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Tea chest

Ref: 1673
  • Maker

    Manufactured by Abraham Roentgen (1711-93)

  • Detail

    Kingwood, with brass handle and engraved escutcheon; the interior partially lined with red velvet, and retaining the original gilded tin [?] caddies

    15 .5 (excluding handle) x 22 x 14 cm

    Anglo-German, circa 1735-50

  • Literature

    Christopher Gilbert & Tessa Murdoch, John Channon and brass-inlaid furniture 1730-1760, New Haven and London, 1993 (for a discussion of related tea chests)

    Wolfram Koeppe, ‘A Tea Chest by Abraham Roentgen at Frogmore House’, Furniture History, XLIII (2007), pp. 161-70, for a discussion of tea chests of this form by Abraham Roentgen.

  • Collection

    Private collection

  • Note

    Although lacking an early provenance, Wolfram Koeppe has confirmed that this tea chest is the work of Abraham Roentgen.  The design and details of manufacture, for example the dummy ‘catch’ on the opposite side to the internal spring mechanism, corresponds with examples in the ‘English Manner’ made by Abraham Roentgen in Herrnhaag during the 1740s, following his return from England, where he worked with the London cabinetmaker William Gomm (see, for example, Koeppe, fig. 1 – also veneered in kingwood). But attention should also be drawn to English chests of the same form, one veneered in walnut and the other in mahogany (Gilbert & Murdoch, pls 167 and 168).

    The engraved escutcheon on the present example is characteristic of others found on Roentgen (and other’s) chests, while the handle appears to be identical to one in a Birmingham metal work pattern-book (Koeppe, fig. 4).