Museum accessions

The home of the Ingram family for three hundred years, Temple Newsam House, in Leeds, has one of the finest collections of decorative arts in England, much of it once owned by the Ingram family. Recently, two extraordinary nineteenth-century case pieces have been added to the collection, a secretaire (illustrated at right) evidently commissioned for the Blue Drawing Room by Isabella, Marchioness of Hertford (born Isabella Anne Ingram in 1759), and a cabinet (illustrated below) made by the distinguished Leeds furniture-making firm of Hummerston Brothers.

A woman of enormous taste and style, Lady Hertford inherited Temple Newsam on the death of her mother in 1807, and over the years before her own death in 1834 redecorated many of its principal rooms. Between about 1827 and 1829 she created the Blue Drawing Room in the south wing. Its furnishings included a cabinet piano made in 1829 by John Broadwood and Sons of London that appears to incorporate elements from what may have been the earliest substantial European commission of Japanese export lacquer--a balustrade ordered in Holland in 1639 by Amalia van Solms, the wife of the stadholder Frederik Hendrik, and installed a few years later in Huis ten Bosch, her summer palace near The Hague. Close examination of the secretaire reveals that the pilasters that flank the upper and lower sections are from the same balustrade, and as both pieces are visible in a photograph of the Blue Drawing Room taken in 1894, it is impossible not to conclude that the secretaire was made for the room at the same time as the piano.

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The incorporation of the columns is clearly but one element of the taste for oriental lacquer evident in the secretaire, which also includes components from two other Japanese lacquer cabinets as well as panels of Chinese lacquer. It bears a striking resemblance to a cabinet at Windsor Castle, made about 1828 by the firm of Nicholas Morel and George Seddon, a celebrated London cabinetmaking and upholstering company that worked almost exclusively for the royal family. The cabinet at Windsor was commissioned by George IV, who as Prince of Wales had been among the first to champion the taste for furniture incorporating oriental lacquer, initially for Carlton House and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and later for Windsor.

By the mid-1860s, the appeal of the oriental had morphed into an Anglo-Japanese style promoted first by Edward William Godwin, then popularized through William Watt's trade catalogue Art Furniture, from Designs by E. W. Goodwin, published in London in 1877. One of the most distinguished manufacturers to produce furniture in the style was Hummerston Brothers of Leeds, which had been founded in 1839 as a furnishings and decorating emporium and expanded into cabinetmaking and upholstery in 1869. Its clients included the best families in Yorkshire, including the Ingrams, for whom they decorated several bedrooms and dressing rooms in 1886.

In 1976 a descendant, a Miss Hummerston, presented Temple Newsam House with a portfolio of about a hundred of the firm's design drawings, including one that, except for minor differences in decoration, is virtually identical to the cabinet illustrated here. Hummerston's printed label, glued on to the back of the cabinet, is inscribed with the names Smollit and Earnshaw, presumably referring to the craftsmen who worked on the cabinet.

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