SIR ARTHUR WILLIAM BLOMFIELD (1829-1899)
SIR ARTHUR WILLIAM BLOMFIELD’S REMEMBRANCE CABINET, CIRCA 1860
£12,600
Auction: 11 October 2023 at 10:00 BST
Description
painted and gilded oak, patinated metal fittings
Dimensions
85cm wide, 226.5cm high, 36cm deep
Provenance
Provenance - Mr & Mrs A. W. Blomfield
Private collection, Luxembourg
Northern France early 2010’s
Oscar Graf 2017
John Gilbert Getty (1968-2020)
with Paul Shutler
Footnote
The exterior of this cabinet is decorated with a choir of angels on the front. Above the door is the Latin motto:
‘Non vox sed votum, non musica chordula sed cor, Non clamans sed amans, cantat in aure Dei’.
Translated as:
‘Not the voice, but the desire, not the musical instrument, but the heart, not the crier, but the lover, singeth in the ear of God’.
Or
‘It is the duty of a devout mind to pray to God, not with the voice or the sound of the voice but with the devotion of the mind and with the faith of the heart’.
The interior right-hand panel:
Gules two swords in saltire argent hilts and pommels or (for the See of London) Per fess indented argent and azure a bend gules (for Blomfield) - ensigned with a Cross and a Crozier
For the Bishop of London and Blomfield’s late father Charles James Blomfield (1786-1857).
The interior left-hand panel:
Argent on a bend azure between two unicorn’s heads couped three lozenges of the field (for Smith) Crest. A demitiger rampant azure holding a broken sword proper
Motto- Vigilando et orando (By watching and praying).
For Blomfield’s late wife Caroline Harriet Smith (1840-1882)
Note: Until the re-attribution of this cabinet, domestic furniture designed by Blomfield numbered just one: a cupboard, first published by his friend Charles Locke Eastlake in Hints on Household Taste (p.XV, fourth edition 1878), of which a handful of examples exist.
Blomfield was not the only Gothic architect to make elaborate large-scale pieces for their home or office early on in their career. Richard Norman Shaw famously commissioned a cabinet that now resides in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum straight after he left the employ of George Edmund Street, and of course, the architect William Burges furnished his entire office and house with such cabinets.
The interior, later decorated following his wife’s death in 1882, is intended as a private memorial for his late father, the Bishop of London, Charles James Blomfield (1786-1857) and a memorial from a devoted husband to his late wife Caroline Harriet Smith (1840-1882).