The courts and nobility of Europe had long been fascinated by the exoticism and mystery of the Orient by the time the present bookcase was made in c. 1720. The huge growth in trade through the East India Company in the seventeenth century brought silks, lacquer wares, tea and porcelain to England, preciptating a huge desire amongst the wealthy for a taste of these extraordinary goods, which cabinets such as the present example, magnificently ‘japanned’ in imitation of Chinese lacquer, provided in some style. 

This example captures the characteristically fantastical, pastoral vision of life in the East, with golden, robed figures moving amongst birds and luscious flowers and grand pagaodas resting beside waterways beneath trees. 

This cabinet is a model that had only been recently introduced at this time, superseding scriptors or escritoires.¹ Inventories from the period reveal that such desks-and-bookcases as these were placed in bedchambers, dressing rooms and closets, to be used for storage of clothes, writing and dressing, the doors serving as looking glasses.

This example is the classic form, most sought after by collectors. It is a double-dome bureau-bookcase, a more labour intensive and costly model to produce than its flat-topped peers. 

The cabinet doors open to reveal a fitted interior of drawers, shelves and a central cupboard, above candle slides and the bureau fitted with further drawers, pigeon holes, marbled pilasters enclosing secret compartments and an eighteenth-century blue silk writing surface. Such cabinet interiors, with their many compartments and shelves, afforded contemporaries ample opportunity to display their complemetary collections of imported blue and white porcelain.

An extremely similar double-domed scarlet and gilt example with comparable decoration and almost identical interior arrangements, though arguably less acomplished, detailed and well-proportioned than the present cabinet, was supplied c. 1720 to John Meller at Erddig Hall, Wales.² The cabinet remains at Erddig and is attributed to John Belchier, who supplied a series of important articles to Meller between 1722 and 1726, and remains a possible author of the present cabinet. Indeed, its quality certainly suggests a leading London firm. 

¹ A. Bowett, English Furniture 1660-1714 From Charles II to Queen Anne (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 220

² A. Bowett, Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740 (Woodbridge, 2009), p. 61, pl. 2:16