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 ...