LATE 17TH CENTURY, COROMANDEL COAST

Boldly and profusely carved with flowers and foliage in low and high relief and made from costly ebony and fragrant sandalwood, this fine cabinet is both visually and olfactorily striking. Made in the Dutch colony of Batavia, present-day Jakarta, the cabinet combines a form European in origin with the precious materials of the Far East. Batavia was home to a large number of Chinese artisans and cabinet-makers in the 17th and 18th centuries and their influence may be seen on the form and style of the mounts of this cabinet. The luscious and lavish carving of plants in symmetrical swirling outlines is related to a Batavian clothes chest in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (TM-1295-27a) dated 1650-1700, as well as a cabinet sold with Zebregs & Röell, Amsterdam. The Zebregs & Röell cabinet shares with the present lot an arrangement of interior drawers carved in lower relief. This type of cabinet also shares characteristics with colonial furniture made on the Coromandel Coast. An ebony chair in the Ashmolean, Oxford (WA.OA180) that was reputedly given to Charles II as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry has similar shallow-relief carving and an ebony cabinet with related shape and carving, formerly in the collection of the Dukes of Hamilton, intriguing given the Hamilton-Beckford connection, was sold Sotheby’s London, 3 May 2018, lot 128.
There was a certain fascination with ebony for eighteenth and nineteenth century collectors, most notably Horace Walpole for Strawberry Hill and William Beckford for Fonthill Abbey, a Coromandel side table originally in the Walpole collection was sold from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection; Sotheby's, London, 25 October 2022, lot 53 (£30,000 including premium).