MID 17TH CENTURY, THE STANDS 19TH CENTURY

This pair of Flemish cabinets are shown in the famous 1880 painting The House Builders by Sir Frank Dicksee, P.R.A. (1853-1928), depicting Sir William Welby-Gregory, fourth baronet (1829-1898), and his wife Victoria, only daughter of the Earl of Wharncliffe. Identifiable with their ebony ripple-moulding, tortoiseshell panels, and brass handles, one of the cabinets is depicted behind Lady Victoria as the couple are shown poring over A.W. (later Sir Arthur) Blomfield's model and drawings for Denton Manor. When the picture was exhibited the house had been in progress a year, and it would be completed four years later.

The dating of the painting before the construction of Denton raises the prospect that these cabinets had been in Harlaxton Manor as the reconstruction of Sir William's family seat was initiated primarily to provide a home for the pictures, furniture and other works of art inherited from his father's cousin, Gregory Gregory of Harlaxton. The picture also indicates that the Flemish cabinets were very much in the personal taste of Lady Victoria, who belonged to the group known as 'The Souls', an aristocratic coterie devoted to intellectual and artistic pursuits and disdainful of the more worldly pleasures indulged in by the Prince of Wales's Marlborough House set. Like Lady Victoria's dress, the furniture and decorative arts in the picture, including the present lot, appeal to cultured aesthetic style preeminent among the Welbys' social set. In front of the Flemish cabinet is an ebony chair of a seventeenth-century Goanese type, generally thought of by the Victorians as 'Elizabethan'. Behind her are an old lacquered cabinet and a large blue porcelain vase, the latter the quintessential symbol of Aesthetic sensibility since Rossetti, Whistler and other trendsetters had pioneered the taste for 'blue-and-white' in the 1860s.