A William and Mary Oak China Display Cabinet, Circa 1700

David Drey, King's Road, London, 27 June 1966;

Collection of Simon Sainsbury, Woolbeding House, West Sussex;

Christie's London, 18 June 2008, lot 17;

Where acquired by the present collector.

The British philanthropist and businessman Simon Sainsbury (1930-2006), chairman of and heir to his family's eponymous supermarket empire, assembled an important collection of Impressionist and Modern paintings and antique English furniture at Woolbeding, an 18th-century manor house in West Sussex originally built for the MP Sir Richard Mill, 5th Baronet (1689-1760) and subsequently acquired in 1791 by Lord Robert Spencer (d.1831), youngest son of the 3rd Duke of Marlborough, through whose descendants the property passed to the Lascelles family before being transferred to the National Trust in the late 1940s. Sainsbury leased the house with his civil partner Stewart Grimshaw and spent several decades collaborating with prominent landscape architects to transform the gardens into an 'English Arcadia', now open to the public. Following Sainsbury's death, important works by artists including Gainsborough, Monet, Degas, Gauguin and Francis Bacon were bequeathed to the National and Tate Galleries, and the remaining collection was sold at auction in 2008.