One of the finest surviving examples of its type, this chest exhibts the very best quality cabinet-work and materials. The top is quartered and cross and feather-banded. A slide sits above two short drawers simulated as three and three long graduated drawers, similarly banded. One side has a fitted pen and ink drawer and the other a simulated one to match, each above a carrying handle. The back of the chest is veneered and the whole is raised on bracket feet. The escutcheons and shilling plate handles are the original.

The carcase cockbeads and thin-railed second-phase construction suggest a date of 1730-40. As characteristic of chests after 1730 until 1740, the top features an ovolo-bead moulding around the whole edge and the base an ovolo base moulding.

The slide and fitted pen drawer indicate that the chest was intended for writing as well as use as a dressing table, and the veneered back that it was possibly for placement away from the wall. The four re-entrant corners are a refinement. 

The chest has passed through the hands of several notable connoisseurs of English furniture, one of them the important dealer Ronald A. Lee and another the private collector John Parry, who held it in such high regard that it was not sold in his first collection sale at Christie’s in April 1997 but retained to form ‘the nucleus of the present collection’, sold at Christie’s in March 2010.