Painted at the exterior with figures of Classical gods and goddesses, the two doors opening to sixteen drawers surrounding two smaller doors, their fronts painted with scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the smaller doors opening to four shelves framed by a painted proscenium, on a gilt- and silvered wood stand carved with openwork scrolling acanthus, the apron centering a putto, on lion-paw feet, the stretcher and reinforcement at the upper interior of the stand later, the drawers numbered in pencil, an old gilder's label to the stand printed S. NILSSON, Förgyllare, Södergatan 19, MALMÖ, Södergatan 19
73¹⁄₄ in. (186.5 cm.) high, 56¹⁄₂ in. (143.5 cm.) wide, 23¹⁄₂ in. (60 cm.) deep

The Barons von Blixen-Finecke, Näsbyholms Slott, Skåne, Sweden.
By descent to Lovisa Louise Clara Margareta, Baroness von Blixen-Finecke (1899-1968), Stockholm.
Dr. Bjorn F.W. Holmgren (1901-1971), her husband.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 29 October 2003, lot 218.

A. Roosval, Svenska Slott och Herresäten vid 1900-Talets Början, Stockholm, 1920-1923, p. 83.

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Lot Essay

This strikingly graphic cabinet, painted with no fewer than eighteen scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, is recorded in the collection of Näsbyholms Slott, the ancestral seat of the Swedish Barons von Blixen-Finecke in Scania. The Näsbyholm house was damaged by fire in 1955 and rebuilt two years later, but an earlier photograph survives to document the cabinet's home in the old house, recording it standing in the winter garden in 1919. Although the cabinet's exact origin remains unclear, it is listed in the family's inventories as Dutch and bears a distinctly Netherlandish style of painting, linking it to a tradition of seventeenth-century Northern European polychrome-decorated case furniture. While many of these pieces were painted with elaborate bouquets and still lives, others, including the present, were painted with a broad assembly of figural scenes, each filling a drawer front. For two smaller Flemish examples, each on a later stand, see the Antwerp example sold by Christie's, London, 1 June 2020, lot 263 and the example painted with a combination of Classical and Biblical scenes, sold by Christie's, London, 19 May 2021, lot 71.