Antique Victorian Flame Mahogany Partners Pedestal Desk c.1850 19th C

Sir Robert Ludwig Mond (collector; scientist/engineer;1867 - 1938)

3 Cavendish Square, London W (in 1935). 9 Cavendish Square, London W1 (in 1938).

Research chemist, company director, and art collector; son of the German chemist and industrialist Ludwig Mond (q.v). Worked with Lord Kelvin at Glasgow University. Director of, among others, Natal Ammonium Ltd, Brimsdown Lead Co and Mond Nickel Co Ltd, Clydach. Followed a similar career to his father, but also recorded tombs in Egypt. His archive of notebooks, etc. from Egypt are in the Griffith Institute, Oxford (www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/gri/4records.html). He bequeathed his extensive collection of Egyptian and Classical antiquities to a large number of museums across Britain (BM, Ashmolean, Birmingham, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, plus his old club, the Savile Club), Canada (Royal Ontario Museum, Vancouver), Australia (Adelaide, Kyancutta) and the Institute of Jamaica; this division was carried out by his Trustees through the solicitors Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan & Vandyk, with The British Museum receiving the first choice (ME Archives: Correspondence and Reports to Trustees, 1939). A bronze statuette of Mond by Edouard Lanteri, dated 1912, is exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG 5316).

Mahogany 
is probably one of the largest ‘families’ of hardwood, having many different varieties within its own species.

Mahogany has been used for centuries in ship building, house building, furniture making etc and is the core structure of just about every 19th century vanity box, dressing case or jewellery box. It became more of a Victorian trend to dress Mahogany with these decorative veneers, such as Rosewood, Kingwood, Burr Walnut and Coromandel, so that the actual Mahogany was almost hidden from view.

Mahogany itself is a rich reddish brown wood that can range from being plain in appearance to something that is so vibrant, figured and almost three dimensional in effect. 

Although Mahogany was most often used in its solid form, it also provided some beautifully figured varieties of veneer like ‘Flame’ Mahogany and ‘Fiddleback’ Mahogany (named after its preferred use in the manufacture of fine musical instruments).

Cuban Mahogany was so sought after, that by the late 1850′s, this particular variety became all but extinct.