These handsome commodes, with lustrous panels of satinwood displaying ‘antique’ panels based on d’Hancarvilles’s engravings of Hamilton’s celebrated collection of Greek vases, are the quintessence of sophisticated Grand Tour taste and were likely executed by the celebrated Golden Square cabinet-makers Ince and Mayhew.

THE COMMISSION
They were almost certainly commissioned by Thomas Brand for the Hoo in Hertfordshire. Brand was a politician and landowner who in 1770 inherited the Hoo from his father, also named Thomas. The Hoo had been built in 1661 for Jonathan Keate, before being acquired in 1732 by the Brand family. The elder Thomas Brand moved in sophisticated circles and was a close friend of Horace Walpole with whom he traveled to Italy on the Grand Tour and who in 1743 commissioned for Brand an extraordinary cabinet to display his collection of classically inspired ivory medallions to match one of his own (the Brand cabinet was sold Christie’s, London, 5 July 2012, lot 5 for £1,217,250, and is now in the Art Institute of Chicago). Brand commissioned the fashionable court architect Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam’s notable rival, to remodel the Hoo, and the landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to redesign the gardens, which had remained little changed since the seventeenth century. Given his passion for antiquity, it is tempting to think that the elder Thomas Brand might himself have commissioned these commodes, but given the fact that d’Hancarville’s engravings of Hamilton’s vases were not initially published until at least 1766-7, just a few years before the elder Brand’s death, and that stylistically these commodes, with their restrained, rectilinear outline, are more likely to date from the 1770s, it is more likely that they were commissioned by his son, no doubt inspired by his father’s archaeological zeal.

THE ATTRIBUTION
The elegant ornament of these commodes reveals the antique Etruscan fashion popularized by the architect Robert Adam (d. 1792) and his furniture patterns in The Works of Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1773. The central panels to the front are taken directly from Greek vases in Sir William Hamilton's collection, which was acquired in 1772 by the British Museum and published in Baron d'Hancarville's Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities, Naples, 1766/7. The front panel on one commode depicts Bacchus and his lover Ampelus, personification of the grapevine (d’Hancarville, vol II, pl. 40), while the front on the other depicts Volumnia, mother of the Roman general Coriolanus, his wife Hersilia and Valeria, sister of Valerius Publicola (d’Hancarville vol. I, pl V, p. 1764) Similar large-scale figural medallions from this source feature on furniture attributed to the Golden Square firm of John Ince and William Mayhew, one of the leading cabinet-making firms of the period and perhaps the most accomplished rivals to Chippendale. Furniture in this idiom from documented Ince and Mayhew commissions includes notably a pair of corner cupboards and a commode en suite at Badminton (illustrated in L. Wood, Catalogue of Commodes, London, 1994, p.199, figs.187- 188 and pp.230-232, figs.218-222). A further related demilune commode with classical figure medallion is illustrated in P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1924, vol.II, p.143, fig.27 (probably that sold from the collection of Bunny Mellon, erroneously described as nineteenth century, Sotheby's, New York, 21 November 2014, lot 1201).