Fall-front secretaire, c.1829 (Japanese and Chinese lacquer, gilt-metal mounts)

Isabel Lady Hertford, who must have commissioned this piece, had been a confidante of the Prince of Wales - later George IV - from 1806 to 1820. Furnishing Windsor castle in the 1820s, he had a number of Oriental lacquer cabinets altered or provided with giltwood stands; the Temple Newsam Secretaire is a superb example of this exotic Regency taste. But the components from which it was made - two or three Japanese lacquer cabinets and side panels of Chinese lacquer - illustrate the much earlier European taste for importing lacquer: the cabinets were made for the export market c. 1640-90. The superb quality Japanese export lacquer columns are, like those on the piano, porbably from the Huis ten Bosch balustrade made in 1640. As few as seven might have been needed for these two pieces of furniture: another five embellish a French cabinet at present in Paris. The tiny landscapes and figurative scenes in ogee-shaped cartouches on the columns may relate to episodes in classic Japanese literary works: one derives from a romantic story - the Field of Musashi - in the Tales of Ise, which was compiled in about 950AD.