The commode, designed for a mirrored window-pier, has a black 'portor' marble top and lion monopodia feet, and is conceived in the French 'antique' manner popularised by George Bullock (d. 1818). Its 'Grecian' stepped plinth is accompanied by bronze reliefs of an 'Apollo' palm-flowered tablet and 'Grecian' laurel-wreaths, and it can be related to a brass-inlaid 'commode' pedestal that was designed in 1816 by Bullock and the classical scholar J.B.S. Morritt for Sir Walter Scott's Shakespeare bust (C. Wainwright et al, George Bullock: Cabinet-maker, London, 1988, no. 15). Bullock's work, while trading at the Mona Marble Works, Oxford Street and at Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was featured in 1816 in Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of Arts. One of his related brass-inlaid commodes, also with portor marble top, is now in the Birmingham City Museum (Wainwright, op. cit., no. 42). The same palm-flowered tablet also features on a closely related commode that was formerly in the Royal Collection and is likely to have been supplied to King George IV. The latter was sold anonymously, in these Rooms, 25 September 1997, lot 169.