The Finest Piece of Walnut Furniture of its Type
Fig. 2a. Detail of the cornice of the desk and bookcase, showing the carved and gilded decoration. Stukenberg photograph. At Sandridgebury, his country home near St. Albans, the British business executive Percival Griffiths (1862–1937) created an antiquarian oasis. The collection of early eighteenth-century English furniture formed by Griffiths, with advice from furniture scholar Robert W. Symonds (1889–1958), is considered the finest such collection assembled in the last century. Griffiths’s lesser-known, yet no less significant, collection of seventeenth-century needlework is detailed in Volume II of the book from which this excerpt is taken, English Needlework, 1600–1740. Dispersed at auction not long after Griffiths’s death, objects from his collections are today prized by collectors and the many museums in which they reside. The narrow, walnut-veneered, partially gilt desk and bookcase is considered the star piece in Griffiths’s collection, and has long been greatly admired by connoisseurs of English furniture (Figs. 1, 2, 2a). Research on the pre-Griffiths provenance of several pieces from the collection in preparation for this volume has brought to light new archival information on this remarkable piece, so that it is now possible to identify not only the original patron, the Bristol merchant Caleb Dickinson (1716–1783), but also the previously little-known cabinetmaker, John Unwin (b. 1695) of London, who made it. Fig. 1. Desk and bookcase by John Unwin (b. 1695), London, 1738. Walnut, gilding; height 84, width 29, depth 21 inches. Bryan Collection; photograph by Jamie Stukenberg. Fig. 2. A view of the desk and bookcase in Fig. 1 closed. Stukenberg photograph. Fig. 3. Portrait of Caleb Dickinson (1716–1783) by Thomas Frye (c. 1710–1762), 1738. Signed and dated “T. Frye