederick Davis of 100 New Bond Street, no 562, ‘Large cabinet, marquetry work, ebony, ivory, and coloured woods. Portuguese. Probably Goa work. Beginning of 18th century’, and a second by the museum itself, no. 822, ‘Cabinet and stand, cedar wood, inlaid with ebony and ivory in pattern of scroll foliage and birds. Portuguese, 17th century, probably manufactured at Goa, India. Height, 4 ft. 4 in.; width, 2 ft. 1 in. 11/. 781.-‘65’.
THE CABINET
The present cabinet, is distinguished by the fact that it incorporates earlier elements with Mughal-influenced Gujarat design and colouring, in particular the use of green tinted ivory. It is comparable with writing boxes and table cabinets produced in Gujarat and Sindh in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example a small fall-front cabinet, and a cabinet on stand in the Victoria and Albert Museum. (8) Each of these pieces is decorated with scrolling floral and foliate motifs very similar to those on the present piece.
Two Goanese contadors are also in the Victoria and Albert Museum (9). The former is raised on a stand with identically shaped feet inlaid with a bird form which, according to Jaffer, has been identified by scholars as jatayu, king of the vultures - a central figure in the Ramayana (ibid., p. 57). The latter contador, fitted with rows of drawers as on the present piece, is fitted with almost identical pierced gilt-copper mounts.
The present cabinet is most closely comparable with a six drawer table cabinet in the Grao Vasco Museum, Viseu, Portugal. Dated to 1675-1685 its top is identical in design to the top and sides on the present piece, and the drawers are also closely related. This table cabinet could very possibly have been made in the same workshop.
Another comparable cabinet sold Sotheby's New York, 27 April 2007, lot 285.
(1) ‘The Private Collections of England; Mr. Frederick Leyland’, Athenaeum, no. 2866, 30 September 1882, pp. 438-440; ‘The Private Collections of England: Mr. Frederick Leyland’, Athenaeum, no. 2869, 21 October 1882, pp. 534-535.
(2) ‘49 Prince’s Gate’, Osborn & Mercer, 17 June 1892;
(3) A. Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, New Haven & London, 2010; G.C. Williamson, Murray Marks and his Friends, London and New York, 1919; S. Weber Soros, C. Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer, 1827-1881, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 190-199.
(4) L. Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography, Washington, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 147.
(5) P. Ferriday, ‘Peacock Room’, Architectural Review, CXXV, 1959, pp. 407-414; N. Cooper, The Opulent Eye: Late Victorian and Edwardian Taste in Interior Design, New York, 1976, pp. 28-29, pls. 38-41; D.S. Macleod, Art and the Victorian middle class: money and the making of cultural identity, Cambridge, 1996.
(6) Ornamental Art, South Kensington Museum, London, 1881.
(7) C. Wainwright, ‘A gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuffe’: Murray Marks, connoisseur and curiosity dealer’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14 no. 1, 2002, pp. 161-176.
(8) A. Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India, London, 2002, pp. 28-32, nos. 7 and 8.
(9) Ibid., pp. 56-59, no. 21 and 22.