This impressive Medieval chest is of a type called a Stollentruhe, named for the four sturdy oak Stollen, or posts, which raise it above the damp and dust of the floor. Westphalian examples of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are, however, less famous for their wood joinery than for the extensive and graphic wrought-iron strapwork that both reinforces their structure and decorates their surfaces. The dual use of wrought metal as both structure and ornament stretches back to the earliest known European cabinetmaking, appearing in the famous curlicue straps on two coffres at the Musée Carnavalet and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (inv. nos. MB113 and PE 982, respectively), dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and often considered among the works of French furniture.

This tradition is also inextricably linked with the art of the wrought-iron hinges and straps that decorated church and cathedral doors, many of which are now only known through nineteenth-century studies by scholars of metalwork such as Jakob Heinrich von Hefner-Alteneck and John Starkie Gardner. In Westphalia, wrought-iron fittings on both buildings and furniture often took the form of stylized branches, their ends terminating with leaves, fleurs-de-lys and lobed flowers, represented on our chest by the hexafoil terminals to the straps wrapping around the corners, as well as the veined and curving cruciform terminals at the corners its escutcheon. Its scheme of ironwork can be related to the pair of door-hinges from the Frauenkirche in Oberwesel, dated 1460-1480 and illustrated by J.H. von Hefner-Alteneck, reproduced in Decorative Ironwork of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Mineola, 1996, p. 33, also discussed in J.S. Gardner, Ironwork to the End of the Mediaeval Period, London, 1893, who remarks that these doors and their hardware were destroyed during a restoration in 1844. Also recorded by Hefner-Alteneck is a gable-topped casket, dated 1420-1440, bound by straps adorned with hexafoils and an incurved escutcheon very similar to the present chest, see op. cit., p. 53.

The function of these chests is not known with certainty, but it has been remarked that their considerable weight implies that they were meant for freestanding, but probably not portable, storage. No surviving imagery exists as a primary source to indicate where they were kept in domestic furnishings, but it has been suggested based on textual sources that many were dowry chests intended for elite wedded couples, likely meant to be kept in their bedchamber. For this argument, see the cataloguing to a related chest, its origin recorded as the town of Rheda-Wiedenbrück in the Westphalian Lowland, preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (acc. no. 900:2-1904). The catalogue also notes that its mounts may have been tinned or painted for visual effect. For examples quite similar to ours, see that sold Christie’s, London, 3 November 2011, lot 216; one offered Christie’s, Amsterdam, 22 September 2009, lot 216; and one sold Sotheby’s, London, 28 October 2008, lot 15; a particularly small example was sold Christie's, London, 26 June 2007, lot 255. A large tabletop coffer with a comparable scheme of wrought iron was sold Sotheby’s, London, 31 October 2007, lot 15.