A George III style satinwood, mahogany and marquetry commode, circa 1900, after Thomas Chippendale's Diana and Minerva commode

Harewood House in Yorkshire is one of the Treasure Houses of Britain and one of the finest examples of the harmonious concert of architecture, fine art and decorative arts in the English country house tradition. The house was made for Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, by the admirable triumvirate comprising the architect Robert Adam, the landscape gardener Capability Brown and the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, each the reigning kings of their respective art forms in the 1760s. One piece by Chippendale set the Baron Harewood back a cool £86 and was invoiced as "A very large rich Commode with exceeding fine Antique Ornaments curiously inlaid with various fine woods [...] with Diana and Minerva and their Emblems Curiously inlaid & Engraved".¹ This was the Diana and Minerva commode, one of Chippendale's greatest works and still on public display in Harewood's State Bedroom (HHTF:1997.163). Given the iconic status of this commode, firmly attributed to the greatest of English furniture makers during its eighteenth-century 'golden age', it is unsurprising that the strongly historicist popular taste at the fin-de-siècle sought to reproduce it in the present lot. In late Victorian and Edwardian interiors, the Arts and Crafts movement had brought a strong current of almost rustic simplicity to much of furniture design, but the admiration for the splendid furniture of the Georgian period remained fervent and was a visible presence in the grand interiors of the period. The quality of the reproduction on the present lot is impressive and an example of the strong calibre of craftsmen that were operating in many art furniture workshops of the late nineteenth century. Beyond the differences in colouring to the veneers, there are some divergences from the design of the original Minerva commode that are observable on this fin-de-siècle copy - the shallower dimensions mean the the side panels are thinner and so the original foliate square is more rectangular, and the typically English marquetry top is replaced with a marble one, more characteristic of French commodes in the period.

¹ Quoted in the catalogue entry for Harewood's digitised collection page, available at <https://mpleedsharewoodhousetrust.zetcom.app/v?mode=online#!m/Object/22217/form/ObjCatalogViewFrm> [accessed 20th October 2024]