Boxhouse Antiques

An English Chippendale period carved giltwood mirror, mid-18th century, ca 1755. Flanked, in a delicately shaped frame, by carved fruit, bold C scrolls and foliage: very typical of ...

A fine and rare pair of English Regency-period mahogany sofa tables of elegant design ca 1811 – 1820. Note the beautifully-figured, matched mahogany & satinwood tops supported on ‘c...

A good pair of English late-17th century walnut chairs. Charles II period, circa 1680. Lovely waxed patinated surfaces and colour. The upri...

A rare, small, English George I / II- period walnut bureau bookcase/ cabinet with a moulded swan-neck pediment. Circa 1727-1730. The bevelled mirror plate has a candle slide below. ...

An elegant early 18th-century red walnut armchair, circa 1730. This smart and useful desk chair (or 'occasional' chair) has a slip-in seat covere...

A rare Chinese polychrome Coromandel or ‘Bantam Ware’ lacquer casket or table cabinet, Kangxi period (1661-1722). Circa 1700. This fine small Chinese export lacquer fitted casket is decorated overall with polychrome incised decoration. Opening with two doors revealing a red interior with fitted drawers and a hinged rising top. In superb, almost entirely original condition, retaining its vivid colours and fine details with courtiers in a pavilion and on horseback amidst foliage and formal palace gardens. The small bun-type feet are historical replacements. Interestingly bearing an antique-script inventory #25 and A I on the base. Nb. Bantamwork or Coromandel lacquer, not to be confused with ‘japanning’, is the term applied to decoration that is cut into a layer of gesso and then lacquered in colours. Much of the lacquer was transhipped from China through Coromandel in India, or the Dutch colony Batavia, Java. References: Coromandel lacquer or ‘Bantamwork’, with its characteristic incised decoration, was made in Henan province in northern China from the latter part of the Ming dynasty and exported to Europe from the end of the 17th century through the East India Company’s and VOC trading posts on the Coromandel coast of India. The technique consisted in overlaying a base of wood with a series of increasingly fine white clays and fibrous grasses. Over this surface, lacquer was applied and polished before the design was incised and the hollowed out portions filled with colour and gilt and finished with a clear lacquer to protect it. Although John Stalker and George Parker used the term ‘Bantamwork’, the contemporary layman usually called it ‘cutt-work’, ‘cutt Japan’ or ‘hollow burnt Japan’. Stalker and Parker discuss two types of ‘Bantam-work’ – flat and incised – in their Treatise on Japanning and Varnishing of 1688, noting that it ‘was done in colorus mix’t with a gum water’. They also considered that it was ‘almost obsolete, and out of fashion, out of use and neglected….’ although admitted that ‘it was very pretty, and some are more fond of it, and prefer it to the other…’. This casket/ table cabinet now on offer is related to one formerly with Malletts and illustrated in A. Bowett, 'English Furniture 1660-1714: From Charles II to Queen Anne', Woodbridge, 2002, p. 150, plates 5:9. A much larger closely-related Bantam work coffer with rising lid was offered in the ‘Asian Art in Cologne’ sale lot 114 on 11th December 2021. Estimated @ £60,000 – £79,000. Mme de Pompadour, mistress to King Louis XV from 1745 to 1751, was an avid collector and admirer of Chinese Coromandel or Bantam work and was probably largely responsible for the very high prices recorded for such pieces, sometimes 10 times or more the price of ordinary furniture of equivalent quality. A Coromandel cabinet...

A fine pair of mid-eighteenth century carved mahogany library armchairs in the manner of Robert Manwaring, ca 1760. Crisply carved, of superb colour ...

A fine and rare English chinoiserie-decorated occasional table, circa 1820. The subject matter is extremely rare in that it depicts Europeans in exotic oriental robes. One is seated with an opium pipe; displayed in a polychrome romantic tropical environment with pavilions, rockwork, trellising, foliage, palms, with a peacock and HoHo bird at their feet. Note the very rare and charming depiction of these men with beards. In over 65 years we have never encountered a japanned table showing this European feature. Raised on a gilded, reeded, partly-ebonised column rising from a stylised platform base and spreading, gilded animal...

A rare Chinese Guan Yin figure, early Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Beautifully painted carved wood retaining a significant amount of its apparently or...

An outstanding and rare, 17th-century Japanese mulberrywood gilt-lacquer cabinet raised on a later stand. This fine and exceptional two-door, gilt-heightened cabinet - reputedly in mountain mulberry wood...

A rare 18th-century mahogany Cockpen open armchair of very good quality. George III period, ca 1760. This antique armchair is in mahogany with a chinoiserie open-fretwork (or Chines...

An English Regency-period chinoiserie penwork occasional table, circa 1815. The unusual rectangular gentle-serpentine top profusely decorated, and centred by a chinoiserie scene of ...