ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS PISTOR, CIRCA 1690

An ‘oyster-veneered princeswood’ (kingwood) fall-front bureau or ‘escritoire’, that can be closely related to this cabinet on chest, was illustrated in Country Life (11 August 1950, p. 44) in one of a series of articles on Buxted Park, a house recently reconstructed by the architect Basil Lonides following a serious fire. The bureau, the location of which is currently unknown, was inscribed to the interior ‘Mr. Thomas Pistor, Ludgate Hill, London’ (C. Gilbert, The Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, p. 44). The Buxted escritoire and this cabinet share several features rendering an attribution to Pistor for the latter probable – the use of exotic kingwood or ‘princeswood’ veneers, the wavy decoration to the cushion drawer, the same geometric patterns to the inlay of the sides and to the drawers of the base, and the same pattern to the inlay of the front of the upper sections.

The relatively obscure name of the Moorfields and Ludgate Hill joiner and cabinetmaker Thomas Pistor – in fact two craftsmen, a father and son of the same name – first came to light in the announcement of Mr Pistor’s (junior) posthumous stock sale in the Spectator on 22 March 1711, which was published by R.W. Symonds in 1929. Their obscurity is in no small part due to the fact that neither worked for the Royal Household (A. Turpin, ‘Thomas Pistor, Father and Son, and Levens Hall’, Furniture History, 2000, pp. 43-60). Further research has revealed a documented commission by Thomas Pistor now at Levens Hall, Cumbria – in particular a suite of furniture made for James Grahme, a friend and member of the household of James, Duke of York (later King James II 1685-88), with bills dating from August 1684 to 1687 and probably relating to his London home or Bagshot Lodge, including for a ‘… Large wall(nut) flowerd Looking glass & Tables and Stands flowered... 09 10 00’, delivered in April 1685 (ibid, p. 44, figs. 1-3).