ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS CHIPPENDALE OR THOMAS CHIPPENDALE JUNIOR, CIRCA 1775-80

This impressive architectural clothes-press, with its arched panelled doors displaying superb flame mahogany veneers, belongs to a small but distinct group of neo-classical mahogany case furniture supplied to Harewood House by Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) and Thomas Chippendale Junior (1749-1822). The first reference to Chippendale Senior’s work at Harewood is a letter from him to Sir Rowland Winn dating to 1767. Three decades later, the final entry in the Chippendale accounts refers to the furnishing of the Gallery in 1797. The body of furniture executed by the firm over this period was vast, including wealth of mirrors, tables, seat and case furniture for the state rooms, family apartments, basements and servant’s quarters, rewarding visitors with ‘a show of magnificence and art as the eye hath seldom seen’.

The earliest iteration of the present form at Harewood dates to circa 1769-70. A finer piece, it is embellished with anthemion reserves the panelled doors, stiff leaf carving and crisp guilloche mouldings typical of Thomas Chippendale’s oeuvre (see P. Macquoid, A History of English Furniture: The Age of Satinwood, London, 1908, fig. 134 and C. Gilbert, The Life & Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. I, p. 195, fig. 1). The present clothes-press, apparently originally with flanking wings, does not appear in the surviving Chippendale account covering the period 30 December 1772 to 7 June 1777 - nor is it readily identifiable among the numerous entries for ‘cloaths’ presses or wardrobes in the 1795 inventories of Harewood House or the families London home on Portman Street - and is perhaps more likely to be the work of Thomas Chippendale Junior. In 1776, Chippendale Senior moved away from the workshop in St Martin’s Lane to Kensington, in effect relinquishing the day-to-day running of the firm to his then partner Thomas Haig and Chippendale Junior. The cabinet-work of the present lot is of typically outstanding quality and the historically sensitive nature of the design, with its Vitruvian scroll waist moulding and restrained dentil tablet frieze sit more closely with Chippendale Junior’s idiom.

Edwin Lascelles died in 1795 and Chippendale Junior went on to supply his heir Edward Lascelles, later 1^st Earl Harewood, with a fine pair of breakfront clothes-presses in 1796 (see J. Goodison, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale Junior, China, 2017, p. 413, fig. 274 and for a related bookcase from the 1790s see op. cit., p. 301, fig. 84).

For a related mahogany cabinet, headed with richly carved scrolling acanthus brackets by Thomas Chippendale Senior circa 1770, see Thomas Chippendale, 300 Years; Christie’s, London, 5 July 2018, lot 12 (£344,750). For a further cabinet which is comparable see that acquired by the Leeds Museum for Temple Newsam House, Leeds from Norman Adams (see C. Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, London, 1978, vol. I, p. 54, fig. 38).