An outstanding provenance which came to light after many years helped make it a marriage made in heaven.
The cabinet had belonged to the Victorian artist Lord Frederic Leighton of Stretton, one of the greatest painters of high Victorian art.
The Leighton House Museum in Holland Park in London has acquired the piece, a cabinet on stand, for an undisclosed price from a Melbourne woman through the Melbourne art consultant Martin Gallon.
Marriages, real or imagined, are usually the bane of the antique market. Anyone who wants to rubbish a piece of late Georgian or Victoria furniture especially cedar, chimes up with "It is a marriage. Its top does not match its bottom."
To this, the late Len Barton, a doyen of the antique trade, would add "His (the speaker's) top doesn't match his bottom either."
In this instance it hardly matters little that the piece may be made up, for it comes from a good home.
That can make a marriage very respectable indeed.
The "concoction" also works very well because it came from wildly decorated Orientalist home.
Such was Leighton's studio.
It has now been placed in the spot in the house where it originally stood before the contents of the house were dispersed in 1896.
The cabinet disappeared until it was offered without any provenance at the Sotheby's sale titled The Decorator and Connoisseur, held in Melbourne on September 29, 1997.
The distinctly odd looking cabinet, offered with an estimate of $3500 to $5500 sold for $4025 to the present anonymous vendor.
The vendor, a woman, recently approached Mr Gallon for advice on what to do with it.
She told Mr Gallon that she had found an old catalogue in a drawer of the cabinet - the original catalogue of the Leighton House sale.
On its website Leighton House Museum also repeats the story of the catalogue find.
Sydney businessman John Schaeffer helped the The Leighton House Museum acquire the piece by partially funding it.
An exhibition of Schaeffer's High Victorian art is about to open at the house.
Leighton House has photographs of the cabinet in position in the house so it was helpful but not important that the piece is reported to have contained a catalogue of the original Leighton House contents in one of its drawers when last auctioned.
Without it of course, the provenance might have been lost for good.
It is not unknown for some rogues in the trade to introduce such catalogues, pages, or labels to support a provenance that may not be correct.
The house acknowledges on its web site that as a piece of furniture the cabinet is very odd.
The cabinet is now regarded as made up of elements of a South German chest of the late sixteenth century and possibly elements of an English chest of drawers of a century later, it says.
These were put together and a stand made for it probably in the 1860s or 1870s.
It says it does not yet know where and when Leighton acquired it.
But it claims that this is the most important piece of Leighton’s original furniture to have returned to the house
Sotheby's Australia catalogued it as "an unusual Italian Walnut ivory-inlaid marquetry cabinet on stand." It was illustrated in that catalogue.
But Sotheby's Australia was a very different entity at that time and it has not been possible to track down the circumstances of its auction.
Several members of the trade and auction industry remember the cabinet, but could not throw any further light upon it.
Another aspect of its provenance may have been lost.
Auctioneers have an annoying practice of listing sales as including works from the collection of so-and-so and not stating which are which except perhaps orally at the sale.
This piece was offered alongside furniture from the collection of "Mrs Len Voss Smith."
Voss Smith was an art publisher who helped set up Christie's Australia in the late 1960s.
He tried to encourage Australians to buy overseas art of the late 19th century early modern period albeit admittedly with an emphasis on the School of Paris.
He was just the kind of person who in his travels might have picked up such a piece but the catalogue gives no indication of this and memories in the industry of the piece in the antique traded have faded.