A George III ormolu-mounted rosewood serpentine commode that is being offered for sale by Christie's in London next Thursday morning is baffling the auction house. The item, Lot 110 in an auction of important English and Irish furniture, carries a warehouse label for "R. Strahan & Co., L. Stephen's Green/Hogan Place Dublin."
Although this suggests the commode, decorated with pietra dura panels and marquetry, spent some time in this country, Christie's has been unable to discover for how long or where; the item of furniture is of exceptional quality and would, therefore, have belonged only in a major house. It is expected to fetch £50,000-£80,000 sterling. Robert Strahan was one of Dublin's principal cabinet makers and upholsterers during the first half of the 19th century. He inherited a furniture-making business established at the end of the previous century, and it grew to take in a number of premises around the city, including workshops on both Henry Street and Leinster Street. Having participated in many of the international exhibitions held in both London and Dublin during the second half of the last century, the company survived well into the present one. The commode must have passed through Strahan's hands at some date to acquire this label (It also carries the remains of another label, including the word "Picadilly".).
It may be at this point that the original top - probably marquetry-inlaid and brass-banded like that on another similar commode - was removed and the present piece of serpentine-fronted rectangular purple and yellow jasper marble substituted. Such alterations were common.
The commode itself is highly distinctive, thanks to its decoration of pietra dura landscape panels and oval ivory medallions carrying heads of Roman emperors. The landscapes, on both the central section and side drawers, were probably retrieved from an earlier Italian or German cabinet; the large plaque on the commode door shows a Neapolitan harbour with a lighthouse, while the smaller panels depict villas in wooded landscapes. All the plaques are ormolu-framed. Dividing the recessed centre from either side are pilasters decorated with ivory bust portraits intertwined with ribbon inlay; similar heads also embellished the contemporaneous Rockingham medal cabinet.
In 1771, the Duchess of Manchester employed Robert Adam to design a cabinet to display Italian landscape plaques of marble intarsia, which had been executed at the beginning of the 18th century in Florence. Serpentine and ormolu-enriched commodes of this kind began to be popular around 1760 thanks to the work of ebeniste Pierre Langlois Senior, who worked on London's Tottenham Court Road; a pair of his marble-topped commodes bearing some similarities to this one are now in Buckingham Palace. Christie's believe the commode being sold next week was most probably made by Pierre Langlois Junior, who succeeded to the business after his father died in 1767. The piece would have been placed in a bedroom apartment decorated in the Adamesque neo-classical style, which had come into favour; its Italianate scenes were especially suited to such surroundings. The question remains: what house in Ireland provided such a setting?
