The Yellow Drawing Room

Always called the Yellow Room, it echoes the tradition of the upstairs drawing room in London town houses. Most, if not all the furniture dates from the Regency period and is rosewood or simulated rosewood, inlaid or applied with brass.

This room contains some exceptional furniture; in particular a suite of three tables, comprising a sofa table and a pair of fold-over top tables, one for 'tea' and the other for 'cards', placed to either side of the chimney breast: all rosewood, gently faded, inlaid with lacquered gilded brass and in superb, original condition. On each of them are pieces of Wedgwood black basalt's ware, notably a pair of ewers, sacred to Bacchus and Neptune (wine and water), dated 1871.

On the mantelshelf is an exceptional pair of ormolu and malachite candelabra (c.1810) from the collection of Lady Monahan and a pair of Flight, Barr and Barr period Worcester urns (c.1815).

Among other notable furniture in this room is a small double-sided mobile bookstand from the collection of the newspaper proprietor Sir Keith Murdoch, the auction invoice pasted on the base showing it cost £60 in 1953. The sofa and armchairs, again Regency, are excellent examples of their period.

The decorative strength of the room is enhanced by one of the most exotic pieces in the Collection, a Blackamoor console table and looking glass, Venetian in origin, dating to about 1820. Johnston often displayed this favourite console and looking glass at his shop where, if the rest of the stock was a little tired, it certainly livened things up. Of course its very high price impressed, as did the fact that it was always "sold".

There are also a late 18th-century Adam-style marble chimney-piece and a remarkable clock, thought to represent The Gilded African (so called because of his habit of wearing gold bullion epaulettes on his uniforms), François-Dominique Toussaint (L'Ouverture), the Saviour of Haiti. The clock is an automaton and has a head and eyes which move. It is standing on a Regency brass inlaid cabinet. Occasionally this clock is in the Green Drawing Room.

Other treasures include a very rare set of watercolours which Johnston hung in this room, depicting life in an Indian Rajah's household; it is thought that these were executed by Indian Artists working for the Dutch East India Company and are called Company Pictures. Nearby is a pair of fine ebonised side chairs (c.1810). The cabinet and chairs, early additions to the Collection, were first photographed in Greenwich.