Cabinet

The inner side of the folding front panel is framed by several lines of pearl strings. The surface is decorated with military badges, straight and curved swords, a halberd, a shield, a gun- barrel, a trumpet and armour among leaved foliage. Inside, 8 drawers enclose a compartment with a door. The front panels show rough sketches of remains of buildings with grassy mounds in the foreground. The outer sides are profiled. According to Hedvig Szabolcsi, the piece described above, together with two other properties of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts (Cat.Nos. 303,305), comes from the northern part of Hungary, although she adds that some further research in the archives is necessary. Mailer also emphasizes the importance of further research and registers the pieces as Southern German or Tyrolese' unless their Hungarian origin is proved by documents: "As photographs and descriptions show, there is no real difference between the cabinets of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts and some Tyrolese ones only a signature or a written record would suggest that there was a Hungarian branch of this type of Tyrolese or Southern-German Furniture". Literature of a later date also mentions the uncertain origin of the cabinet and assigns it cither to Tyrol or to Northern Hungary. The fact that it is now known to have been purchased before World War II in Frankfurt am Main by Mr Endre Morvay would seem to support Mailer's view, since two of the intarsia cabinets in the Museum of Applied Arts can be shown to have been purchased in Germanic territories.