A set of George III pine room panelling - Designed by Sir William Chambers, circa 1765

Comprising a pair of door frames with egg-and-dart border and ionic half pilasters surmounted by a modillion cornice with swag tablet flanked by paterae and a pair of panelled doors with egg-and-dart mouldings, a quantity of Greek-key carved dado mouldings, a quantity of ribbon and reed wainscot mouldings, a quantity of egg-and-dart cornice mouldings, a quantity of dado panelling, restorations and replacements including most of the carved ribbon-and-reed wainscot moulding, the reverse of the egg-and-dart mouldings incised '1', '11', '111', inscribed in pencil 'W Young'
Two door frames 98 in. (249 cm.) high; 73 in. (185.5 cm.) wide; 8 in. (20.5 cm.) deep
Two doors 78½ x 39 in. (199.5 x 99 cm.)
Estimate: £15,000-30,000

Provenance: Installed at 56 Berners Street, London, W1 under the direction of Sir William Chambers.
Bought from Nicholas Gifford-Mead, Pimlico Road, London, 1999.

Notes: The elegantly carved Ionic door-cases with Apollonian laurelled tablets in George III French antique manner and mouldings en suite, were designed in the late 1760s for a Parlour at no. 56 Berners Street by the Rome-trained court architect Sir William Chambers (d. 1796). Their festoons of ribboned laurels with 'Grecian' pendant baguettes, relate to the ornament of a chimneypiece featured in Chambers' Treatise on the Decorative part of Civil Architecture, 1759 (pl. 46, fig. 9). And, together with the palms wrapping the door-frames' echinus mouldings, they serve to evoke Apollo's Mount Parnassus triumph as poetry-deity; while such decorative elements also harmonised with the room's stuccoed ceiling (J. Harris and M. Snodin, Sir William Chambers, London, 1997, fig. 198). The latter's central medallion compartment was mosaiced with beribboned laurels tied to a reeded medallion frame and wreathing a palm-flower, that recall a temple ceiling pattern published in Robert Wood's, Ruins of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra, 1753. The doors' antique-fluted pilasters echoed those of the room's Ionic pillared marble chimneypiece, whose frieze tablet likewise displayed a ribboned garland. The door entablatures are also flowered in Grecian ribbon-frets, and echo the Grecian fret that wreaths the room's chair-rail, alongside an Etruscan-fashioned 'Venus' pearl-string. The same patterned doors were introduced at another house in Berners Street (no. 21), which adjoined that of Chambers' partners, the plasterer Thomas Collins (d. 1830) at number 20.

Christie's. Furniture & Carpets Including Two Private Collections. 24 January 2008. 8 King Street, St. James's, London