A Victorian carved oak partner's desk, circa 1855, designed by A.W.N. Pugin and made by Gillows

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright, Pugin: A Gothic Passion, New Haven, 1994, p.233;

P. Atterbury, ed., A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, New Haven, 1995;

J. Cooper, Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors; From the Gothic Revival to Art Nouveau, London, 1998, p.45;

C. Gere and M. Whiteway, Nineteenth-century Design from Pugin to Mackintosh, London, 1993, pp.54-55;

M. H. Port, The Houses of Parliament, p. 293, fig. 194.

This desk model, as Jeremy Cooper notes, was produced by Gillows throughout the 1850s and ‘60s for general sale, precisely because it was one of the “plainer” designs at the Palace of Westminster and better suited to ordinary domestic life. Through the popular dissemination of the desk used by the Prime Minister himself into the houses of the everyman, the social, moral and civic values associated with the Neo-Gothic style were able to filter downwards into the life of the nation more broadly.

Variations on this design can be found in several rooms within the Palace of Westminster, but the present lot corresponds to inventory number POW 05413. The desk is clearly visible in a photograph of the Prime Minister’s Room taken circa 1905 that belongs to the Farmer Collection in the House of Lords Record Office. For one of Pugin’s more elaborate variations on this pedestal desk form, compare inv. POW 10133, originally made for the House of Lords Library.