The cupboard is currently on view at Christie's South Kensington branch, and, of course, I couldn't resist heading down for a shufti. The staff are extremely helpful; photos allowed, as was opening it up and poking about, missus:
I asked about the vendor: naturally, they can't divulge identities, but they did say that it came via a friend of the housekeeper at Kenwood. I'd guess Dot got it when Cynthia cleaned the place out, and then passed it on to her mate.
The interior shows some paint and the holes used to fix it to the wall. Riveting:
Pleasingly, they have left it entirely "as is", including cobwebs, spider corpse and, intriguingly, some flakes of tobacco on the lower shelf:
6-800 pounds seems a bit low to me. Having said that, there's a recession on, so who knows?
