In 1896 this "secretaire cabinet," a desk with drawers and pigeonholes behind two doors and a fall-front writing surface, demonstrates the sophisticated cabinetmaking skills that Morris and Company could offer its most affluent clients. It was praised by contemporaries for the perfection of its decoration: the design, skill, and freedom of its marquetry; the choice of woods; the cutting; and the coloring. Credit was given to its designer, George Jack, an architect and skilled woodcarver who was responsible for most of the outstanding inlaid furniture produced by Morris in the 1880s and 1890s. A student of historic furniture that he used as models for his decorative techniques, Jack applied the richly inlaid scrolls of thistle, oak, and ash foliage (repeated mirror fashion like a Morris textile pattern), cross-banding, and checkered border to an overall conception based on a stately eighteenth-century English cabinet-on-stand. Katherine B. Hiesinger, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 151.