A Baroque travel cabinet
An oblong box made from walnut, conifer, poplar, various fruit woods and ivory. The lid, sides and front face decorated with geometric low reliefs. The interior fitted with eight drawers surrounding a central compartment, all inner faces and the outer door finely inlaid in ivory – the door of the inner compartment with a depiction of Saint Andrew, the drawers with birds in scrolling tendrils, the inner face of the door with a depiction of Orpheus making music. With an etched, wrought iron lock plate. With traces of earlier insect damage. H 32.5, W 39, D 27.5 cm.
Alpine / South German or North Italian, late 16th / early 17th C.
This depiction of Orpheus can be found in similar form in Virgil Solis' engravings of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The cabinet housed in the National Museum in Stockholm, for which Heinrich Kreisel proposed an origin in northern Germany or Dresden, is decorated with similarly fine ivory tendrils.
Provenance
Auctioned by Sotheby's London on 6th December 2011, lot 40.
South German private collection.
Literature
Cf. Kreisel, Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels, vol. 1, Munich 1968, illus. 182 and 379.
Cf. cat. Wunderwelt: Der Pommersche Kunstschrank, Augsburg 2014, no. 58, for a smaller, contemporaneously produced cabinet with similar ivory inlays attributed to Ulrich Baumgartner.