The plasterwork ceiling and frieze, with attenuated acanthus, paterae and urns, is a modern interpretation of Wyatt’s work of the late 1770s. The contemporary chimney-piece, with inlaid marble fluting and a central plaque of Diana the Huntress, was brought from a house in London, demolished in the 1930s.




Pictures
The tenebrous painting by Wilson has been identified from a bill in Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn’s possession at Wynnstay as A View in the Villa Chigi at Ariccia (18). George Lambert, one of the earliest painters of natural landscape in England, is represented here by a pair of classical views belonging to the category of copies and variants that he made of Claude and Gaspard Poussin (Nos 98, 99). The painting over the chimney-piece of Grasmere is by Ibbetson (8). Above the door are two pictures made of kingfisher feathers, in Hungmu frames, purchased at the Ionides sale, and either side of the fireplace are early works by Abraham Bloemaert (1590) of Bacchus and Ceres (Nos 181 and 184), which are unusual for their trompe l’oeil effect.

Bloemaert Bacchus (No.181)

Ceres (No.184)


Furniture and Ceramics
The dining-table has a mahogany top of remarkable figure banded with rosewood, and is of the Sheraton period, as are the leather-covered chairs, part of an exceptionally large set, commissioned by Thomas Chinton, 3rd Duke of Newcastle (d.1794), for Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, which was demolished in 1938. Reflecting the influence of Thomas Chippendale, this dining table relates closely to those supplied by Francis Gilding (d.1796) to Audley End, in Essex, in 1786.
 
The mahogany side-tables, set in the south bows of the room, created specifically to accommodate them in the 1930s, were originally made for Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn at No. 20 St James’s Square, to the designs of Robert Adam. Their honeysuckle friezes and central plaques, decorated with an amphora among vine-branches, are almost certainly the work of the specialist carvers Robert Ansell (working from 1767 to 1780) and Richard Collins, and show how brilliantly Adam had already formed his own neo-classical vocabulary by the late 1760s.
  
The porcelain on the left side-table is early eighteenth-century Imari ware, and that on the right is Qianlong. On the bow-fronted mahogany sideboard are a number of pieces of early eighteenth-century Chinese Export armorial porcelain, bearing the arms of Stephen Sulivan, a director of the East India Company and an ancestor of Lord Faringdon. The chandelier of about 1860 is English and a fine example of red flushed overlay.